By now the scandal is largely forgotten: Several years ago at the university in our little town, a college girl contracted a fever and died within 72 hours.
It’s a Christian university, and many of the students prayed for her during those hours. When the girl died, people stopped praying—except for about a dozen of them.
This was the scandal: They prayed for resurrection.
The students tried to gain access to the county coroner’s office and pray for the girl’s resurrection. The coroner said no.
The students stayed on the sidewalk and continued to pray into the night. You could see them as you drove by: lifting their hands, calling on God to overrule this untimely death.
The girl was not resurrected.
At the university, people were shocked at the audacity of this prayer.
Professors observed that the dead girl (a believer) was now with Jesus in Heaven. Why, they asked, would anyone think it was a good idea to bring her back from a better place?
The students who prayed (and the church they were associated with) gained a reputation of being radical and even irresponsible toward others. The same people who would defend the biblical record from the book of Acts became vocal critics when a few zealous students decided to attempt living out an episode from that book.
I’m guilty, too. Here’s my personal experience when I was confronted with a first-person testimony of God using Christians to raise the dead:
Jessica lives among the poorest of the poor just north of Lima, Peru. As a very young child she fell ill, languished for a few days, and died. In her neighborhood there were no telephones—no electricity, no running water. Her mother gathered the women in the neighborhood and began to pray. She sent others to find her husband, and still others to find the elders of the church, who showed up within a couple of hours and joined in prayer. After hours more of prayer, Jessica came back to life.
I met Jessica when she was about eight years old. Her mother told me how Jesus had raised her daughter from the dead. I suggested that perhaps her daughter had been very sick, but not dead. With typical North American smugness, I reasoned with the woman that God most certainly had healed the girl, but remained skeptical of outright resurrection. The woman became incensed and told me she knew very well that her daughter had died, and that Jesus brought her back. Mom was pretty angry with me.
Why don’t North American Christians raise the dead—or even try?
In fact, even suggesting the possibility is considered bad form. I tell Jessica’s story in my book The Impossible Mentor. It covers two pages out of 250, yet I’ve heard from many people that—because of this story—the book is dangerously out of balance.
Perhaps, but I’d like to suggest at least four possibilities as to why this topic is so sensitive:
1. North American Christians don’t raise the dead because we don’t ask.
Death has the final word in our society: Call the doctor, call the coroner, call the funeral home. Let them make the pronouncement and carry the dead away.
Affluent societies are insulated from the dead. The dead are whisked away, cleaned, dressed and embalmed by professionals while we weep and mourn at home.
It doesn’t occur to us to stay by their side and ask God to intervene.
When a woman named Tabitha died in Joppa, the believers asked Peter to come help (Acts 9). They didn’t accept death as the final word.
