Zombies have managed to become hot items in recent years.        

“They have been behind blockbuster movies (World War Z),  outrageously successful television shows (AMC’s The Walking Dead),  best selling books (Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies),  smash pop hits (anything by Miley Cyrus),  and 80% of the video games ever made (The Last of Us, Resident Evil, Left for Dead, Little Big Planet: the Corpse World, and so on, and so on).  You can buy Zombie Defense kits (Cross link’s “3-Day Defense Survival Kit” comes with food, glow sticks, and a blanket, though curiously no chainsaw),  go to zombie conventions (Seattle’s 2013 ZomBCon was labeled as “The World’s Largest Zombie Culture Convention & Survival Expo”)  and take part in zombie runs (as either the sprinting living or the shambling dead, giving new meaning to “running your feet off”).  When Discovery’s MythBusters dedicates a whole show to zombies, you know the genre’s a big deal.”¹

Okay, I suppose if you’re a horror fan, or at least a fan of apocalyptic fare, this all makes sense.  On the other hand, I can’t think of a worse concept to put in someone’s mind about rising from the dead than dying and coming back with a craven appetite for the flesh, or brains, of the living.  Not to mention shuffling around with scarcely any cognitive abilities, repulsive, and purposeless.  Though reanimated and impervious to bullets, this kind of rising is to be less alive than before—inhuman, beastly, rotten.   

This is the opposite of resurrection as the Bible talks about it.  Consider some of these observations from the dying and rising of Christ:

Beyond the grave, He was still cognitively Jesus.
His resurrection was an entrance into glory.
He was beyond constraints and boundaries of physical space.
He could be visible and invisible at will.
He could be touched, as well as apprehended by faith.
He resurrected as a new creation, invulnerable to physical corruption.
He is eternal, timeless, alive forever.  

Nor do these points ever get old.  Fast-forward some sixty years from the first resurrection Sunday.  

John, who had been a young disciple, is now greatly advanced in age.  After all this time, he sees Jesus again, whom he  describes in the Book of Revelation as,  

“…one like a son of man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash around his chest. The hairs of his head were white, like white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the roar of many waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength” (Rev. 1:13-16).  

Six decades later, and the resurrection has not gotten stale.  What John sees is a lot more than a re-animated corpse.  It’s even more than coming back to life again, regaining vital signs, brain wave activity, and normal body temperature.  John’s description captures a vivacious, audacious, dynamic life equipped for continuing interaction, forever and ever.

“When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead…” (Rev. 1:17a).

Why?  Because compared to Jesus, John was dead.  In fact, compared to Him, we all are.  Up next to the resurrected Christ, even if we’re in peak physical condition, we’re actually little more than raisins slowly hemorrhaging life.  We’re dying on our feet.  

Zombie pop culture is more about us in our present condition than we realize.  Our most exciting moments are boring, muted by gray mortality.  They pass quickly and do not deliver.  Jesus, though, continues the ongoing brilliance of life in every way and in every sense of the word.  It is not until His glory dawns on the heart anew that we realize how  much of what we have is only partial and tainted with shadow.

“But He laid His right hand on me, saying, ‘Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one.  I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades’” (Rev. 1:17b). 

This is great news, for the One who lives so much larger than anything else labeled “life,” made a promise to you: 

“Because I live, you also will live” (John 14:19).

1 Paul Asay, Burning Bush 2.0:  How Pop Culture Replaced the Prophet, p.76