Year A: Homily for 5^th Sunday in Lent

Through today’s readings we know that God wants us to be as full of life as possible, as completely human as possible living out our full humanness. The one thing that keeps us from being fully alive, being the full human person that we’re called to be, that God wants us to be, is sin. When we sin, when we fail to follow God’s ways, we don’t hurt God; we detract from ourselves. We make ourselves less than what we can be, what God wants us to be. Today the scriptures tell us how we truly can be what God wants us to be, how we can become truly alive.

The first reading today is about becoming alive. It’s that very famous passage from the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel. At this point the chosen people had failed to live up to their covenant, their agreement with God had been taken into exile. Everything had been lost. Their city Jerusalem was destroyed. The temple was leveled, and they were as a people in shambles and suffering. Everything seemed to be like death for them.

Then Ezekiel has this vision of their situation – of a valley of bones, dead dry bones. You might remember the old song – ‘Them bones, them bones, them dry bones. O hear the Word of the Lord.’

God said to Ezekiel, “Can these bones live again?” Ezekiel says, “Lord, only you know that.” So then God says, “Speak on my behalf to these bones. Say to them, “Dry bones, hear the word of God! Tell them that God says, ‘I’m going to put spirit in you, make you live. I shall put sinews on you, make flesh grow on you. I shall cover you with skin and give you my spirit that you may live and then you will know that I am Yahweh your God.’ “

Later on in that passage, Ezekiel says to the bones which represent the ‘deadness of the Jews”, “This is what Yahweh says: ‘I’m going to open your tombs. I shall bring you out of your tombs, my people, and lead you back to the land of Israel. You will know that I am God, oh my people, when I open your graves and bring you out of your grave, when I put my spirit in you and you live! I shall settle you in your land and you will know that I, God, have done what I said I would do.’ “

This vision of Ezekiel is a clear vision that God was restoring his chosen people to the fullness of life that they had lost because they were not faithful. God was taking them back and going to restore them.

And it really did happen. The Persian king defeated the Babylonians, who had captured the Jews, and now the chosen people were going back to their own land. They were going to become fully alive as God’s people again. But then the important thing is to notice what God says will happen: “When I put my spirit in you then you live. You will know that I am God.” In other words the covenant is to be restored. “I will be your God. You will be my people. You will live according to my way.” And as we know from the prophet Isaiah, God’s ways are not our ways. God’s thoughts are not our thoughts. They’re different. They’re profoundly different. But when we live according to God’s ways, God’s thoughts, we become alive! That was what God was inviting those people to do, to come alive again by following the way of God.

In the Gospel lesson, the same thing happened but a little bit of a different way. Jesus went into that village after he had delayed a couple days, and Martha went out to meet him and addressed him, saying, “If only you had been here my brother wouldn’t have died.” Martha seems to be thinking of Jesus as a wonder worker, a healer and that’s all. But then as the conversation goes on we discover it’s much deeper than that. When Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again,” she understood him to mean that he would rise on the last day, at the resurrection of all mankind. But that was not quite right. Jesus had said something different. He said, “I am the resurrection and the life; if you believe in me you will never die and if you live and believe in me you will always be alive.” Jesus is telling Martha, “Look, believe in me.”

How do we believe in Jesus? It is much more than just an intellectual acceptance. Jesus said, “Not everybody who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord.’ will enter the kingdom of heaven. Only those who do the will of God.” In other words follow the way of God. That’s how you believe in Jesus, you follow him and then you come to new life. A life that no one can take from you. A life that begins to enable you to be all that you can be.

Like the Jewish people who felt dead from their captivity, we too live in a world that has been caught up in death for a long time. We have our dry bones as well. We kill each other in acts of murder, abortion, euthanasia, execution, war, terrorist activities, drunk and reckless driving.

We kill ourselves through suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, smoking, overwork, stress, bad eating habits, and physical neglect.

We watch calmly as others die from poverty, hunger and malnutrition, homelessness, unemployment, poor education, disease, lack of health coverage, child abuse, arms proliferation, discrimination, pollution, destruction of the environment, unsafe working conditions, and all the laws, policies, practices and attitudes which contribute to these conditions.

Jesus is the resurrection and the life. He is the God who will put my spirit in you that you may live.

When we believe in Jesus, we discover Jesus in a whole variety of places. When I was hungry, you gave me to eat. When I was thirsty you gave me to drink. That’s how we enter into the fullness of life, finding Jesus in others, seeing Jesus in the poor, the oppressed, those who are treated so badly in this world. We see Jesus in them and believe in Jesus, reach out to Jesus and follow him. We become alive.

There are many different ways in which we can follow Jesus in order to become fully alive. The Gospels spell out all these ways, but there is one that is probably the most important .

To follow Jesus most of all and to come into fullness of life, even now, because Jesus is the resurrection and the life, we must, more than anything else, heed his command: “Don’t just love those who love you. Love your enemies.” We have to reach out in forgiveness, reach out in healing to others in order to be healed ourselves, in order to become whole. If we hold hatred, vengeance, in our hearts we’re less than human.

So if we believe in Jesus, if we follow Jesus — and that’s what it means to believe in Jesus — if we follow him especially in this way of forgiveness and peace and love we will become fully alive. “I am the resurrection and the life. If you believe in me you will never die. Whoever lives and believes in me will live always.” Jesus is asking us during this time of Lent and reconciliation to look deeply in our hearts to see the ways that we’ve failed to follow him faithfully, especially in the way of love, the way of forgiveness. If we can be like Martha and say, “Yes Lord, I believe”; if we can, in fact, recognize that our world is full of dry bones; if we repent of our sins and commit ourselves to following Jesus, we will become fully alive and become all that we can be. And when we are all we can be, we can face physical death with the firm confidence that eternal life is not just a pledge of rising on the last day, but a present and continuing participation in the life of the ever-living Jesus right now at this moment. Those who believe in Jesus never truly die.

Of all the miracles Jesus did, the raising of Lazarus ranks as the most astonishing to the people of his time. Traditional Jewish belief had it that the soul of a dead person somehow remains with the body for three days. After three days the soul departs finally from the body never to return, and that is when corruption sets in. When Martha objects to the opening of the tomb and says, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days” (John 11:39), she is expressing the common view that this is now a hopeless situation. Is that why Jesus delayed coming to the funeral, to let the situation become “impossible” before acting on it? G.K. Chesterton once said, “Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all.” In traditional Jewish mentality bringing back to life a person who is already four days dead and decaying is as unthinkable as the prophet Ezekiel’s vision in which the grey, dry bones of the dead are miraculously restored to life.

For the early Christians the story of the raising of Lazarus was more than a pointer to the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus rose on the third day; his body never saw corruption. For them this miracle is a challenge to never give up hope even in the hopeless situations in which they found themselves as individuals, as a church or as a nation. It is never too late for God to revive and revitalise a person, a church or a nation. But first we must learn to cooperate with God.

How can we cooperate with God so as to experience God’s resurrection power in our lives and in our world? Well, everyone knows the answer already: faith. But that is not the point that John makes in this story. In fact there is no one in the story, not even Mary or Martha, who believed that Jesus could bring Lazarus back to life after four days dead. No one expected him to do it, so expectant faith is not the emphasis here. Rather the emphasis in the story on how we cooperate with a miracle-working God is placed on practical obedience and doing God’s will.

To effect the miracle, Jesus issues three commands and all of them are obeyed to the letter. That is how the miracle happens. First, “Jesus said, ‘Roll away the stone.’ … So they rolled away the stone” (verses 39-41). Did the people understand why they should do this heavy work of rolling away the tombstone to expose a stinking corpse? You bet they didn’t. But it was their faith in Jesus expressing itself not through intellectual agreement with Jesus but through practical agreement with him, through obedience. Why didn’t Jesus command the stone to roll away all by itself, without bothering the people? We don’t quite know. All we know is that divine power seems always to be activated by human cooperation and stifled by non-cooperation. As C.S. Lewis said, “God seems to do nothing of Himself which He can possibly delegate to His creatures.” God will not do by a miracle what we can do by obedience.

The second command Jesus gives is directed to the dead man: “‘Lazarus, come out!’ and the dead man came out” (verses 43-44). We do not know the details of what transpired in the tomb. All we know is that Jesus’ word of command is followed by immediate obedience. Lazarus gropes his way out of the dark tomb even with his hands and feet tied up in bandages, and his face all wrapped up. Even a man rotting away in the tomb can still do something to help himself.

The third command again is addressed to the people, “Unbind him, and let him go” (verse 44). Even though Lazarus could stumble himself out of the tomb, there was no way he could unbind himself. He needs the community to do that for him. By unbinding Lazarus and setting him free from the death bands the community is accepting Lazarus back as one of them.

Many Christian individuals and communities today have fallen victim to the death of sin. Many are already in the tomb of hopelessness and decay, in the bondage of sinful habits and attitudes. Nothing short of a miracle can bring us back to life in Christ. Jesus is ready for the miracle. He himself said, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). Are we ready to cooperate with him for the miracle. Are we ready to roll away the stone that stands between us and the light of Christ’s face? Are we ready to take the first step to come out of the place of death? Are we ready to unbind (i.e. forgive) one another and let them go free? These are the various ways we cooperate with God in the miracle of bringing us back to life and reviving us as individuals, as a church, and a nation.

 By Rt.Rev.Prof.Kasomo Daniel

Bishop Kasomo is the Bishop of The Society of St. Peter and Paul (SSPP)