Putting Our Faith in Jesus and Leaving the Tomb of Fear, Fifth Sunday of Lent (A), March 29, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Fifth Sunday of Lent, Year A
March 29, 2020
Ez 37:12-14, Ps 130, Rom 8:8-11, Jn 11:1-45

The following text guided today’s homily: 

• As together we help each other to deal with the present situation of the coronavirus pandemic, the dialogue of Jesus with Martha and Mary in the Gospel, as well as Jesus’ action in raising Lazarus, are especially poignant and relevant. They are meant to have a big impact on our faith and our hope.
• When Martha and Mary sent Jesus a message that their brother Lazarus was ill, he remained where he was for two days basically until Lazarus had died. It confused the apostles and likewise confused Martha and Mary. When Jesus finally arrived, Martha ran out to greet him and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Mary later came, she said the exact same words. They had faith in Jesus that he could have healed their brother just like he had healed so many others. But Martha’s hope was not extinguished. She said to Jesus, “But even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you.” It was now the fourth day and Jews, based on different passages in the Old Testament, believed that a person’s soul hovered around the body for three days after death, but by the fourth day the person had passed the place of no return. Martha, however, was not intimidated. “Whatever you ask of God, God will give you.” That led to one of the most fascinating dialogues on the meaning of faith we have in the Gospel.
• Jesus said to Martha, “Your brother will rise.” And Martha replied immediately with stunning words, “I know he will rise, in the resurrection on the last day.” She, together with Lazarus and Mary, had probably asked Jesus during one of his visits to their house to reveal to them what would happen to us after death and had learned from Jesus how he would destroy death and restore life. She hadn’t forgotten the lesson about the general resurrection. But that’s not what she was requesting … and that’s not what Jesus himself was immediately planning to do.
• Jesus told her that ultimately told her that resurrection is not so much a concept, or state, or an event, but a relationship. “I am,” he told her, “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. To be risen from the dead, to be fully alive, means to be in a living, loving friendship with Jesus. If one lives and died in such a friendship with Jesus, he affirms, then death is nothing other than a change of address as a person continues in relationship with him who is the life and who came to give us life to the full.
• But then Jesus looked Martha right in the eyes and asked, “Do you believe this?” Jesus asks us the same question. For us to look at the resurrection and the life not as concepts but as a personal relationship requires looking at Jesus not as an historical figure but as a living, acting, breathing, loving Savior present right now seeking to raise us to experience life to the full. Martha didn’t reply merely, “Yes, Lord!” She presented us the grounds of faith. She said, “Yes, Lord. I have come to believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world.” Because of her living faith in Jesus, because of her trust in him, she committed herself to believing anything he would say, even if it seemed hard or even impossible to believe. Because of her faith, Martha recognized that the Resurrection and the Life was standing before her! Because of her faith, she would be raised from the dead by her faith-filled friendship with Jesus even before her brother Lazarus would be liberated from the tomb! Jesus wants us to have that same resurrection now.
• Before leaving for Bethany, Jesus had said to his disciples, “Lazarus is dead. For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe.” Jesus worked the miracle of raising Lazarus from the tomb on the fourth day the way he did so that we might believe, so that we might grow in faith, trusting in his words, even and especially when they’re the most challenging.
• We’re living in one of those challenging times right now. By this point, all of us know people who have contracted the coronavirus. Many of us know people who are struggling for their lives. Some of us know people who have already died as a result. It’s tempting for us to say, “Jesus if you had been here, if you had active, my brother, or father, or friend would not have gotten infected, would not be suffering, would not have died.” But we must approach the situation with faith like Martha and Mary. Jesus had said prior to the journey to Bethany, “This illness is not to end in death but is for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” Even illnesses, even deaths, can work out for God’s glory and work out for the good for those who love God. Jesus asks us, “Do you believe this,” and he wants to have us place out trust in him and his promises.
• We know that while Lazarus’ resurrection was a resurrection “backward” (a resuscitation to an earthly life from which he would have to die again), Jesus’ resurrection and the resurrection in which he hoped we should share — which he prophesied in action by working this miracle — would be a resurrection “forward,” to a completely new state of life, from which we would never die again. In raising Lazarus, he manifested both his power and his desire to do this. As we enter more deeply into Lent, and as we seek to be salt, light and leaven in the midst of the coronavirus, Jesus wants to have us grow in our faith in Him who is the Resurrection and the Life, confident that even should we die, if we die in him, we will live, and no one who lives and believes in him will ever die.
• How do we, in this life, encounter and befriend Jesus, as Martha, Mary and Lazarus did? How do we experience the resurrection and the life in the present that he wants to give us? We do so through prayer, that heart to heart conversation with him who listens, speaks and comes to abide in us. We do so through the Sacraments and our hunger for them. We do so by charity, in which the love with which he loves us overflows to love for others. Jesus provides the means and we’re called to seize them.
• And Jesus provides those means because he loves us and wants us to enter into communion with him who is the Resurrection and Life so that we might have life to the full now and forever. Just as much as St. John tells us that Jesus “loved Martha and her sister [Mary] and Lazarus,” and the crowd, seeing him weeping at the tomb, said, “Look at how much he loved him!,” so Jesus loves us just as personally and just as much. It’s obvious that Jesus, from a distance, could have cured Lazarus and even brought him back to life. After all, he had already worked several such miracles from a distance. By going up to work the miracle in person when the Pharisees and put a contract out on his head, however, Jesus was showing everyone that helping Lazarus was worth his life. In a similar way, God could have come up with another way to save us without Jesus’ leaving heaven, without his taking on our flesh, without his going up to Calvary and being massacred on a Cross, but he likewise wanted to show us we were worth saving. The greatest source of our human dignity is that Jesus accounted our lives more valuable than his own, and was willing to take our place on death row, to give his life for ours. If we could listen to the angels, seeing this love that Jesus has for each of us, we would hear them saying, “Look at how much he loved you and me.”
• Right after he told Martha that he is the resurrection and the life and that whoever lives and believes in him, even though he die, will live, Jesus asked her directly, “Do you believe this?” The same Jesus now turns to us and tells us the same truth. He reminds us of his great love for us that led him to trade his own life for ours. He recalls for us the great truths about the sacraments of resurrection — Baptism, Confession, and the Eucharist —and he puts us on the spot to determine whether it will be a source of life for us or whether we will try to put those gifts, and their Giver, to death. And so he asks each of us individually, as he asked Martha: “Do you believe this? Do you believe in my love? Do you believe my promises about the resurrection and the life? Do you believe in what I did to found the Sacrament of Confession to give you the joy of resurrection from the death of sin? Do you believe me when I tell you, ‘This is my body… given for you?’ Do you trust in me when I say, ‘This is the chalice of my blood… poured out for you?’ Then, Jesus tells us, “put your faith in me now: Come out of your tomb and live in friendship with me in this world so that that friendship, that resurrection and that life will continue forever!”

The readings for today’s Mass were: