5th Sunday of Lent

Fifth Sunday of Lent

We can look at this Gospel on so many different levels. What we see is the deep love that Jesus had for his friends. It is a story of looking at the deep humility of Jesus and also the glory of God shining through to rise from the dead.

We see this man Lazarus who was sick the translation from the Greek presupposes that he was feeble and if we were to translate it into literal English it would say “ Who was disabled” He is deeply loved by both his sisters and Jesus. IT is the first time that we hear in the Gospel of John that Jesus had love for individual people. It is not the first time that we meet this family. In Luke’s Gospel Jesus visits the family and we meet these two unmarried women looking after Lazarus.  When Jesus learns and arrives at their family house we see this deep emotion of Jesus. He shows us quite clearly the deep emotion that we all have when someone who we love dearly dies. There seems to be a deep void that encounters our Lord. He is usually so stable and serene in his dealings with people.

The question is because Jesus is usually so measured what has happened here does he get in touch with his deepest pain and feel the pain of weakness and death. But what we do see is that his repose is a real human response of love for a friend who is dead.

Then we get the most wonderful miracle of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead for the Jewish authorities it was the last of a long line of things that Jesus had done and now they decided to find a way to put Jesus must die. But what was Jesus doing? He had showed his humanity and now with the raising of his friend we see the Glory of God shining through.  Because of this many believed that Jesus was the Christ.

We can see that this Gospel can be seen on so many different levels. We can notice and wonder at the complete love that Jesus has for his Friend and how he wept for his friend when he died.  Through this he also shows us the divinity and the Glory of God shining through so that others may believe.

The Gospel also teaches us something of ourselves too.  If we look symbolically at this Gospel we can see ourselves.  We could take Lazarus as we are not also caught up in death and a culture of death:  Are dead to some of those things that drag us down.  We are often caught up in this culture of death and sometimes we are not even aware of it, by our negativity to change, our prejudices and our hang ups our lack of charity towards others.

These shadow areas are our tombs where the light of Christ does not come in. And then we are commanded to rise again in love. Our response needs to be positive and sometimes we need to allow others to unbound our bandages that do not allow us to move freely.  And yet we live in fear of change, of losing power and control of a situation and then the fear to trust and let go. I am sure that actually it is a mixture of all of these things.

What Jesus wants is that we rise and become fully alive. He calls us out of the tomb that we have in ourselves as we heard in the first reading from Ezekiel “ I am going to open your tombs and raise you up from your tombs”

We can rise let go of the fear and live in the light of the Glory of God as we draw ever closer to the Great Feast of Easter we need to draw closer to the mystery of what it means to be a Catholic as so I urge you to come to the Tridium Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter day to really experience of the mystery of God’s love.