Fifth Sunday of Lent

I came across a saying recently that struck me, ‘A friend is God’s way of saying that he doesn’t want us to go through life on our own’. We all need good and faithful friends, reliable companions on the journey of life. Jesus was no exception in that regard. It is said in today’s gospel reading that Jesus ‘loved Martha and her sister (Mary) and Lazarus’. They were his friends and he was their friend. When Lazarus took seriously ill, it was only natural for the two sisters to get word to Jesus to come quickly. The message they sent him was very simply expressed, ‘Lord, the man you love is ill’. When those whom we love are ill, it impacts us greatly. We want to be with them, and if we can’t be with them, we pray for them and keep them in our minds and hearts. If that person we love dies, our hearts break. Any of us over a certain age will have known such heartbreak.

When the sisters sent for Jesus, he delayed in coming even though he loved Lazarus. During the delay, Lazarus died. The Lord’s timing must have seemed strange to Martha and Mary. Why didn’t he come sooner? As Martha said to him, ‘If you had been here, my brother would not have died’. Sometimes the Lord’s timing can seem strange to us. We know that he loves our loved ones even more than we do, and, yet, he lets them die. We can struggle to reconcile the Lord’s love for us with the death of our loved one, especially if that death is sudden, coming at a young age or in circumstances that are tragic. Yet, somehow, as people of faith we have to keep on trusting in the Lord. As Martha went on to say to Jesus, ‘I know that, even now, God will grant you whatever you ask of him’ – ‘even now’, even in these circumstances that seem to make little sense from a human point of view. There are times in our lives when we all need to say, ‘Even now, I believe. Help my unbelief’.

When he arrived, Jesus entered fully into the grief of Martha and Mary. There was no attempt on his part to avoid the reality of death. As he said to his disciples, ‘Lazarus is dead’. It is said of Jesus that at the sight of Mary’s tears, he himself wept, and ‘in great distress, with a sigh that came straight from the heart’, he asked, ‘Where have you put him?’ The Lord weeps with those who weep. He weeps with us as we grieve the death of our loved ones. He enters with us into that valley of darkness. He is there as the good shepherd who cares for his flock. The people standing by who saw Jesus weep said, ‘See how much he loved him’. Jesus loves each one of us with the same love he loved Lazarus, Martha and Mary. He has befriended us, just as he befriended this family. He has laid down his life for us, and as he goes on to say in this gospel of John, ‘no one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends’.

Jesus goes on to do something extraordinary for this particular friend, Lazarus, calling him from death back into life, ‘Lazarus, come forth’. There are very few passages in the gospels where Jesus raises the dead. We know that we will never have that experience of Jesus returning our loved ones to the life they lived before they died. Yet, Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead not primarily for Lazarus’s sake. One day Lazarus would die again. He did so for all our sakes. Jesus was showing us that God’s loving power at work in his life is stronger than the power of death. That is good news for us all. This is the message he gave to Martha before going on to raise Lazarus from the dead. He said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die’. In other words, the Lord’s friendship of us and our response to his friendship in faith creates a bond between him and us that death will not destroy. Through our friendship with the Lord, we already share in his life, a life over which death has no power. Beyond the moment of our physical death, we will come to share even more fully in the Lord’s risen life, and in that sense we will never die.

Jesus came that we may have life and have it to the full, by offering us his friendship and drawing us into a relationship of love with him so that we can begin to live even now with his own life and then live with this live fully beyond death. This was the purpose of Jesus’ life, and the purpose of our lives, the goal of our lives, is to surrender to this wonderful purpose of the Lord for us. The Lord keeps calling us, as he called Lazarus, to come out, to come out into the light of his presence, so that his wonderful purpose for our lives can come to pass.

Monday, Fifth Week of Lent

It is always worth reflecting on how Jesus is portrayed as relating to people in the gospels, especially to what the prophet Isaiah calls the ‘crushed reed’ and the ‘smouldering wick’. In today’s gospel reading a woman allegedly caught in the act of adultery is brought before Jesus by the religious authorities. All they have on their mind is condemnation, in accordance with their interpretation of the Law of God. Their question to Jesus is, ‘What have you to say?’ Initially, he has nothing to say. Instead, he bends down and writes on the ground. In certain situations, silence can be the best response to a question, especially an insincere one. The question of the religious leaders was more of a trick question. They were using the woman to get Jesus to say something they could use against him. All the religious leaders could do before Jesus’ silence was to persist with their question. Eventually Jesus responded. However, whereas their question focused on the woman, Jesus’ response focused on his questioners, ‘If there is any one of you who has not sinned, let him be the first to throw a stone at her’. The woman may have sinned, but her accusers were also sinners, their most recent sin being using the woman to get at Jesus. Once the woman’s accusers departed, Jesus now looks at her for the first time and asks her a question she could answer with ease, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’ Jesus’ final words to her says a great deal about how he relates to us all, ‘Neither do I condemn you, go away and don’t sin any more’. Jesus, now risen Lord, is not in the business of condemning us. He came into the world so that we may have life and have it to the full. He is always calling us, as he called the woman, to grow more into the fully alive person God desires us to be, alive with Jesus’ own love. According to Saint Paul, our ultimate destiny is ‘to be conformed to the image of his (God’s) Son’. Here and now the Lord can help us to grow into his image through the power of the Holy Spirit.