Mass readings for the 5th Sunday of Lent:
Ezekiel 37.12-14 Psalm 130.1-8 Romans 8.8-11 John 11.1-45
As we were last week, so we continue in reading from that section of John’s gospel often referred to as “the book of signs” – miracles Jesus performs that resonate with much greater meaning than the action itself as astounding as his works are. All these signs are grand metaphors that also have a literal meaning: today we hear the story of Jesus raising his friend Lazarus from the dead; but we know this points to something much more profound. Indeed, today’s miracle caps this “signs” section with the greatest of the signs – the sign of the resurrection.
The meaning of it is teased out in his dialogue with Lazarus’ sister Martha. We can take this miracle as proof that the resurrection from the dead will happen. We can look at the raising of Lazarus as a “preview” of sorts – yet Jesus indicates there is more to it. Resurrection as an idea, as a reality is more than something that will happen to him personally at the coming Passover, or as an event at the end of history, when the final trumpet sounds and the dead are summoned from their graves.
He summarizes this in that famous phrase, “I am the resurrection and the life, whoever believes in me, though they die, will live, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.”
Resurrection isn’t something that just happens to Jesus at Easter or to you and I at the end of history – Jesus Christ is the Resurrection now; and life in him is the life of the resurrected both now and forever – we live the Resurrection as much as we might live a lifestyle of sin, of sexual deviance and indulgence, of addiction, of mindless consumerism, of distraction by the world and its many temptations. Indeed, that’s where we come from until we die to these and are resurrected in the spirit to the new life in Christ. The power of the resurrection and the new life it brings is something we can have and experience here and now.
For a lot of people, that is a little confusing; and so, we ought to be glad to hear from that indispensable saint, Martha. She is someone who in great faith and devotion to Jesus, shows us that this confusion is quite natural for us. Martha models engagement in faith, she shows us faith seeking understanding. We hear how confident she is in Jesus; she says that she knows, not believes, not hopes, but knows that God will grant Jesus whatever our Saviour asks of the Father; and she recognizes and confesses that Jesus is the Christ. In doing so, she echoes Peter’s famous confession at Caesarea Philippi. Similarly, as much as God has revealed to her the identity of Jesus as the Christ, like Peter, she still hasn’t grasped the whole of it. Peter couldn’t understand that Jesus must die and then rise again as being integral to his identity as the Christ. Martha here is confused by Jesus who is having her brother’s tomb opened, because for her the resurrection from the dead is not something that is supposed to happen now, in the midst of the world, in a world of ongoing sin and death. In her mind, and in the understanding of just about everyone, resurrection is part of the new world, the new heaven and earth; and I suppose one can speculate that she also imagines it to be a rather sanitary affair, free of all the rot and smell of this world – we shall rise incorruptible, in full good health, clothed in robes of immaculate white, under a clear blue sky.
How many Catholics and Christians live that misunderstanding? Faith is about the hereafter, a final reward after getting through the drudgery of this life – and given the drudgery, God is apt to indulge a little sinfulness provided we get our confessions in, but he holds back those ultimate rewards of resurrection and eternal life – there’s no real reward in this life.
Martha is about to find out that resurrection actually comes amid the stink and corruption of this world, and it does because wherever Jesus is, there is life, newness of life, and resurrection to life… and he is most assuredly with us to the end of the age when the fullness of the Resurrection is realized.
It’s just like his teaching on the Kingdom of God which we understand to be both here right now, and yet to come; something we live in as citizens of the heavenly city even as we know ourselves to be struggling in this world, walking through the valley of the shadow of death. We’ll get there in the fullness of time as we experience it now in God’s graces and blessings.
In concrete, here and now terms, we need to answer the question, “Are we living this life of the Resurrection?” Or are we dead? Or perhaps not dead, but not opening ourselves to that life. We also need to consider who has spiritually died, whose faith is in the grave, and so, needs to be roused, called forth, and unbound by those things that have brought them to entomb their spiritual selves, those things I spoke of earlier: addictions, distractions, all the temptations the flesh is prone to – that, by the way, many find a measure of happiness in. So dead are they through sin, that they can’t perceive their condition. To take an extreme but starkt example, the heroin addict is in extasy once he shoots up, there is happiness in that self-abuse, but to the onlookers, they see someone who looks like a corpse, and who, indeed, is on the road to death.
In my appointment to St. Augustine’s, I had an interview with the bishop and he laid out his understanding of the parish’s situation, its most urgent needs and gave me a mandate. Nothing unusual in that. And while there were particular notes to be taken down, for example, the falling away of families with children in our publicly-funded schools for Catholics, I would say that the mandate to all the priests in recent years, if not recent decades, has been to bring the many sheep who’ve gone astray back into the fold. And yet, there has been only limited success, and with the coming of those ill-advised lockdowns, forced shuttering of the churches even as Walmart and Costco were kept open, put paid to many of the modest successes we’ve had.
We’re back to square one, or perhaps even a few squares further back from one. And this has led the Church’s leadership, both lay and ordained, at all levels of the Church, to meditate on what we’ve been doing, and why we find so much spiritual death among the baptized of the western world, of countries like Canada, the UK, Germany, France, and so on; and then to think and pray on, what is to be done.
If I had a basic critique of the ministry efforts of, well, the past fifty years, I’d say that we’ve forgotten who it is who raises the dead. It’s not us. Well meaning efforts that lead to discouraged pastors and laity, often put too much emphasis on how we can entice people back into church – dare I say, “trick” them back into faith whether by offering children’s programs, or upbeat music, or gourmet coffee in the parish hall, and so on. I don’t want you to understand that I am dismissing all these initiatives, but it’s just that they tend to unconsciously rely upon the human element with the encounter with Christ as something that comes later – “gee, if we give them a good time, they’ll want to come back.” Recently, in an interview, a celebrity convert to Catholicism summed up his experience of a mass where, as nice as it was, he said he felt “like somebody was trying to sell me a car.”
We’re not here to sell anything or anyone, Christ included. We’re here to have an encounter with God, first and foremost. We’re to be Martha, in our distress, Mary Magdalene in our sorrow, Peter in our confusion, any one of the Apostles our fear, but also any of these in our joy, coming out to encounter Jesus Christ and to be changed by him in our self-understanding, and in our understanding of God. And if we’re doing that, anyone in our midst, any witness to that authentic encounter is going to ask, “what is going on here?” and then, we pray, “and who is this Jesus, really?”
There is resurrection in this parish, in its ministry: the compassionate care ministry is being trained in the area of mental health – not because we think it’ll bring the people in; but because by our learning and training, we can come to let Christ flow through us to the depressed and the anxious who are in need of comfort and healing. We’ve now a refugee committee, who in fear and trembling, if I might characterize their own anxieties about taking on this challenge, are working out their own salvation through this ministry where they must come to be Christ, and not so much themselves, to the stranger, to the one in need.
The liturgical ministries of this parish are stumbling out of the tomb themselves; I know of the great reluctance to come back this past year; many have reservations about beginning to serve at the altar, here at the ambo, at the communion line, at the door of God’s house. Why? I haven’t time to speculate, but for each of these there is a call to die to oneself, rise in the power of the resurrection, and let Christ live in you and through you minister to ailing souls, and to be a sign of hope for those mourning the spiritually dead.
And for us all, who come to worship, to pray, to intercede on behalf of the world – it’s time for concerted prayer, intentional intercession for those who are not here, not in any church, not planning on anything more than a chocolate bunny to commemorate our Lord’s sacrifice, his suffering, his resurrection; those whose faith appears dead, yet is only really in sickness awaiting the glory of God.
“If you had been here, my brother would not have died.” We must send the word, as it was once sent to Jesus from Bethany out of concern for the dying Lazarus, and then believe that whatever Christ asks of the Father will be given.
But we’ve got to ask, ask with all the conviction of one who loves the Lord with all one’s heart, one’s soul, one’s mind and one’s strength; as one who no longer lives for oneself, but in the power of our resurrection faith as Christ living within, the Christ of the resurrection, the Christ of the eternal life we now live. Amen.