Last week police in Las Vegas discovered ricin in a motel room. Ricin is an extremely powerful poison made from castor beans. It takes about 2% of the lethal dosage of arsenic to kill a person with ricin. It's the stuff of spy thrillers and real life spies, as evidenced by the 1978 murder of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov who was injected with a pellet of ricin via an umbrella tip in London. Among poisons that are readily available to most people or can be manufactured by amateurs, there is nothing more deadly than ricin.
In today's Gospel lesson we encounter something that is many times more deadly than ricin or any other substance. In fact, this is so deadly that it is more deadly than death. On the surface this doesn't make much sense, after all there aren't degrees of death. There are different ways of dying and some may seem more appealing than others, but death is death. Or is it? In reality there are two kinds of death. There is a death that all living creatures must experience — the kind of death that arsenic or ricin or cancer or a care accident or just old age can bring about. This is the death that most people think about — and worry about — when we talk about death. It's the death that Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha, had experienced while Jesus delayed His visit to Bethany. But this death, physical death, is not the only kind of death and it is not the most severe kind of death. Jesus told us and showed us that this kind of death is of no great concern to us when He spoke one command and Lazarus walked out of his tomb.
There is a second death: the spiritual death that comes from unbelief. This death ushers people into eternal damnation filled with torment and suffering. We encounter this kind of death in today's Gospel too. It is the death of unbelief that causes the Jewish leaders to reject Jesus and then plot to have Him killed. Such unbelief remains to this day and it is deadlier than death. But greater than both deaths is the love and power of Jesus who is the Resurrection and the Life to all who believe. By His death He has destroyed death. Through faith in Him you have been delivered from death and that which is more deadly than death.
