5th Sunday Lent A - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2020

Faithful to his purpose in writing his Gospel, the author of the Gospel of John drew on an incident from the life of Jesus, his raising of Lazarus, and used it to lead his readers to believe that “Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God”. His hope was that, through believing in it, they would have "life in his name”.

Today's story gave Jesus the opportunity to claim, “I am the resurrection. If anyone believes in me, even though he dies, he will live, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die”. Lazarus fitted the first category: he believed and died. Martha fitted the second category: she was still alive and believed. They would both experience the same outcome: Lazarus would live; Martha would never die. The crucial issue in order to experience life was that they believe in him, believe in his Father.

The Gospel of John has Jesus speak often of “believing”. Sometimes the word simply has the sense of agreeing with a statement — assenting, for example, to the things listed in the Creed. More often, however, the word has the sense of “believing into” [which is hardly English] and carries quite a different connotation. “Believing into” is more like relating to another, trusting the other or, even better, entrusting oneself to another, and is not all that different from loving. That is the possibility that Jesus holds out to believers.

Fairly obviously, when Jesus spoke about resurrection and about life, he was not talking about realities whose meaning was clearly obvious. Life with Jesus, life with the Father, wonderfully exceed our capacity to understand. In inviting us to believe in him, Jesus was inviting people, as he said elsewhere, to ask, to search, to knock — to draw closer to mystery but never to exhaust it or to sum it up neatly.  Our asking, searching, knocking draw us into the realm that is understood more with metaphorical insight than with scientific accuracy. Yet our relationship with Jesus grows and goes deeper — and remains mystery, an ever more fascinating mystery.

A comment in Luke’s Gospel about Mary gives us something of an entry into the process of Mary’s believing into God, believing into Jesus. It was a simple observation but amazingly wise. Luke wrote, “Mary treasured these things and pondered them in her heart”. Firstly, Mary “treasured” her experience — she noted it, was alert to it, respected it, neither denying it nor simply taking it for granted. As well, she “pondered” it. And she pondered it inevitably with a spirit saturated in the wisdom of her people. What she found was an ever clearer sense of God, present in life, in her life — hidden … but still discernible.

As her life unfolded, Mary’s journey of believing into her son became more challenging. Jesus left home; he acted as he had never acted before; he seemed to become a different person from the one she had known as a child — until he was eventually arrested, tortured and murdered as an enemy of the State. There was so much to “ponder”. Perhaps she did not find answers to her questions; her sense of the mystery of Jesus needed regular fine-tuning — yet her confidence in him did not falter. She came to know him as never before; her relationship with him grew deeper and richer; and her trust in him, even in the face of unthinkable challenges, became stronger.

In our case the ability to entrust ourselves to Jesus in answer to his invitation calls for personal experience of him, and not just any experience, but experience reflected on and pondered. Such pondering calls for time, quiet time. With the ever-present threat of contracting or spreading the corona virus, and the insistent urging to “stay at home”, time on our hands will become a new experience for many of us, and an unexpected opportunity to devote previously scarce time to quiet, reflective prayer.

If you would appreciate help with such praying, be sure to contact Fr Paddy or myself. We would love to walk beside you on the journey as best we can.