These three passages coincide with the Scrutinies and are meant to instruct those who are preparing for Baptism as well as to remind those already baptised. During the Scrutinies, the Elect are prayed over, laid hands on and exorcised. This Sunday they will receive the “Our Father” which they will subsequently recite publicly with the congregation for the first time at the Easter Vigil where they will be baptised. (In the past, the Elect would be dismissed after the Scrutinies and so it makes sense that they will recite it publicly with congregation at the Easter Vigil).
This Sunday’s Gospel centres on matters vital to the meaning of human existence—life and death. The narrative is straightforward. Lazarus, a close friend of Jesus had been unwell. Even though the sisters of the sick man made an appeal for Jesus to come and visit him, the Lord basically tarried in His response. By the time Jesus made His way to visit Lazarus, he had already been in the tomb for four days. The shortest verse in the Gospel consists of these two words that simply revealed the depth of Christ’s humanity: Jesus wept. Such was the Lord’s love for His friend.
The Evangelist John uses the untimely demise of Lazarus to highlight that Jesus is the Lord who has power over death. The Lord could have healed Lazarus if He had immediately rushed to visit him or better still, from a distance, command with merely a word, as He did with the Royal Official’s dying son in Capernaum. As this marks the last of the seven signs in John’s Gospel, God’s glory is to be manifested through the death of Lazarus. The symbolism is profound as highlighted in the ensuing dialogue between Jesus and Martha. Jesus used one of the seven “I AM” statements when He said, “I AM the Resurrection and the Life”. The connexion between death and the Resurrection is found in the Person of Jesus Christ.
What does it mean for us?
We are mesmerised in every instance of death and subsequent returning to life because we are unnerved by the absoluteness of death. Here today, gone tomorrow. Here now, gone later. What makes it more frightening is NOT that nobody has peeled back the curtain of death. In fact, Christianity believes that Christ underwent death but He came back victorious in the resurrection. The death and the resurrection of Jesus signalled that life is not ended when we breathe our last here on earth.
The dilemma we face can be gleaned from the manner we behave beginning with the reaction towards the pandemic to the current controversy concerning gender. Our problem merely reflects the confusion we have with regard to death and the beyond. What do I mean by that?
The daughter of the Jairus was raised from the dead. The son of the widow of Nain was brought back to life. Today Lazarus is set free from the pangs of death. But they are not the fullness of life promised by the Death and Resurrection of Christ. Everyone who has ever been resuscitated will have to undergo death once again.
While Lazarus may have lived to a ripe old age and the Gospel does not record it, the point is he died again. That is why the pivotal message of the Gospel today is centred on the dialogue between Christ and Martha. Jesus said: “I am the resurrection and the life. If anyone believes in me, even though he dies, he will live and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this”? Martha replied, “Yes, Lord, I have come to believe that you are the Christ, the one who was to come into the world”. This act of faith carries with it a belief that death here on earth is not the final chapter because we have been created for the Resurrection.
Christ died in order that we might be able to rise in Him. As indicated above, our struggle or the dilemma today is with the possibility of life after death. The contemporary conception of life and its meaning is greatly steeped in a materialism that makes us forget the spiritual side of our existence. Life here on earth does not only have an expiration date; it is also limited. We tend to calculate life in terms of years. For example, the measure that of a good life is living to a ripe old age. Preferably the person should die in mentis compos meaning that he or she should breathe the last in relative mental composure. But if one were to convert those years into breaths, how many million breaths do we have? Every passing minute we would have whittled down our fixed number of breaths and counting down. We are breathing to die.
It is precisely because life is limited that it must be contextualised with eternity. We are created for the eternal which makes everything we do here important. Firstly in order to enter eternal life we need to die. Not merely as a price for our sins but rather because earthly existence is not meant to be eternal. Secondly, if there were no Resurrection, we will be tempted and driven to squeeze all “meanings” into this temporal time-frame. Without the Resurrection, the cry for meaning will compel truth to be manufactured to fit the situation.[1] As a result, if we were unable to fulfil our desires and dreams, without the possibility of the Resurrection, we would be abject failures.[2] Thirdly, in terms of sins, since we are so conscious of our carbon footprint, we ought to leave as small a sinful footprint as possible so that our transition from life here on earth to life with Christ would be swift. As the 2nd Reading reminds us, we live according to the Spirit and not according to the flesh. The focus of a life in the Spirit is hinged on the grace of interior freedom from sin right up to the end where we enter into the beatitude of pure joy.
In conclusion, the raising of Lazarus was simply a resuscitation. Whilst spectacular, nevertheless, it was merely an appetiser to the powerful reality of the Resurrection. Martha’s confession clarified and showed that the guarantee of life everlasting is founded on faith in Jesus Christ. Throughout these Scrutinies, the Elect are invited to embrace the faith of the Samaritan woman, the faith of the man blind from birth and now in the person of Martha, together with the Elect, each one is invited to place his or her confidence in Christ who alone can lead us to the immortality promised in the Resurrection.
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[1] For example, a man who feels like a woman will mean that we must find a category to describe this and therefore that becomes the truth. There is a development of calling a pregnant woman who has transitioned into a “man” a “sea-horse dad” because in nature it is the male seahorses that give birth. The lengthening alphabets surround the LGBTQIA++ is an example of how much that spectrum needs to be widened in order to accommodate “truths”. No longer will meaning be derived from truth/reality but our meaning is the determinant of truth.
[2] A person might live a meaningless life. For example, someone “mentally disabled” from birth. What is his worth? Nothing if we use “ability” as a measure of meaning. He should not exist but because there is the Resurrection, the final reconciliation is that God in eternity can make up for what that person lacked in this lifetime.
