Fifth Sunday of Lent, Year A
(Ezekiel 37:12-14; St. Paul to
the Romans 8:8-11; St. John’s Gospel 11:1-45)
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Today’s Gospel, dear People of God, is
both dramatic and deeply consoling, revealing Jesus to us in the power of His
divinity and the tenderness of His humanity, and also – indeed, most
wonderfully -- in the ineffable beauty of His Personal commitment to and
communion with His heavenly Father. And
that St. John was well aware of all this is shown by the fact that the raising
of Lazarus is the last of Jesus’ Son of Man miracles in his Gospel and, for
that reason, of special significance and worthy of our close attention.
First of all we should note that the
intention of Jesus to establish, confirm, and fulfil faith is paramount in all aspects of the Gospel account:
Jesus
said to (His disciples) clearly, “Lazarus has died, and I am glad for you that
I was not there, that you may believe. Let us go to him.”
Jesus
told Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in
Me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in
Me will never die. Do you believe this?”
Martha
said to him, “Yes, Lord. I have come to believe that You are the Christ,
the Son of God, the One who is coming into the world.”
Jesus
raised His eyes and said, “Father, I thank You for hearing Me. I know that You always hear Me; but because
of the crowd here I have said this, that they may believe that You sent
Me.”
Six times Jesus uses or calls forth the
word ‘believe’ in our Gospel passage, before St. John himself ultimately tells
us:
Now
many of the Jews who had come to Mary and seen what He had done began to believe
in Him.
All is indeed directed towards faith,
first of all in Jesus’ chosen disciples through whom and upon whom He
will build His future Church; in those very dear friends of His, Martha,
Mary, and their risen-brother Lazarus whom He loved and whose home in the
village of Bethany was ever open to Him, serving, when needed, as a place of
refuge for Him; and then in the ‘crowd’ who had come to commiserate with
Martha and Mary over their brother’s death.
When
Jesus arrived in
Bethany He found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days.
Jesus had prepared His disciples for that
but He had not been able to calm their anxiety for His safety since He was now
back in Judea where the Jews had tried to stone Him. The disciples were -- as Thomas said --
prepared to die with Jesus such was the hostility they had only recently
experienced in Judea, but God’s agenda was quite different from those their very real fears. They would witness the glorification of God
with Martha, Mary, and the Jewish visitors, and when their former oppressive
fears for Jesus’ and indeed their own safety melted away into such a glorious
dénouement, they would never ever forget --- as it behoved future apostles ---
what they had seen. The Gospel
proclamation was about to be indelibly imprinted in them.
It is not easy to assess just what Martha
believed about Jesus; as you have seen she did most certainly believe in Him,
but somehow she seems always to have had too much to do, too much to say, too
much to occupy her mind, for such belief to slow down her active involvement in
whatever might be going on or being said around her, let alone to ‘stop her in
her tracks’. Perhaps her relationship
with Jesus might be described as one of religious admiration befitting an
awaited-super-prophet and miracle worker, a vaguely understood Messianic figure
with, of course, a generous measure of personal ‘affection’; on the whole, a
somewhat loosely co-ordinated relationship, very real indeed, but so very
different from Mary’s simple and most humble self-demission before One Who was
awesome in His power, but above all, mysterious in His Person. Martha would do anything for Jesus,
but she was not one to slow down, let alone stop, her ever-pressing and
important work so as to be able to sit and listen intently at the feet of the
Person of Jesus.
When
Mary came to where Jesus was and saw Him, she fell at His feet and said to Him,
“Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died.”
All is now ready for Jesus to publicly
reveal -- by a most remarkable miracle -- His divine power, first of all
to His disciples and friends, to anchor their faith and reward their devotion
and courage and to the Jews present awaiting the Messiah of God; but also to
afford us modern Catholics and Christians, together with all those so very dear
to Him who were present on that day in Bethany, a deeply comforting awareness
of the beauty and integrity of His human nature by a most privileged --
almost secret -- glimpse into the depth and tenderness of His sympathy and
compassion:
When
Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who had come with her weeping … He (Himself)
wept.
He did that, however, in no foppish
manner; for in line with the Vulgate translation we learn that when He saw
their weeping:
Jesus became perturbed -- not just upset, not merely distressed,
but with a certain mixture of anger and indignation -- and deeply troubled.
It was in pursuance of such indignation
that He asked to be shown where the body of Lazarus had been placed that there He
might make manifest His determination to destroy the abusive power of Satan in
the human lives of all who would believe in Him and learn to walk in His ways.
So
Jesus, perturbed again, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone lay
across it. Jesus said, “Take away the
stone.”
Martha could now no longer control herself
and she gave agitated expression to her own thoughts and feelings and surely
those of all the Jews around, saying:
“Lord,
by now there will be a stench; he has been dead for four days.” Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that
if you believe you will see the glory of God?” So they took away the stone.
Martha’s ‘belief’ needed to be both
deepened and purified; for the moment, though, her undoubted commitment would
allow her to see and appreciate something of the glory promised by Jesus as she
managed to take hold of herself for a very short while and wait for whatever
Jesus would choose to do.
Saint Paul gives us a clue to the nature
of that glory of God she was about to witness when he writes to his converts at
Corinth (2 Corinthians 4:6):
God
who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to bring
to light the knowledge of the glory of God on the face of Christ.
And indeed, what unutterable beauty, what
other-worldly glory, was now to be seen on the face of Jesus as He:
Raised
His eyes and said, “Father, I thank You for hearing Me. I know that You always hear Me; but because
of the crowd here I have said this, that they may believe that You sent
Me.”
He was actually allowing the ‘crowd’ to
overhear/see, and hopefully learn from, His Personal relationship with His
heavenly Father!!
And then, suddenly breaking off such
tranquil intimacy:
He
cried out in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!”
The dead man came out, tied hand and foot with burial bands, and his
face was wrapped in a cloth. So Jesus said to them, “Untie him and let him
go.”
We are surely not erring if we allow
ourselves to think that what was to be seen on Jesus’ up-turned face and echoed
in His short prayer, was a transcendence expressive of the wondrous beauty of
Jesus’ total oneness with and undying presence to His Father, of His
unconditional obedience to and love for His Father ever seeking not His own
will but the will of His Father and the glory of His Name … all that was,
surely, even more glorious than the divine power so wondrously manifested when
Lazarus came out -- still bound in all his burial bands -- from the tomb where
he had lain for four days. And again,
dear friends, notice that, as we began so here at the end, all is for love of
His Father and of us:
That they may believe.
‘Believe’ what?
Jesus had told His disciples on His first
hearing of Lazarus’ death:
I
am glad for you that I was not there, that you may believe. Let us go to him.
That was further clarified when, standing
before the tomb of Lazarus and surrounded by the accompanying crowd, Jesus
prayed:
Father,
I thank You for hearing Me … because of the crowd here I have said this, that
they may believe that You sent Me.”
Belief in Jesus as the One sent by the
Father; that is the kernel of our faith in, and the true glory of, the Son of
Man. He is God the Son become flesh of
the Virgin by the Holy Spirit; and His glory on earth lies in the
self-sacrificing love of His proclamation and manifestation of the ultimate
Glory of the eternal God: the sublime
oneness and goodness of the most Holy Trinity, Father and Son -- begetting and
begotten -- in the unity of the Most Holy Spirit of Truth and Love.
Dear People of God, we are most surely
meant to draw strength for our faith, consolation, comfort, and joy, for our
heart, as we ponder today’s readings.
For, in and through the temptations and trials, the difficulties and
griefs, of living and ultimately, of dying, the most important question we will
all have to answer is, ‘Do you trust in My love, do you believe in My power, to
save you?’ And if in such a moment of
crisis we can say with Martha, ‘Yes Lord, I believe’; if indeed, with Mary, we
can trustfully allow any stone blocking, or ever-so-slightly impeding, the
entrance to our heart to be fully rolled away and thus -- despite any fear,
great or small, of what might be hidden there -- leaving the way to our
innermost self being opened up wide to the saving power and healing love of
Jesus, then, undoubtedly, we shall, as Jesus promised, see the glory of God and rejoice whole-heartedly and most
gratefully for His Church our Mother who has taught us so firmly, so clearly,
and so beautifully that,
JESUS CHRIST is indeed for us PERFECT GOD
AND PERFECT MAN.
