"The Resurrection of the Dead" - Part 2 The Living Dead

In the first of this series of articles, we discussed the Greek words used to describe the dead, primarily, nekros, and the concepts of death and the afterlife in Jesus’s era. In this article, we are going to discuss Jesus’s use of this term. Specifically, we are going to see how he uses “the dead” to refer to both those who are still alive, but spiritually dead and the same words to describe those who are physically dead. However, the verses where Jesus’s meaning is the clearest are those referring to his own death and “being awakened.” In other verses, his meaning is not so black and white, but lot of grey.

This article echoes the two themes of the previous article. Instead of definitions, we are going to look at specific verses where Jesus refers to the dead where he . This raises an interesting question: can the “resurrection of the dead” also refer to the awakening of those still living? We are, however, also going to look at what these verses imply about the afterlife for the actual dead. As we will see, this is far from simple. It is certainly not as simple a Christianity talks about the afterlife of “heaven” (see this article) and “hell” (see this article) today.

The Living Dead

To make this simple, we are going to start with a simple verse, one that cannot easily be misinterpreted, though it can be explained a couple of ways. Jesus says this when a student asks for permission to go and bury his father. The word used is  nekros. Though the response is a humorous play on words, it clearly refers to both the physically living and the physically dead. The verse is Matthew 8:22:

NIV: Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead.
Listeners Heard: Follow me. And leave the dead to bury those, their own dead.

Jesus is clearly saying that the living, the ones doing the burying, are “dead” or “dying” in some way. Remember, the Greek word means both “dead” and “dying.” To me, this means that Jesus knows more about these people than what is recorded in the Gospel. Jesus wouldn’t say this unless he knew something about these people. This verse also implies something about the dead father as well because Jesus is telling his follower not to attend his funeral.

I can only think of two possibilities for Jesus’s statement. The most obvious one is that both the man’s family and his father are spiritually dead. My initial feeling it that they all probably abused the one who became Jesus’s follower. The follower is not just making the choice about going to a funeral, but which way of life to follow: that of his father and his family or the one that Jesus is teaching. If this is the case, then Jesus uses the word, nekros, to mean the spiritually dead.

This is my favorite interpretation of this verse because it is the one that works best dramatically. When I do the novel version of this, the disciple will be an abused child from a dysfunctional family. Jesus isn’t being mean in this verse. He is being kind.

In later articles, we will look at a list of verses where Jesus may be referring to the spiritually dead more than the physically dead, but in this article, we must look at other possible forms of “the living dead.”

The Physically Dying

There is another explanation that makes sense. This man’s father may have died of some form of the plague. His family may have been infected. So Jesus uses nekros, not to mean the “spiritually dead,” but the “physically dead” and “the physically dying.” In this case, letting those who are already infected is simply a matter of good sense, not a moral judgment.

There is another verse that appears to refer to those who are “dying” and not “dead.” This verse was spoken to his apostles when he sent them out. That verse is Matthew 10:8 :

KJV: Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils:
Listeners Heard: Those being weak, serve! Those dying, rouse up! Rough ones, cleanse! Demons, toss out!

At this point in his ministry, people thought that Jesus had raised Jairus’s daughter from the dead, but Jesus himself had said that the girl wasn’t dead, merely sleeping. (Of course, Jesus said the same thing about Lazarus who was dead and buried, which raises another question about Jesus’s view of death.) The question here is simple: was Jesus really instructing his apostles to raise the dead? (We will discuss this in a future article about the different verbs translated as “raise” when speaking of the dead.) Or was he telling them to minister to those who were sick or even cheer up those who were dying? This seems unlikely. Especially, since Jesus says something similar to the followers of John the Baptist describing what they had seen and heard in Matthew 11:5:

NIV The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up,
Listeners Heard: Blind ones open their eyes, and lame ones walk around. Rough ones are being cleansed. And deaf ones hear, and dying ones are being lifted up.

The “dead/dying ones” here are in the plural. How many dying people had Jesus raised from the dead at this point? Jairus’s daughter. Again, it seems much more likely that they had “heard and seen” the sick and dying “being roused up.”

Another Type of Living Dead

Before we leave the topic of the living dead, we have to explore, not the “dying” of the living, but the life of the dead. For this, we will introduce a verse that is very complicated, Matthew 22:32:

NIV: I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.
Listeners Heard: I myself am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." He is not a god of dead one. Instead? Of living ones.

We will to focus here only on the tense in which God is quoted. The present tense is taken from the Greek Septuagint version. In the original Hebrew in Exodus 3:6 has no verb tense. Jesus’s use of the present tense is significant because God does not say, "I was the God, of Abraham," despite the fact that the patriarchs died hundreds of years before Moses. Jesus is using this present tense as evidence that the patriarchs are still “living” in some way. There are a number of possible interpretations for this, some of which we may discuss in a future articles. The point here is that Jesus did not see the “dead” as dead but living in some way. Living, I must point out, before he died on the cross.

Conclusions

Who are “the dead?” They can be the physicality dead that need to be buried, but they are also those who are alive enough to bury the bodies. They might be spiritually dead because of the way they live, or they might be dying from some disease. The same Greek word means both “dead” and “dying.”

However, even those who died hundreds of years ago were alive, in some way, to Jesus, and alive now, not in the future after the resurrection. What does this mean? For Jesus, the statement that God is not "a god of dead ones" may speak directly against the existence of an afterlife as Sheol or Hades. However, there are a lot of other possible meanings in this verse, especially when coupled with the one the precedes it, but we will deal with that in the next article.