Two weeks ago, we heard the story of the woman at the well. She encountered the Lord Jesus, who said to
her, “I will give you living water, which alone can satisfy”. She represents all of us, all thirsting for
God. Jesus invites all people of all time to drink deeply of the living waters
of God through Him.
Last week we heard of the man born blind. Again, he is all of us, born in the blindness
of sin. We desire to do good and avoid
evil, but it’s not always easy to see clearly. Sometimes our egos and our
sinful attachments are so great, they blind us to seeing how God wants us to
live rightly. Jesus says to the man born blind and to all of us, “I am the
light of the world.” If you want to see
rightly, let the light of Christ and His teachings enlighten you.
These stories in John’s Gospel move toward a sort of
crescendo. I am living water which quenches thirst. I am the light by which you
see. And today Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life.” He’s not just
water, He’s not just light. He is Life itself. And he desire that His life
might animate us in this life, that it might sustain us through death, and
animate us in all eternity, including the resurrection.
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 Man 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 allow death to reign in us at any
level: physically, emotionally, or spiritually.
Sin diminishes us, God restores life.
Next, week, on Palm Sunday, we’ll come to understand the
price the Lord pays to defeat the powers of death in us. But on this fifth
Sunday of Lent, we’re invited to consider how the Lord commands us to live.
Today, our three catechumens present themselves for the last
of the three scrutinies. They do so because they want to live and they
recognize that Jesus is the resurrection and the life. So, you’ll notice in the
scrutiny prayers many references to life, being restored to life and raised to
life, like Lazarus in our Gospel today.
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…I will put my spirit in you that you may live, and I will settle you upon
your land” we heard in our first reading.
Our three Catechumens will receive the gift of new life in
Baptism this Easter Vigil. They have heard that same promise that God made to
Israel all those centuries ago, the promise of life, and through prayer and
fasting and study have opened themselves to the fulfillment of that promise in
them. Thanks be to God. They have heard the Lord calling them to come out of
their tombs, like Lazarus. Thanks be to God.
Why follow Jesus Christ? Why seek baptism and faithfulness
to him? The promise of being raised from the dead is a pretty good reason.
Living forever in God’s kingdom of peace is a pretty good reason. And it’s not
just an empty promise--the promise of some delusional California cult leader.
Resurrection: it’s really the ultimate argument against
anyone who says all religions are the same. No. They aren’t. Show me a member
of another religion who not only raised the dead but also rose from the dead.
“I will open your graves and have you rise from them. Here
the Lord is not just speaking of the promise of rising from our graves on the
last day, when he returns. The grave is also wherever the powers of sin and
evil and death reign in us still: 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.”
In the Gospels, we have not one story, but three stories of
Jesus raising the dead. We just heard the story of Lazarus; 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.
St. Augustine offered a spiritual reading of these three
encounters with the dead.
Because Jairus’ daughter dies inside 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.
Jesus is of course able to heal those sins too, but like the
others, there must be confession, there must be acknowledgement that these sins
exist in me, and that I need a savior.
May we have the humility and honesty to recognize the need
to be raised by Jesus, healed by Jesus, that we may truly live with him for the
glory of God and salvation of souls.
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