I am the Resurrection and the Life

Funeral Homily for Joan Dalaly

In the first chapter of the Gospel of St. John, verse twelve, St. John writes: “To those who accept him he gave power to become children of God, to those who believe in his name. . .” In chapter twenty, John concludes with this statement: “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of [his] disciples that are not written in this book. But these are written that you may [come to] believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through this belief you may have life in his name.” Following all the appropriate rules of good rhetoric, St. John tells us of the purpose of his Gospel at the beginning and at the end of his work. While the Gospels of Saints Matthew, Mark, and Luke were written to provide us with a more or less chronological record of the ministerial period of the life of Jesus, St. John’s Gospel was written to bring us faith in Jesus Christ.

Scattered throughout the chapters of this Gospel, Jesus makes seven statements that begin with the important words: “I AM.” You will remember from the story of the burning bush in the book of Exodus that God identifies himself to Moses as “I AM.” From that moment the Israelites came to know their God by this name which proclaimed that God existed.

In the reading from St. John’s Gospel that we proclaimed this morning, we hear one of those faithful I AM statements. When Martha says to Jesus “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day,” Jesus responds by saying: “I am the resurrection and the life.”

In this particular statement we learned two things. First, we realize that Jesus identifies himself with the God who engaged in self-revelation to Moses. We also learn that for those who come to believe that Jesus is one with the Father will never die. While this mortal coil that is our body will return to dust, our immortal soul will live forever with Jesus, his father, and of the Holy Spirit. This is the whole of our faith. As St. Paul writes in his first letter to the Thessalonians, we will rise with and in Christ at the end of time.

St. Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians is the very first Christian Scripture, written before any of the Gospels and all of the other letters of St. Paul. We see evidence of this in the fact that St. Paul still believes as he is writing this letter that Jesus will return while he is still living. If we look at later letters of St. Paul, we will recognize that he eventually came to understand that Jesus’ return was not to be as early as he at first thought. Despite this fact, St. Paul never loses his faith in the resurrection. In fact he states unequivocally that if Jesus did not rise from the dead, our faith would be in vain.

Today we come to this Liturgy of Christian Burial for our beloved mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, associate of the Franciscan sisters of the Sacred Heart, and a member of the Franciscan family to celebrate her faith and to bolster ours as we grieve her loss to Sister Death. As a Franciscan Joan joined herself to the poor man of Assisi who had come to regard death as his sister. He realized that sister death was no more than a portal through which we pass into eternal life.

Yes, we grieve now. As the great Christian philosopher, C.S. Lewis, wrote our grief now is the result of our love before, and our joy later will be the result of that grieving. He knew what it meant to grieve as he lost his beloved wife to death. However, through his faith he came to realize that grief is the product of love. As the right of Christian burial tells us, death cannot unravel the fabric of our lives which we have knit through love.

God’s grace and mercy are with his elect, and we pray that one day we will be among their number with all the saints in heaven, those who have placed their faith in Jesus Christ, who have believed with St. John that Jesus is the resurrection and the life.