The altar crucifixes, statues, and other sacred images are all veiled in purple today. Until relatively recently, this 5th Sunday of Lent was called “Passion Sunday.” With just 2 weeks to go till Easter, today marks the beginning of Lent’s final phase, as the Church focuses our attention more and more on the final events of Jesus’ earthly life – and why those events matter for us today.
The
gospel we just heard [John
11:1-45] recounts the last
miracle of Jesus’ public life – miracles John’s Gospel calls “signs,” because
they reveal Jesus and invite us to respond with faith. But the raising of
Lazarus also had as a consequence the authorities’ decision to execute Jesus.
So life and death are mixed together, as the same event that suggests the new
life Jesus makes possible also results (on the part of his enemies) in a
decision for death. The apostle Thomas’s somewhat surprising exclamation, “Let us also go to die with him,” is
actually addressed to us, as the Church invites us to accompany Jesus in his
final journey.
Meanwhile this story about the human friendship
between Jesus and Lazarus - and the extension of Lazarus’ earthly life -
becomes a story about our relationship now with the Risen Christ and his offer
to us of a resurrection similar to his own.
Jesus’ friendship with Lazarus extended also to his
sisters, Martha and Mary, who first sent him the news of their brother’s
serious sickness, thus setting the stage for a series of conversations, the
most important (and familiar) of which was for so many centuries read at
Catholic funerals.
Listening in on their conversation today, we hear
Jesus’ one-sentence answer to Martha, Your
brother will rise, (and her rather matter-of-fact response) rather
matter-of-factly ourselves. But there was nothing matter-of-fact about it!
Whatever else might happen to people when they died, ancient people knew that
dead people do not rise back to life from the dead. Among Jews, however, there
was one group – the Pharisees (whose beliefs Martha apparently shared) – who
held the view that, whatever else may happen to people when they died, a
general resurrection of the dead would follow – in the future, on the last day.
Jesus’ surprising answer to Martha, I am the resurrection and the life, was
intended to hint ahead to his own unique experience of resurrection – something
neither Martha nor anyone else would have understood at the time, since no one
was then expecting the Messiah (or, for that matter anyone else) to rise from
the dead, all by himself, ahead of everyone else.
We, however, can follow the story backwards, so to
speak. We start from the fundamental fact that Jesus Christ has risen from the
dead, and then we understand his death - and his whole life - in the light of
that.
Lazarus was brought back from the tomb to resume his
ordinary mortal life. Jesus, however,
would rise out of his tomb in order to live forever. Bystanders had to take away the stone for Lazarus to be
able to come out, and Lazarus himself emerged bound hand and foot. But no one had
to help Jesus rise up or had to untie him.
The resurrected life of the Risen Christ is something altogether new and
different and means death’s decisive defeat.
Hence the threat that this subversive belief in the
resurrection posed – and still poses – to those who see only the familiar world
we now know.
John’s Gospel goes on to tell how, as a result of
this event, the political leadership decided to kill Jesus - and to eliminate
the evidence by killing Lazarus too. It’s like that scene in Oscar Wilde’s play
Salome, when Herod, hearing that
Jesus has been raising people from the dead, declares: “I forbid him to do
that. I allow no man to raise the dead.”
Martha’s invitation to Mary, The teacher is here and is asking for you, is addressed to all of
us, who are in turn invited to address it to one another - and to this world
which so desperately needs to hear it, but which increasingly seems somewhat
dead to hope.
After experiencing what Jesus had done for Lazarus,
many believed in him, but others went to report him to his enemies. Jesus’ own
resurrection, of which this was meant as a hint, likewise challenges each of us
to respond - one way or the other.
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