NOTES for Luk 7:11-16
Jesus' raising of the dead has always drawn special attention. This is no surprise: all such events are usually understood in the context of biblical ideas about the universal resurrection, the Last Judgment, and, in the New Testament context, about the Savior's return and the final triumph of the Kingdom. Of course, such parallels are entirely possible. And yet it is important to see not only the similarity but also the difference between these raisings and that universal resurrection on the day of Judgment of which, for example, the Book of Revelation tells us.
Indeed, when the issue is the Last Judgment and the triumph of the Kingdom, one must also speak of the complete transformation of the nature of this world, including the nature of the human person himself. In relation to the human person, the Church Fathers directly called this process "deification," not, of course, in the sense that a person becomes God, but in the sense that his nature becomes compatible with the nature of the Kingdom of God.
Meanwhile, the people whom Jesus raises return to their former life, to the life of the untransformed world in which they lived before they died. But this return, too, was a consequence of the action of that power of the Kingdom without which there can be no life either in the Kingdom or in the world not yet transformed by the power of the Kingdom.
Why, then, do the people raised by Jesus rise not to the life of the Kingdom, but to the life of the untransformed world? The reason is that the Kingdom itself has not yet been revealed in fullness. We live in the age not of a Kingdom that has fully arrived, but of a Kingdom that is arriving. And those living in our age are not born as inhabitants of the Kingdom and do not find themselves in it automatically; they must make their choice and make an effort to enter this Kingdom.
Therefore those who come into contact with the Kingdom receive the fullness of life that is proper to them as inhabitants of their age. What follows depends on them, on their choice and their desire. For some, the return to the life of our world, into which the Kingdom is entering, can become only a delay on the way to death, which is inevitable in the untransformed world. For others, it can become the first step on the way into the Kingdom.