Show Notes
In this powerful Eastertide episode of Peaceable and Kind, host Derek Vreeland explores why the resurrection of Jesus is not just a moment in history — it’s the foundation of Christian faith and our hope beyond the grave.
Derek shares personal stories about overcoming his fear of funerals, the importance of showing up for those who grieve, and how Christian hope is rooted not just in going to heaven, but in the promise of resurrection.
Drawing from John 11 and the story of Lazarus, Derek unpacks Jesus’ bold declaration: “I am the resurrection and the life.” This episode challenges listeners to trust in Jesus daily, not just as an idea, but as the living embodiment of resurrection power.
Whether you’re walking through grief, longing for hope, or reflecting on the meaning of Easter, this episode offers encouragement, biblical insight, and a reminder that death does not have the final word.
Key Takeaways
Resurrection is the foundation of Christian hope — not just heaven.
Jesus is resurrection and life — this is personal, not theoretical.
Funerals are sacred moments to show up, grieve, and offer presence.
John 11 reveals Jesus’ deep love for friends in their sorrow.
The hope of resurrection invites us to trust Jesus daily — in life, in death, and beyond.
Scriptures mentioned in this episode:
John 11:5-27
Preorder Derek’s new book, Incarnation: 8 Lessons on How God Meets Us here: https://amzn.to/42jSZAs
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Transcript
Narrator: Welcome to Peaceable and Kind, the podcast where we explore the transportation. Power of living out Jesus’ call to peace and kindness in our everyday lives. Each week your host, Derek Vreeland, will delve into the stories, scriptures, and practical steps that help us embody these essential Christian virtues.
Derek Vreeland: Welcome back to another episode of Peaceable and Kind where we talk about the Bible and Christian faith. as well as spiritual practices that promote peaceableness and kindness. I am your host, Derek Vreeland. And if you haven’t already, would you consider leaving a rating or review? That certainly helps us out here. And you can always reach out to me, by the way, on social media to let me know what you think about the kind of Christian content we are creating here. You can find me on Facebook, on Blue Sky, you can find me on Instagram, you can find me on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. I’m at Derek Vreeland and all of those places. But let me know what you think about what we’re doing here at Peaceable and Kind. Well, we’re in the season of Easter, and so our podcast episodes have had a resurrection Easter theme. But Easter always marks spring and this year Easter has come a little bit late. Easter Sunday was in mid. April and so spring is here and so we’re celebrating Easter not just on one day. But traditionally, Easter has been a seven-week celebration. So traditionally, this season is called Easter Tide And the interesting thing about Easter is that the Easter season is longer than the season of Lent. So Lent is a time for fasting. It’s a time for self-reflection. We have these traditions during the season of Lent of giving things up. But Easter is a time for celebration. It’s a time for feasting. So here at Peaceable and Kind, through Easter tide, we are picking out themes of resurrection to celebrate Easter. Recently, I saw a meme online that said Passover and Easter are not the same thing Passover is biblical, Easter is pagan. Research, study, and know the difference I saw it online and posted it in my Instagram stories. By the way, if you’re not following me on Instagram, that’s really where I’m the most active uh particularly in my Instagram stories. I annoy my family to no end with all of my posting in the Instagram stories. So you gotta follow me there. But I posted uh that meme in my stories uh with a little bit of a correction because there was a little bit of a uh grammatical typo in the meme and I was doing it to to be funny. But I posted it because The implication in the meme was that Easter is not really a holiday to be celebrated by Christians because it’s not mentioned in the Bible And so after posting it, I posted another story where I said, if you want to play that game, then know that Christians practicing Passover is not biblical. Passover is the Jewish celebration that marks the Exodus. And so there is a Seder meal. uh that goes along with Passover, and there are Christians that participate in Passover, uh which was a Jewish holiday, but there is no command anywhere in Scripture that says Christians are supposed to. And so I was kind of pushing back on the meme a little bit because the meme was written in such a way to discourage Christians from uh celebrating Easter, which I think is a is a horrible mistake. And the issue is Passover being biblical. Now, you know me. I love the Bible. I am a devoted Bible reader and Bible teacher. And the Bible is essential to the Christian faith, but it’s not necessarily the foundation of our faith. And this might be new information for you. This might cause you to reconsider some things. But the foundation, the bedrock foundation of our faith is not what is written in Scripture The foundation of our faith is the resurrection of Jesus. The very literal, the very physical, the very historical event of Jesus’ resurrection. This is the foundation of our faith. Now, the Bible’s important. The Bible is our inspired, sacred, authoritative text. It is the highest form of God’s revelation to the life of Jesus. But it’s Jesus who shows us what God is like. So we read the Bible in order to get to Jesus. And we read all of the Bible because all of it is authoritative. All of the Bible is inspired, Old Testament and New Testament But it is Jesus and not the Bible who is our Lord and Savior, our shepherd and king. So we don’t simply follow the Bible, we follow Jesus. So we’re not looking for things in the Bible just to pull out and say, okay. I want to start doing these things. We read the Bible to see Jesus and we follow Jesus and we celebrate his resurrection on Easter. Even though you don’t find the word Easter in the Bible, Christians from the second century forward made a big deal of Resurrection Sunday, Easter Sunday morning Okay, enough of all that. Today I want to talk a little bit about funerals. Okay, I and I know I got you excited. Nothing sounds like Easter joy more than funerals. But I want to give you a little bit of background. I want to make perhaps surprising confession. And that is, for a long time, I had a strong aversion to funerals And I know that sounds strange coming from a pastor, but there was a long time that if I could, I would avoid funerals. particularly if it was an open casket. Because again, here in a moment of transparency, um I was a little freaked out around dead bodies. As a child, I only remember attending one funeral service, and it was for a family friend who had died. And so I went uh to this funeral, it was about an hour away from our home, and I remember going to the funeral service, and for me it was otherworldly. I remember the apprehension that I was feeling while we were standing in line to greet the family and to view the body, to pay our last respects. But I remember as a child not wanting to be there. I remember holding my mom’s hand and I wanted, I wanted to run. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to view the body and as we got closer to the casket I could feel anxiety building up in me and so we got there and I looked in the casket really quick and then I looked away. And during the entire funeral service as I sat there with my family, I let my mind wander a little bit to take me to another place. And during the funeral, I remember s as a child just sitting there like stoically, keeping a a firm grip on my emotions, which I had completely shut down, an unhealthy habit, which took me years and years and years and therapy to unlearn. But as a child, I quickly had this bad habit of just shutting down emotionally. And as I grew up, as a young adult, if I had the power to choose it, I made my best attempts to avoid funerals at all costs. I recognize the value of family getting together um and friends uh rallying around and providing support for those who are who are grieving. the gatherings that are that are prompted by the death of someone we love, whether they’re memorial services or visitations, funerals. or the very, you know, popular celebration of life. These are all really good moments of community for family and and friends to get together. And I’ve always seen the value of that. That’s all good. But again, it was coming close to a a dead body that just creeped me out. And I know this is because I recognize I’m a part of this death-denying culture. We just don’t want to talk about death. We don’t want to face our own mortality and shortness of life. Death and funerals used to be considered to be a normal part of life. I mean, often people would die at home. Uh funerals and gatherings would often take place in homes or or churches. Now very often they’re at funeral homes. And I think we have developed really unhealthy practices of just putting our head in the sand. and avoiding funerals, the thought of death, just completely. And I’ve noticed it as a pastor that more and more people will show up at a visitation than actually a funeral service. So I had this aversion for such a long time, and luckily, as a pastor, this aversion didn’t last. really long. As a pastor I’ve grown to appreciate the value of being there for families in their most difficult moments of grief and sadness. I like to be there simply as a reminder that Jesus is with them I remember the first funeral service I did as a young pastor in my twenties. I was so nervous and self-conscious. Because again, I didn’t attend a lot of funerals as a child. But in that very first funeral, I was probably 25, 26 years old. And was completely, completely self-conscious. I didn’t know where to stand. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to say things. I mean, I tend to be a bit whimsical as a preacher. I like to work in humor and jokes into my sermons. Uh that’s a bit of my personality. So in that first funeral service, I was nervous that you know, what if I say something funny and it’s inappropriate? And I was just a ball of nerves. Um, but it all worked out. I had went to the funeral director the morning of the funeral service and said This is my first funeral. I don’t know what to do. You’re gonna have to tell me. And I appreciate uh that funeral director. Uh he was an older gentleman and he just smiled and he said, I will tell you what to do. And so it all worked out and it was it was a it was a beautiful funeral service. These days I I really look forward to attending funerals, even if I’m not the one leading the service, I’ve learned that the best we can do as followers of Jesus when life becomes disorienting for those who have lost someone they love is simply to show up and be present. When I’m not officiating a funeral service, but just attending, I have the habit of counting the number of references I hear to heaven and the number of references I hear to resurrection. And it’s just something I do. It’s kind of a little game I play, uh, but I’m just I’m curious about the language we use around death and dying. And in my time of doing this, I have found that heaven easily outnumbers resurrection 10 to 1. By the way, I did an entire episode. If you go back, it’s episode 38. It’s an episode on hope and grief where I talk a lot more about this. And the reason I’m counting heaven and resurrection references is that it seems like we put a big emphasis on heaven. Which is good, by the way, right? The hope that we have in heaven, right? To be absent from the body, to be present with the Lord is a hope I never want to take away from people. But what I see in Scripture in the New Testament is much more references to resurrection than to heaven And for early Christians, this was the preaching of the early church, that our hope in the face of death and loss was the hope of resurrection, that at the end of this age, with the return of Jesus, there would be a resurrection of the body. By the way, this is one of the reasons I so appreciate the ancient creeds of the church, like the Apostles’ Creed. In our church, we recite the creed every Sunday, and I have a practice of reciting the Creed every morning as a part of my prayer time. And I love that the creed helps us to get the end of our story, the Christian story, right. Because in the Apostles’ Creed, towards the end, we say, I believe in the resurrection of the body. and the life everlasting. From the very beginning, Christians have put their hope that death is not the end, that physical bodily resurrection is awaiting us. And that hope is rooted in the resurrection of Jesus, what we’re celebrating here during Easter tide. And when I do preach funeral services, and I do a number of funerals every year, I almost always preach from John 11. This is the passage when Jesus shows up at the home of Mary and Martha, just right before the rising of Lazarus. And I love this story so much because it first really shows you the true humanity of Jesus. Because, you know, Jesus had followers. I mean, there were crowds following Jesus. He had followers, he had committed disciples, he had his 12 disciples. But he also, there was this group of 70, and by the end, there’s at least 120 that stay really committed to Jesus and his kingdom of God movement. But Jesus had more than followers and disciples. Jesus also had friends. And there was a family, two sisters and a brother. that lived in the small little village of Bethany, right outside of Jerusalem, that were friends of Jesus, Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. Now they were also believers, as we’ll we’ll see here in John 11. They were followers of Jesus, but beyond that They were friends, and so Jesus would often swing by their house and have a meal as you do with your friends You might remember the one occasion where Jesus is with them and Mary is sitting at his feet as he’s talking. And Martha is busy in the kitchen getting the meal ready. And Martha’s a little perturbed that her sister’s not helping with the meal and she’s back there in the kitchen. banging around pots and pans, and then she pops out and says, Hey Jesus, tell my sister to come help. It’s a funny little story. Uh but it it shows the friendship among these Mary and Martha and Jesus. And I love that it shows the real humanity of Jesus. I have to pause this episode for just a moment to tell you that I have written a new book. Incarnation, 8 lessons on how God meets us. This eight-week Bible study uses the uniqueness of the message translation to explore God’s presence with us. Link to pre-order is in the show notes. At some point later, Lazarus becomes sick. And Mary and Martha quickly get word to Jesus and his disciples who were ministering miles and miles away. And so from this introduction, I want to jump into the story in John 11, and I want to walk you through this story from the message translation by Eugene Peterson. You’ve heard me in previous episodes talk about how much I love the message. It is a contemporary translation. of the Bible, Old Testament and New Testament, by Eugene Peterson, who is one of my heroes. He has been a mentor through his books. I love Eugene Peterson so much. And I find his translation, which is called the message, uh, to be helpful, particularly when it comes to the stories in the Bible. So let me walk you through John eleven. I want to start in verse five, and again this is from the message. Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, but oddly, when he heard that Lazarus was sick, He stayed on where he was for two more days. After the two days, he said to his disciples, let’s go back to Judea. Jesus had an unexplainable awareness that the death of Lazarus would not be the end of his story. And it’s important to note that these friends of Jesus, Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, were very close friends. He loved them. Um he loved both Lazarus, who was sick, and his two sisters, and so they were somewhat surprised that Jesus didn’t hurry along, and the disciples were a bit surprised that Jesus was not in more of a hurry to get to Bethany to see his sick friend Lazarus. But We can see here at the beginning of the story that Jesus loved them with an undying and unconditional love. Let’s move on. Verse 8. They said, Rabbi, you can’t do that. Because Jesus had just said, let’s go back to Judea. So the disciples said, Rabbi, you can’t do that. The Jews are out to kill you, and you’re going back? Jesus replied, Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Anyone who walks in daylight doesn’t stumble, because there’s plenty of light from the sun walking at night, he might very well stumble because he can’t see where he’s going. In John’s Gospel you can see the building of this plot To kill Jesus. And as John’s gospel continues on towards Jesus’ ultimate betrayal, rejection Scourge and crucifixion and death, there is this escalating tension. The Judeans, these are Jewish people living in the area of Judah. where Jerusalem was, they had been plotting to kill Jesus for some time. They wanted to take Jesus out, and the disciples knew it, and so they were concerned Let’s move on with the story. Verse 11. He said these things and then announced, our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep. I’m going to wake him up. The disciples said, Master, if he’s gone to sleep, he’ll get a good rest and wake up feeling fine. Jesus was talking about death, while his disciples thought he was talking about taking a nap Then Jesus became explicit. Lazarus died, and I’m glad for your sakes that I wasn’t there. You’re about to be given new grounds for believing. Let’s go to him So Jesus not only knew that Lazarus was sick, but had become aware that he had died And he uses the word sleep to describe what had happened to Lazarus. This was a helpful metaphor in the first century Jewish world. for death, because death in this present age was temporary. First century Jewish people, at least Jesus and his disciples, those who belonged to the Pharisee group, they believed. in a physical resurrection of God’s people at the end of the age. Their hope was rooted in the goodness of God, that even though they would die, it would be a kind of sleep and God would raise them to new life Let’s continue the story. That’s when Thomas, the one called the twin, said to his companions, Come along. We might as well die with him. When Jesus finally got there, he found Lazarus already four days dead. Bethany was near Jerusalem, only a couple miles away. and many of the Jews were visiting Martha and Mary, sympathizing with them over their brother. Martha heard Jesus was coming and went out to meet him. Mary remained in the house So Lazarus had indeed died. When they arrived, he had been dead for four days. There were people in the home grieving with Mary and Martha And as Jesus and his disciples reached the little town of Bethany, Mary stayed in the house, perhaps to continue to process her grief. But Martha, she left the house. She went out to the road to meet Jesus, and there the two of them had an important and I’d say impassioned conversation. Let’s continue on. Martha said, Master, if you’d been here, my brother wouldn’t have died. Even now I know that whatever you ask God, He will give you Jesus said, Your brother will be raised up. Martha replied, I know that he will be raised up in the resurrection at the end of time. So in their conversation, they’re talking about the concept of resurrection at the end of time There were some first century Jewish people that did not believe in a resurrection. These people were called the Sadducees. You’ll see those people pop up in the Gospels from time to time. But for Jesus and his tribe, they believed in a physical, real resurrection at the end of this age. And so Martha and Jesus are talking about that. And Martha recognizes that there is a coming resurrection, but she’s speaking honestly from a place of grief. Her sorrow was real. She was speaking from a place of grief, and Jesus was speaking from a place of hope And what I love so much about this story is that his hope will eventually triumph and heal her of her grief. Let’s continue the story. Jesus said, you don’t have to wait for the end. I am right now resurrection and life. The one who believes in me, even though he or she dies, will live, and every one who lives believing in me does not ultimately die at all. Do you believe this? I love this point of the story because Jesus is revealing something about himself, that he is the full embodiment of resurrection and life That the hope beyond the grave, hope beyond death, was standing in front of Martha. And Jesus asked, Do you believe this? Through her sorrow and her tears, would she be able to believe that this prophet and miracle worker from Galilee was the embodiment of life and resurrection. So how would she respond? Here’s what she said. This is John 11, 27 Yes, Master, all along I have believed that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who comes into the world Martha was a real believer. Like many women in the New Testament, she believed in Jesus and has now been presented to us as a model of faith. Martha believed in Jesus. Mary, we know, she believed in Jesus. Remember sitting at Jesus’ feet earlier on when Martha was getting upset? Jesus said she’s found the one good thing and she’s not going to let go of that. Martha, Mary believed They believe that Jesus was the coming one, the deliverer, the rescuer, the king sent by God to bring salvation and redemption and hope and life. Martha and Mary believed, and I believe too. I believe Jesus is resurrection and life These are not just ideas. What’s interesting about Jesus’ revelation here is he is saying that he himself is resurrection and life. Later in John’s Gospel in John 14, Jesus will say, I am the way, the truth, and the life. So concepts like life, like resurrection and hope and truth, these are not just ideas, they are embodied in a person. So for me, I don’t just believe in the concept, the idea of resurrection. I believe in the resurrection that’s embodied in Jesus. My hope, my confidence, my trust is in Jesus. I don’t have all the answers I can’t explain all of the mysteries of suffering and life and death, but I have enough confidence to put my trust in Jesus. And just as Jesus asked Martha, do you believe? I think Jesus every day is asking us the same question. I think every day we have the opportunity to answer that question. And when we say we believe, again, we’re not saying we just have an intellectual understanding and agreement. With concepts. Jesus is asking, when he says, Do you believe? He’s asking, Will you put your trust in me? And for us, this is a daily decision. Every day we have the opportunity to ask ourselves, are we going to trust in Jesus and follow him wherever he leads? Or are we stubbornly going to try to trust in ourselves? I’ve had many days where I’ve rejected that offer. I’ve tried to trust in myself and my own abilities. and it’s ended in failure. When I choose every day to trust in Jesus, things don’t always work out the way I think they should, or They don’t always work out the way I want them to. But over 30 plus years of following Jesus, I can say that over time I can see he’s leading me to a good place. And if you’ll put your trust in Jesus, I believe he will lead you to a good place. He said, I am resurrection and life. And I believe that’s where he’s leading us to a hopeful resurrection and to a good life. Well, I hope today’s episode has helped you reflect a little bit on the resurrection power of Jesus. And that it’s added to your celebration here in the season of Easter. That’s all we have for today. Thank you for joining me for this episode. Go in peace and be kind.
This transcript was generated with AI and may contain errors.