Sometimes you just have to prepare and deliver two homilies on the same weekend. Having preached on Cycle C, the woman caught in adultery, today I delivered from Cycle A, Lazarus raised from the dead:
Have you ever had a wake up call? I’m not talking about leaving a message at the hotel front desk and they call you the next morning to help you start your day. How about a real wake up call? Suddenly you realize that something must change to get your life in order or to make something important happen!
Maybe that wake up call comes from a family member or friend that needs us to get it together. Perhaps it’s someone or something letting you know about a health issue. Or it may be something at school or work that needs to change. Wake up calls; we’ve all had them and we all need them from time to time.
As people of faith has this Lent provided us a wake up call? Have we listened to the wake up call from Jesus?
This Lent we have had three weeks of rich Gospels from St. John. In each one of these Gospels, including today, Jesus leaves a wake up call. In each of these Gospels there is the literal and the deeper. Do we remember the last two weeks? We first had the wonderful encounter of Jesus and the woman at the well. The physical: Jesus was thirsty and wanted a drink. We all can relate to this because we all get thirsty. The deeper: Jesus promises living water and He is that living water. Partaking of this living water we will never thirst again. Never! Jesus calls and challenges us to thirst first for Him and to quench our thirst and be refreshed in His presence, His word and His love. What about last week? Jesus and the man born blind teaches us about blindness and sight. The physical: Jesus indeed heals the man born blind. Remember, he used matter in spit, mud and the water of Siloam and words and all of a sudden the man sees. The deeper: as our Gospel story continued the newly sighted man had a spiritual vision as he came to realize that Jesus was the light of the world. Jesus calls and challenges us to see with eyes of faith, to ask Him to cure our blindness, most likely not physical but spiritual. Seeing with the eyes of Jesus, relying on faith for our vision we will never be blind again. Never!
That takes us today. We remember this family that Jesus loves so; two sisters as different as day is from night; Martha and Mary and their brother Lazarus. Martha sends word that Lazarus is sick; we can assume from the Gospel that he is very sick. It seems odd, but Jesus responds by waiting two days. By the time Jesus and his followers arrive, Lazarus has died and has even been in the tomb 4 days. Why is this important? We know from the synoptic Gospels that Jesus has healed the dead before. In both instances, the son of a servant and the daughter of a temple official, they were raised from the dead soon after death. For the Jewish people, this would make since. The belief in that day and culture was that the soul remained with the body for 3 days tops. We know that Jesus resurrected on the 3rd day. To raise Lazarus 4 days after burial, by the way this is only recorded in John, would erase all doubt, erase all disbelief that this would be some kind of trick.
Jesus indeed raises Lazarus after showing his human emotions; he wept and after declaring boldly to Martha that He is the Resurrection and the Life! He is affirming the resurrection of the dead but telling all of us, by telling Martha, that the resurrection is through Him, because this is the will of the Father. Life eternal is from the resurrection of Jesus. Before we look at the physical and the deeper let’s see how Jesus raises Lazarus. He does so with three simple commands: roll away the stone, Lazarus come out and finally, free him or unbind him, meaning remove all the bands and cloths that covered him for burial.
These are commands for us today. We too must roll away the obstacles that we place in our way from full personal relationship with Jesus or the Father and even the Church. Jesus also calls us out from our own tombs. If you are hearing this than you know I’m not talking about our burial tombs. No! I’m talking about the tombs where we bury our hopes and joys and love and faith preventing us from giving freely, giving completely, giving radically to Jesus or the Father and even the Church. We too must be unbound, untied from all that holds us back. Sometimes in our lives it may be our relationships, our friendships, our careers, things we care about deeply on a human plane. But if they bind us up and tie us up from loving Jesus intimately, following God unreservedly or having faith in His Church established by Him, then we must be loosened from these.
So today’s Gospel; the physical: Jesus raised Lazarus, the deeper: Jesus raises us to new life we Him, to eternal life with Him. How do we prepare for this in the days and weeks ahead as Easter draws ever closer? Recommit ourselves today to our Lenten promises. Whatever we said we would do, and no matter how well we have done it, we can recommit to our promise from now until Lent ends. We can use an examination of conscience, just like we do before confession, to determine what our spiritual thirstiness is, where our spiritual blindness leads us and what spiritual tombs hold us back. And we can began today to prepare for the worthy remembrance of Holy Week, as Palm Sunday is just next week and that following Thursday we enter into the Triduum.
We may ignore that wake up call from the hotel operator or those wake up calls that come along in our lives. We all have a wake up call from Jesus and he begs us not to ignore it but answer it. Our eternal life depends on it!
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