Ut Peccatis Mortui

5th Sunday of Lent

05 April 2014

TO DIE TO SIN, and fear, and doubt is to rise through Christ; with Christ; in Christ. For through Christ our sins are forgiven; with Christ we need not fear the sting of death; and in Christ our faith finds the fruits of eternal life.

Resurrection, as a concept, was not foreign to the Jews of Christ’s time. Our first reading from the prophet Ezekiel speaks to us of the physical resurrection of the body when God will open the graves of His people and put His Spirit in them, that they shall live. The hope of resurrection is acknowledged also by Martha in today’s Gospel account when she responds to Jesus’ assertion that her brother, Lazarus, would "rise again”.

Concept and reality, however, are very different. And none in the Gospel account, except the Lord, would have even imagined that the four-days-dead Lazarus would walk himself out of his tomb; not Jesus’ disciples, not his close friends Martha and Mary. To all present at this ultimate miracle, and even to the Jewish authorities who would hear about it, the bodily resurrection of the dead was not to be a reality today and certainly not at the hands of a man, even if some had acknowledged him a prophet, a messiah, or a man of great holiness. Resurrection was for them in the domain of God alone and for a specific time when God would bring the Israelites into His eternal glory in the heavenly Jerusalem. And it is because resurrection was such a distant and intangible concept that the seeming finality of death causes such pain to those remaining in life.

The Lord ensures two deaths in this Gospel account. First, the death of Lazarus. We are told that the Lord waited two days before acting on the message that his friend was gravely ill. Is it not odd that Jesus wanted to be sure of Lazarus’ death before embarking to Bethany? Martha and Mary certainly thought so. Is it not odd that the Lord told his disciples that he was glad for their sakes that He had not been with Lazarus before his death in order to heal him? In this instance, the disciples did not find it odd that Jesus didn’t want to go to Lazarus’ side. In fact they found it odd that he would want to travel there at all, and urged Him to let Lazarus sleep and not go to Bethany because to be so close to Jerusalem would put their master’s life in mortal danger from the Jewish authorities, for whom Jesus was a marked man. But the Lord went to the tomb of his friend precisely to ensure a second death: His own.

More than a foreshadowing of His own resurrection, the raising of Lazarus from the dead is the means by which Christ offers Himself to be crucified. More than an act of love for his friends Martha and Mary, the raising of Lazarus from the dead is accomplished for the glory of God and as a manifestation not of Jesus’ earthly affection for one man and his two sisters, but the truly Divine love of the Son of God for all men. 

And more than an affirmation of the value of mortal life, the raising of Lazarus from the dead is an affirmation of the necessity of death, to sin, to doubt and to the fear of death itself. It is for this that Jesus wept as Mary took Him to the tomb of her brother. It was not because he was sad at the death of his friend or His failure to heal him as he had the blind man. Jesus wept for the pervasive power that death had on the minds of those around him, those that had been taught, through the prophets, about the resurrection but could not grasp it, and needed God Himself to come among them, to live and die to prove that God’s Holy Covenant, his promise to His people, was not set in life and bound by death but transcends the earthly city of Jerusalem to the eternal city of God.

We must not, then, my brothers, be as the disciples who feared for Jesus’ life and preferred him to stay in safety, away from Jerusalem. We must not be as Martha and Mary, who in their hearts wished that Jesus had arrived in time to heal their brother. We need not be as the crowds outside Lazarus’ tomb who wondered if Jesus mourned the loss of His friend and speculated about whether He was unable to save him from death.

We, who in these days ahead of us, will witness Christ’s passion, death and resurrection, as a direct result of his action to raise Lazarus from death, should rather rejoice in this manifestation of God’s power and love in Bethany today: A love that conquers death, not just for one man, but for all who, in Christ, earnestly receive His Spirit that gives life to our mortal bodies.

May our journey with our Lord to Jerusalem permit us to share, through His passion and death – with His ultimate act of love –  in His resurrection. Amen.