March 26th 2023. Fifth Sunday of Lent
GOSPEL: John 11, 1-45
Translated from a homily by Don Fabio Rosini broadcast on Vatican Radio
Don Fabio’s homily follows the Gospel
GOSPEL: John 11, 1-45
There was a man named Lazarus who lived in the village of Bethany with the two sisters, Mary and Martha, and he was ill. – It was the same Mary, the sister of the sick man Lazarus, who anointed the Lord with ointment and wiped his feet with her hair. The sisters sent this message to Jesus,
‘Lord, the man you love is ill’.
On receiving the message, Jesus said,
‘This sickness will end not in death but in God’s glory, and through it the Son of God will be glorified’.
Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, yet when he heard that Lazarus was ill he stayed where he was for two more days before saying to the disciples, ‘Let us go to Judaea’.
The disciples said, ‘Rabbi, it is not long since the Jews wanted to stone you; are you going back again?’
Jesus replied: ‘Are there not twelve hours in the day? A man can walk in the daytime without stumbling because he has the light of this world to see by; but if he walks at night he stumbles, because there is no light to guide him.’
He said that and then added, ‘Our friend Lazarus is resting, I am going to wake him’.
The disciples said to him, ‘Lord, if he is able to rest he is sure to get better’. The phrase Jesus used referred to the death of Lazarus, but they thought that by ‘rest’ he meant ‘sleep’, so Jesus put it plainly, ‘Lazarus is dead; and for your sake I am glad I was not there because now you will believe. But let us go to him.’
Then Thomas – known as the Twin – said to the other disciples, ‘Let us go too, and die with him’.
On arriving, Jesus found that Lazarus had been in the tomb for four days already. Bethany is only about two miles from Jerusalem, and many Jews had come to Martha and Mary to sympathise with them over their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus had come she went to meet him. Mary remained sitting in the house. Martha said to Jesus,
‘If you had been here, my brother would not have died, but I know that, even now, whatever you ask of God, he will grant you’.
‘Your brother’ said Jesus to her ‘will rise again.’
Martha said, ‘I know he will rise again at the resurrection on the last day’.
Jesus said: ‘I am the resurrection. If anyone believes in me, even though he dies he will live,
and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?’
‘Yes, Lord,’ she said ‘I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one who was to come into this world.’ When she had said this, she went and called her sister Mary, saying in a low voice, ‘The Master is here and wants to see you’. Hearing this, Mary got up quickly and went to him. Jesus had not yet come into the village; he was still at the place where Martha had met him. When the Jews who were in the house sympathising with Mary saw her get up so quickly and go out, they followed her, thinking that she was going to the tomb to weep there.
Mary went to Jesus, and as soon as she saw him she threw herself at his feet, saying, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died’. At the sight of her tears, and those of the Jews who followed her, Jesus said in great distress, with a sigh that came straight from the heart,
‘Where have you put him?’ They said, ‘Lord, come and see’.
Jesus wept; and the Jews said, ‘See how much he loved him!’
But there were some who remarked, ‘He opened the eyes of the blind man, could he not have prevented this man’s death?’ Still sighing, Jesus reached the tomb: it was a cave with a stone to close the opening. Jesus said, ‘Take the stone away’.
Martha said to him, ‘Lord, by now he will smell; this is the fourth day’.
Jesus replied, ‘Have I not told you that if you believe you will see the glory of God?’ So they took away the stone.
Then Jesus lifted up his eyes and said:
‘Father, I thank you for hearing my prayer. I knew indeed that you always hear me,
but I speak for the sake of all these who stand round me, so that they may believe it was you who sent me.’
When he had said this, he cried in a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, here! Come out!’ The dead man came out, his feet and hands bound with bands of stuff and a cloth round his face. Jesus said to them,
‘Unbind him, let him go free’.
Many of the Jews who had come to visit Mary and had seen what he did believed in him.
The Gospel of the Lord: Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ
1. The theme this Sunday is that of God bringing life to the darkest and most putrefied parts of our existence.
On these Sundays of Lent, we consider the most important messages of Christ that prepare us for Easter. The Gospel this week presents us with the greatest miracle performed by Jesus during his public ministry, the raising of his friend Lazarus. Adults preparing for baptism traditionally receive the third scrutiny on this Sunday. Last Sunday we had the theme of Jesus as the light of the world, with the previous Sunday presenting Jesus as the living water. This Sunday, we see Jesus as the life who makes his people come out of their tombs. Historically, in the people of Israel, the event of the exile and the subsequent return to the promised land was seen as a sort of existential resurrection. In the second reading, indeed, we read: “Though your body may be dead it is because of sin, but if Christ is in you then your spirit is life itself because you have been justified; and if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, then he who raised Jesus from the dead will give life to your own mortal bodies through his Spirit living in you.” All of this drives home the fact that the difference between death and life is not simply something biological. It has to do with the Spirit. We can be alive biologically but dead spiritually, and sometimes it is death in a material sense that can lead us to an experience of true resurrection. All of this is expressed paradigmatically in the story of Lazarus.
2. Jesus allows Lazarus to die so that something greater than just healing from illness can be manifested. We sometimes wonder why God seems absent from the daily problems of our lives, but he is not interested in resolving superficial matters. He wishes to touch us in the deepest part of our misery.
This Gospel is immensely rich and it we discover the strategy of Jesus to lead us towards the resurrection. The starting point is the friendship between Jesus and Lazarus. Though Jesus is very fond of this younger brother of Martha and Mary, he does not come when they tell him first of the illness. Why not? Jesus says something strange: ‘Are there not twelve hours in the day? A man can walk in the daytime without stumbling because he has the light of this world to see by; but if he walks at night he stumbles, because there is no light to guide him.’ What this means is that when God entrusts us with a mission, we walk in the light so long as we keep to that mission. When we diverge from our mission, we no longer have light because we no longer have grace. God does not bless us with his assistance because he has not called us to what we are now doing. Jesus’ mission involves going to Lazarus when he is already dead because the intention is to do something greater than just healing from illness. When we say something is “dead and buried” we mean it is definitively finished. How often we see things around us that seem to have no hope. We see the Church decline and we think that God is not listening to us. Like the apostles on the boat we think God is sleeping and is not thinking of us, but the reality is that the Lord’s plan is greater than we can see or appreciate. We are a “work in progress” that proceeds according to the Lord’s rhythm, not ours. God does not wish to just resolve the smaller and superficial problems of life, but he wants to get down to the depths of the enigma of our existence, of death, of the void.
3. The image of the stone covering the tomb recalls the many defensive layers under which we hide ourselves. We begin to think that our external “presentable” mask is our real self. God is not interested in our mask. He wishes to enter to the deepest and most rotten parts of our existence to bring light and life.
The image of Lazarus being raised from inside the tomb is very significant. Jesus asks for the stone to be taken away. We tend to enclose ourselves within cloaks of hypocrisy, defensive barriers and quarantines of various sorts. We hide in there and begin thinking that our defensive shell, our external skin, is who we really are. But God does not love our defensive facades, he loves us. Therefore any obstacle which prevents the voice of God from penetrating to our interior must be removed. In all of us there is this interior man who is buried, who is not loved. Too often we have believed that this interior heart of ours is not lovable. We must allow the voice of God to reach this hidden interior. Martha tells Jesus that the stone cannot be removed because a bad smell will come out. Similarly, we think that the true interior of ourselves is not presentable. We think we are only lovable when we are nice, perfumed, and publicly acceptable. Instead, God comes to love us in the part that we have hidden the most, the putrefied part that is hidden under the existential carpet of our lives.
4. From the time of Adam, humanity hides from God, ashamed of our own poverty, seeking to present a mask of independence. But we are nothing without God and we need his voice to penetrate the interior of our tombs and call us out into his presence where we can finally be ourselves.
The resurrection is experienced above all in the experience of God’s love and mercy, whose voice rings out within us and says, “Come out!” As he said to Lazarus, Jesus is saying to us, “Outside, here beside me!” Jesus wishes that we not remain closed in our mechanisms of survival but that we be with him and allow ourselves to be loved. As the psalm says, “In your light we see light”. From the time of Adam, humanity has hidden itself from the Lord, ashamed of its own poverty, afraid to encounter God face to face. Instead, Jesus comes in search of that which is hidden and lost, in order to bring it out and into life. This is the Christian experience of resurrection, the experience of love without conditions, the ocean of God’s mercy in which we can throw all of our anguish. Here we can lower all of our defences, not so that we can live imprudent lives, but so that, in front of him and illuminated by his light, we can finally be ourselves.
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