Homily for 5th Sunday of Lent

Homily for the
5th Sunday of Lent

March 13, 2005
John 11: 1-55
Ezek 37: 12-14
Rom 8: 8-11
Immaculate Heart of Mary, Scarsdale, N.Y.

“Whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die” (John 11: 25-26).

Christ Raising Lazarus (Giotto)

In the 6th c. B.C. God inspired the prophet Ezekiel to envision a vast plain full of human bones, and to invoke the divine Spirit upon them so that they might come together and their flesh might be restored and the breath of God might bring them back to life.  That vision may be found in 37:1-10.  Then God interpreted this vision to mean that Israel, dead and buried as a nation because of military conquest and exile, would return to their land and live again as a nation, pleasing to God.  That interpretation may be found in vv. 11-14, whence came our 1st reading.

The Jews did not arrive at an understanding of personal immortality or of bodily resurrection—the survival of individual human persons beyond death—until a century or so before the birth of Christ.  The enduring life of the nation was as far as Israel could conceive of resurrection and immortality, such enduring life as Ezekiel prophesied.  But in our Lord’s time on earth, the immortality of the human soul and the resurrection of the body were hotly debated subjects, as the Gospels and St. Paul’s career testify.  Many of the Jews had come to believe that God must raise the dead for some final judgment, followed by eternal reward or eternal punishment.  Martha, the sister of Lazarus, asserts that her brother “will rise, in the resurrection on the last day” (John 11:24).

When Jesus states that he is “the resurrection and the life” of whoever believes in him (11:25-26), Martha reaffirms her faith and connects it to Jesus himself as Lord, Messiah, Son of God, “the one who is coming into the world” (11:27) from God to redeem the world.  She has already expressed her confidence in Jesus’ relationship with God:  “Even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you” (11:22).  The “I am” of Jesus—“I am the resurrection and the life”—is a divine claim, an echo of God’s own name, YHWH, revealed to Moses in the burning bush (Ex 3:14).  It is a declaration that God is life and God gives life to the world in the act of creation and in the act of its re-creation thru redemption.

Martha’s sister Mary comes on the scene.  “Lord,” she addresses Jesus.  This title, Kyrios in NT Greek—as in “Kyrie, eleison”—is how the Jewish translators of the OT into Greek rendered the Hebrew word Adonai, so they would not have to write or pronounce the sacred name YHWH.  To call Jesus “Lord,” then, is to associate him with the divine name given to Moses, with the God who delivered Israel from bondage, established a covenant with them, and led them to the Promised Land.

“Lord,” Mary says to Jesus, “if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (11:32).  On the most immediate level, as she speaks to him she expresses her confidence in Jesus’ love for her family, in his concern so often demonstrated for everyone, in his power to obtain favor from God—just as Jesus himself will pray at the tomb, “Father, I thank you for hearing me.  I know that you always hear me” (11:41-42).

At another level, John the Evangelist is telling us, we readers believe, that death and life cannot co-exist.  “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  Death cannot stay in the presence of Jesus, of I AM, of “the Christ, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world.”  Light drives out darkness.  Life conquers death.

According to the Synoptic Gospels (Mark 5:22-24,35-43||), Jesus had once raised a just-dead little girl, and according to Luke he had once raised a young man being carried to burial (7:11-16), which would have been the same day that he died, as is still the custom thruout the Middle East.  Now in Lazarus’s case, there is the notable difference that he has been dead and buried for 4 days.  He’s not “just dead” but so dead that there should be a stench (11:39).  Surely at this point the sisters would have been satisfied and somewhat consoled had Jesus visited the tomb, commended his deceased friend to God, and spent some time sympathizing with them.  Their hope is in the resurrection on the last day.

In a way that Martha and Mary do not express and cannot have comprehended, Jesus is associated in God’s plan with everlasting life.  He asks whether Martha believes that whoever believes in him will live and never die, and she answers, Yes, he is the Christ, the one coming into the world.  But she and Mary remain fixed on the present:  if Jesus had come, Lazarus would not have died.  Opening the tomb is pointless.  Their faith is imperfect.  Nevertheless, Jesus performs the last and the greatest of what St. John calls “his signs” (cf. 12:17-18), the miracles of his earthly ministry, “that the crowd here may believe” God has sent him into the world (11:42) to be its resurrection and life.  He calls Lazarus out of the tomb, and he sets the dead man free from the bands of death (11:43-44), even as on Easter Day he would himself shatter the chains of death.

The raising of Lazarus, like the earlier raising of the little girl and the young man but more definitively, is a sign of Jesus’ own resurrection to come, of his conquest of death, of the unassailable validity of his claim to be the life of the human race.  The little girl eventually died, and Lazarus and his sisters eventually died.  We’re tempted to say, “for good” and without any further resuscitation.

But the Good News of Jesus “the Messiah, the Son of God, the one who [has come] into the world,” is that no one is dead “for good” except the sinner who refuses to believe.  “Whoever believes in me, even if he dies will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”  Obviously this does not refer to the temporary sleep of bodily death in time and space (cf. 11:11).  Jesus himself experienced that for 3 days, so that we might not fear it and so that by his resurrection into the glory of heavenly life we might know that his word is good:  he is “the resurrection and the life.”

Our bodies shall die because of sin, as Paul says (Rom 8:10).  But if the Spirit of Christ dwells in us by faith, then death has no grip on us.  Our words and actions will be life-giving; the Spirit in us will be “alive because of righteousness” (8:10), because of our being in God’s favor, and “the one who raised Christ from the dead will give life to [our] mortal bodies also” thru the Spirit of Jesus dwelling in us and working in us.  Our mortal death, too, will be only a sleep until the last day.