The fifth of Jesus’ “I am” pictures comes in the rawest scene in the Gospel. Lazarus has died; his sisters are grieving; Jesus has arrived four days too late. Martha comes out to meet him, and when Jesus says her brother will rise again, she answers with a line that tells us exactly what an ordinary devout Jew of her time believed: “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.”

Stop on Martha’s answer, because the word she reaches for is the one Jesus is about to turn inside out. The Greek is ἀνάστασις (anastasis) — resurrection, literally a “standing up again,” a rising. By Jesus’ day this was a live and widely held hope: that at the end of history God would raise the dead and set the world right. It wasn’t universal — the Sadducees denied it flatly — but the Pharisees affirmed it, and with them most ordinary people. Martha is simply stating the standard hope: of course Lazarus will rise, on the last day, when God raises everyone.

The hope grew, over centuries, out of a handful of Old Testament seeds. The clearest is Daniel 12: “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” Behind it stands Ezekiel 37, the valley of dry bones, where breath enters the bleached bones and they stand up, a vast army. Ezekiel himself says that vision first meant the nation — Israel as good as dead in exile, brought back to life: “these bones are the whole house of Israel.” It’s national resurrection in its first sense. But the image of the dead rising was so powerful that it became one of the deep wells the later hope drew from. How much of a bodily, individual rising these texts originally taught is something scholars argue over; the hope grew, it wasn’t born full-formed.

So that’s the world Martha is standing in: the dead will rise, at the end, on the last day. And here is what Jesus says: ἐγώ εἰμι ἡ ἀνάστασις καὶ ἡ ζωή (egō eimi hē anastasis kai hē zōē), “I am the resurrection and the life.”

Feel what that does to her belief. She had placed the resurrection out there, at the end of time, a future event God would perform. Jesus takes that future event and relocates it into himself, in the present tense. Not “I will perform the resurrection on the last day.” I am the resurrection. The thing you are waiting for at the end of the world is standing in front of you. “Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live.” The hope didn’t get cancelled. It got a face. The word that named an event at the edge of history now names a person in the room — the future hope, relocated into the present, and given a name.