The transition from death to life is the theme of today’s readings. In
particular, the raising of Lazarus from the dead is a prelude to the Easter
event whose celebration is now at hand. Jesus
loves Lazarus into rising from death! In our readings three dimensions run
through the dynamics of death and resurrection. Ezekiel speaks of the death of hope. Paul glimpses the situation
of a person locked up in what he calls “the flesh”: it is the condition of one
who has betrayed her relational vocation,
her being called to love. This is the death of love. Finally, the Gospel passage
is faith-centered and is an initiation
to faith in Christ who in his person is the Resurrection and the Life. The
dialogue between Jesus and Martha is centered on believing: “Whoever believes
in me, even if he dies, will live. Do you believe this?” asks the Lord; and
Martha replies: “Yes, Lord, I believe”.
{For the Bible, death is not exclusively
biological but is a much more complex reality, one that creeps into so many
areas of human life. The Ezekiel passage speaks of the death of a people, of a
community, and this in the form of the death
of its hope. Here the transition from death to life will be the return from
Babylon of the deported and morally dead children of Israel. Ezekiel states
that the death of a people begins with the death of hope, that is, with the loss
of a future. Here we see hope as a virtue,
hope not as a feeling but as a responsibility, as the work of opening up the future,
of giving meaning to our life, the capacity for promise, creativity, for imagining
what is possible, the courage to begin something new. And here also we discover
the historical possibility of the resurrection
of a human group, of a community, thanks to the courage of an initiative
and a renewal in which something dies and loses its previous form, but only for
the sake of a possible rebirth that
is not a mere repetition of the past, but something wholly new.}
{In Paul’s text, death is spiritual. It is the interior condition
of persons who lock themselves into a self-referential life, a life under the
dominion of the “flesh”, by which Paul means the tyranny of the ego. Here the transition from death to life will consist
in the rediscovery of relationship
and openness to others in Christ, the activating in oneself of the life-giving
death of Christ into which we have been immersed in baptism. For Paul, the
person who lives in selfish self-sufficiency makes of his heart a grave. But
the Spirit of resurrection Christ exhales
into us bursts open the impenetrability of death and brings our dead soul out
of her grave. Christ’s Spirit can penetrate individualistic dungeons and, by taking
up its dwelling in the human heart, can immerse us in new life.}
The gospel is about physical death, in fact the death of a
beloved friend of Jesus. In the death of someone to whom we are bound by love,
something of ourselves dies, possibilities of further shared experience die,
our very being is maimed. And we intuit it is only love, the quality of the bond that unites us to that person, that can
build a bridge between death and life. Only through love can we make sense of
our mortal life. We infer from the Gospel that fear of death draws us into
defensive attitudes so as to protect ourselves from suffering. But such
self-protection actually deadens our life. We may suffer more but we are also
more alive when we remain open. By asking for our faith, Jesus suggests that we,
too, can enter into his own attitude of
trust even in the face of death. “Father”, he exclaims, “I knew that you
always listen to me”. This shows an attitude that, while accepting death and
suffering for the one who has died, also brings life out of death. Faith is the
locus of resurrection. Jesus’ own faith in the Father teaches us how to believe.
He states: “I said this for the people around me, that they might believe.”
An ancient homily proclaims:
“Having seen the divine work of the Lord Jesus, let us no longer doubt the
resurrection! Let Lazarus be to you like a mirror: contemplate yourself in him,
and believe in new life” (Pseudo-Hippolytus). But if faith is the locus of
resurrection, love is its power: Jesus
“loved Lazarus very much”, the text says, and this love became visible in Jesus’
weeping for his friend. Love integrates death into life and finds the meaning
of life in the fact that life is always a
gift of God that is freely given but that must also be embraced wholeheartedly
and thoroughly activated. And this, too, is part of the practice of resurrection that we can embody and give to one another.
To have faith in Jesus who is the Resurrection and the Life is to make love a
place where death is put at the service of life.
In the end, our fundamental problem is not how death can be avoided, but how to grasp the truth that, in death, God’s glory—which is nothing other than God’s love—can be manifested. Only a love that embraces the tragic nature of death leads to the passage from death to life. Jesus believes in love even when he comes face to face with a dead body. And the command Jesus gives to those present after calling Lazarus out of the tomb, is “Unbind him and let him go!” Lazarus is already moving, so the command must be for the benefit of the bystanders. The point is that those around Lazarus must let him go, because love does not hold the beloved back. The more love loves, the more it sets the beloved free. Jesus is teaching us here how to love. He is not bringing the dead Lazarus back to life for him to live in isolation, only for himself. Jesus is teaching us all how to love with freedom. To love is to set the beloved free. This episode shows us how even death cannot hold back love. The transition of the beloved Lazarus from death to life by Jesus’ intervention anticipates what Jesus will himself do shortly afterwards when, “having loved his own, he loved them to the end”. He willingly handed himself over to a death which cannot hold him back because the power of God’s love loosens the bonds of the underworld.
Photograph by Brother Brian. Today's homily by Father Simeon.
