5th Sunday Lent A - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2014

Lazarus’s resuscitation from death, whatever else it did, at least undermined the certainty that death is absolute. But it gave no answers – simply shattered assumptions. Lazarus gave no press interview, said nothing. The point of the story, I think, is what Jesus claimed in his conversation with Martha, “I am the resurrection.” That’s odd.  “I am the resurrection!” What was he driving at? He went on to say, “Whoever believe in me, even if they die, will live; and whoever live and believe in me will never die.” Counter intuitive?

These claims do not faze us, apparently, because we have redefined death, even if a lot of our contemporaries have not. We do not see death as the end of life. Life and death are not opposites. They do not rule each other out. We see death simply as the end of stage one of life, and the necessary doorway to stage two, the details of which, however, we know little about, other than that the first stage sets us up for the second.

What did the resurrection mean to Jesus? He did not stop being Jesus. He did not stop being human. But he was different. He returned to the Father.  Somehow, his humanity was divinised, without his ceasing to be human – as the Creed quaintly expresses it, “He is seated at the right hand of the Father.”

Jesus is the resurrection. I am not. You are not. Mary, his mother, is not. St Peter is not.  But Mary and Peter, you and I, and the whole communion of saints, somehow share in the unique resurrection of Jesus. John’s Gospel talks about abiding in him – he is us, we in him – sharing his life. The process started with Baptism, when we were christened/Christed. We became, as the Epistle of Peter put it, sharers in the divine nature. What on earth does that mean?

It is the nature of God to love. God is love. But love is relationship. Loving is relating. It takes two, at least, to love. In God, Father loves Son; and Son loves Father. But it does not stop there. In loving each other, they also love everything that is. They love you and me, mum and dad, Mary, St Peter, and the whole communion of saints. Apparently, they also love the whole created world.

It is precisely to this activity of loving that Jesus is referring when he says, “Whoever believe in me will never die.” By believing, Jesus does not mean simply being prepared to tick all the boxes listed in the Creed. In John’s Gospel, believing means trusting in, entrusting ourselves to, surrendering to, giving ourselves completely to…  It is the sort of believing in each other that goes on between husbands and wives who really love each other.

When we truly believe, since we have already been Christed at baptism [and so are somehow already in Christ, the risen one], we surrender to the dance of love going on within the mystery that is God. Our loving, even now, is our sharing in the life, in the living, of God. Jesus referred to it elsewhere as eternal life. Eternal life is the life proper to God.  It is our reality, too - now. 

In stage one of life, our loving allows of more or less. If our surrender to God grows deeper across life, our loving becomes increasingly God-like – in breadth and in intensity. We see people differently. As Jesus says, we can learn to love our enemies. We can develop what some mystics call non-dual thinking, non-dual seeing. We learn to prescind from us/them, friend/enemy, right/wrong, good/bad, male/female – and not just by deliberate choice but spontaneously. Without losing our capacity to discern and to choose wisely, he shares with us, apparently, the freedom to love anyone, and recognise that we are at home with everyone.

I would love to be there. Time is running out. I look forward to further stretching in stage two, beyond the doorway of death.