Last week we heard of the man born blind. Again, he is all of us, born in the blindness of sin. Our minds so often clouded and confused, even in our attempts to live righteously. Jesus says to him and to all of us, “I am the light of the world.” If you want to see rightly, be grafted on to me.
As we near the end of Lent, these stories in John’s Gospel move toward a sort of crescendo. He is living water, he says, “I am the light”. And today Jesus speaks the greatest of the “I am” statements. He says, “I am the resurrection and the life.”
What is our God interested in? Life! One of my favorite quotations from the early Church fathers is from St. Ireneus of Lyons, who said, Gloria Dei Homo Vivens, “the glory of God is the human being fully alive.” Jesus himself said, I came that they might have life, and have it to abundance.
Christ died, that we may live, free from sin, full of divine life.
God’s glory, what gives God happiness, is that we are fully alive. Conversely, what saddens the heart of God is when we continue to allow death to reign in us at any level, physically, emotionally, spiritually.
We heard in our first reading about God’s desire to free us from the powers of the grave: “I will open your graves and have you rise from them.” Of course, this can refer to the resurrection of our bodies when Christ returns. But he’s not just speaking of our final resting place here. The grave also wherever the powers of sin and evil and death reign in us: an addiction, a habitual sin, an inability or unwillingness to forgive, anger and bitterness, perversion, fear of leaving behind the comfortable to follow Christ more devoutly, lack of fervor for the spiritual life…the grave is whatever limits the life of God in you. Think of laying in a grave, there is no place to move, you are constricted, unable to move, tied up, and God says, from your graves, I will have you rise up.”
God’s desire to raise us to new life, can be seen in our wonderful Gospel story of the raising of Lazarus. But, Lazarus is not the only story of Jesus raising the dead in the Gospels. There are three raisings. Can you think of the other two? The first one is the daughter of Jairus. Remember the little girl who died in her home when Jesus was on the way to heal her? The second is the son of the widow of Naim. Jesus sees the widow weeping as they brought out the body of her son, and Jesus is moved to raise him from the dead. The third is of course, Lazarus.
St. Augustine offered a spiritual reading of these three encounters with the dead.
Because Jairus’ daughter dies in her house, St. Augustine says that her death symbolizes the sort of spiritual death that remains locked up in us, the sort of sins that poisons us from the inside: the resentments, the old grudges. They aren’t necessarily expressed in words or actions, they just sort of fester within us, poisoning our thoughts, and our wills, and our imagination. These are the sins we do in private—though no sin is private to God, of course. Jesus raises this little girl, just as he wants to heal us from all of our interior sinful attitudes.
Secondly, the son of the widow of Naim. He had died and was being carried outside the house to the cemetery. St. Augustine says, he symbolizes the sins, that have begun to express themselves in action. When the interior anger and resentment, selfishness and lust bubble over in words of actions. But Jesus forgives these too.
The third person Jesus raises from the dead, his friend Lazarus. Lazarus had been carried out of the house and placed in a tomb. By the time Jesus gets there, Lazarus has been in the tomb for four days. His sister, famously says, when Jesus instructs them to roll away the stone that blocks the tomb, “but Lord, surely, there will be a stench.”
St. Augustine says that Lazarus in his grave, symbolizes that evil, that spiritual death, that not only has come out of the heart in words and actions, but has established itself as a habitual. Now, the anger, the hatred, the violence, the lust, have taken root, and have become such a part of my life and my activity, that, like Lazarus in the tomb, there is a stench, and it’s affecting the people around me. That anger, addiction, selfishness or lust now affects the well-being of the family. Neighbors begin to avoid us because of our stench.
There was a saint, Saint Christina would become nauseated when in the presence of someone who had an unrepented mortal sin. She could sense that their souls were dead and rotting.
So we have these three types of sin, the interior, the exterior, and that…well…stinkiest, ugliest sorts of sin. But, at the heart of today’s Gospel, is the message that though our sins are foul, Jesus draws near to us, to bring life. Jesus goes to the smelliest, ugliest soul and invites them back to life.
From time to time, a priest hears someone say, “Father, believe me, what I’ve done is so bad, even God can’t forgive me.” But, our Gospel today says, “false, wrong!” Nobody, not even those who are entrenched in evil are beyond the reach of the forgiving power of Christ. He goes into those deepest darkest places, to bring us out of the disgusting muck of sin.
Jesus wept for Lazarus, under the sway of the powers of death. It breaks God’s heart when we aren’t fully alive. He doesn’t weep out of anger with us; he weeps when sin and death take his friends.This Thursday, we will have a penance service. Through Sacramental Confession new life is available to the most hardened sinner. Every Catholic should go to Confession during the Lenten season. If you’ve already confessed, thanks be to God. If you haven’t come and allow Jesus to raise you out of the grave of sin and dysfunction, to release you from the constrictions of the grave, and to the new and flourishing life of grace, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.
No comments:
Post a Comment