5th Sunday Lent A

See Commentary on John 11:1-45

Homily 1 – 2005 

Today’s story is a great story: Jesus brings a friend back to life, and then there are the other “not-much-more-than” asides that are deeply attractive and thought provoking: Jesus loved, Jesus wept, the disciples and Jesus under constant threat of death.

John uses the story primarily as a symbol (as he has done over the past two Sundays): Lazarus brought to life is symbol of the disciple brought to life.  But in Lazarus’ case it was simply back to what had previously been, albeit through the word of Jesus.  In our case the possibility is what John calls eternal life: those who believe in me will live, those who live and believe in me will never die - an outcome that is not simply worked by Jesus but consists essentially in sharing the life of Jesus: I am the resurrection and the life, with the consequence, as Paul said in the first Reading, that we belong to Christ, that Christ is in us and that the spirit of Christ is living in us.

What was the Spirit that animated Christ? what was the passion in Jesus’ depths? the vision that inexorably drew him onwards? the life that throbbed in him? the fire in his belly? I suppose that it is something that we shall never fully understand, but it seems to me that Jesus’ vision of his God was of a Father who delighted in him, of a God who loved the world so much and with such unshakeable determination.

Jesus’ vision of our world was of a world where people were in touch with and respected their own dignity and the dignity of every person and interacted accordingly in justice, compassion, profound respect and ready forgiveness.  Jesus believed in and hoped in the possibility of such a world.  He was not crushed by the depressing reality of injustice, oppression, vindictiveness, violence, fear and untruth.  He met the world’s reality with love – irrepressible love, determined to absorb the world’s evil by the only response that can absorb it: hope, forgiveness and love.  That is the Spirit that can animate us.  This is the life that Jesus offers us. 

Anything else is death: existing without meaning, existing without purpose, in frantic need of distraction, mindlessly addicted, alienated and lonely, distrusting of others, fearful of ourselves. bitter and unforgiving – not just dead but four days dead (as Martha said!) – awful!

To the extent that we are drawn by the vision of Jesus that gives meaning, sustained by the hope of Jesus that empowers action, moved by the love of Jesus that alone counters the sin of the world, we become alive.  He is indeed the resurrection and the life; and our own experience confirms that those who believe in him are truly alive with a life that transcends death.  Everyone who lives in me, who believes in me, will never die. 

Homily 2 - 2008

This is the last of Jesus’ signs that John lines up for us in his Gospel.  As a sign, it is not so much the story in itself that matters (it leaves lots of loose ends), but what it points to.  John uses it to redefine the meaning of death.

For most of Jesus’ contemporaries, death was the end.  If there was anything afterwards, it was not more than a dismal half-life of shadows.  Some believed in resurrection – but for them resurrection was more a vindication of the nation as a nation than a personal, individualised experience.  Martha probably believed that – but it was little consolation.

For many of our contemporaries and our friends, death is simply death, and that is all there is to it.  It’s the end.  They have their little fantasies, but they don’t really believe them.  Which means that love is only for this world; generosity, trust, the pursuit of integrity and wisdom are only for this world.

For me, that would knock the stuffing out of living.  It would make life and growth at best like a half-baked cake, at worst meaningless, and perhaps desperate.

Many people prefer to live as though death wasn’t.  They can’t bring themselves to talk about it, even to mention the word.  But, paradoxically, when they do that, it haunts them.  Unfortunately, in our present world, rather than come to terms with the inevitability of their own deaths and put them into a meaningful context, whole nations will kill others.  “Get them before they get us!” even if it calls for torture and the wholesale slaughter of innocent civilians.

Jesus has shown us that death, like birth, is just another transition.  Death is not final, any more than birth is final.  Values like love, truth, integrity and wisdom are transcendent; they “go beyond”.  They shape us.  They make us who we are.  They make us who we shall be.  Our strivings and our struggles to grow, to love, to trust and to be authentic are anything but meaningless.  They are the building blocks of life to the full.

Homily 3 – 2011 

A couple of weeks ago I was travelling along the highway here to Ballarat.  I had netting over the radiator air-intake of my car in case I ran into locusts.  In fact there were no locusts, but swarms of white butterflies instead.  I started thinking.

The last time you see it, a caterpillar is spinning a cocoon around itself.  But what comes out of the cocoon is a butterfly.  What went on in the darkness of the cocoon? If the caterpillar was Fred, was the butterfly still Fred? Or did Fred the caterpillar die? and then the butterfly was born? Or was Fred the caterpillar somehow transformed – still Fred, yet not Fred? the same, but not the same?

Whatever the biological process, white butterflies can be a nuisance [especially if you’re trying to grow cauliflowers].  But, prescinding from that, they can also be symbols – symbols of resurrection.

In today’s Gospel story, Lazarus’s experience was not resurrection.  It was more a case of resuscitation.  He wasn’t transformed.  He might have come out scratching his head, but he didn’t come out of the tomb a butterfly, as it were.  Like the caterpillar and the butterfly, Lazarus’s experience can serve, too, as a symbol of resurrection.  He died.  But death was not the end.  Neither the transformation of a caterpillar nor the return to normal life of Lazarus is resurrection.  They just open our minds to possibilities, and set us wondering.

I am struck by Jesus’ statement to Martha in today’s Gospel: I am the resurrection and the life – not – “I shall rise; I shall live”; not  “I shall make you rise; I shall make you live” – but I am it: I am the resurrection; I am the life.

Through resurrection, we shall not so much be transformed like Christ, but transformed into Christ, and, somehow, become one with him.  Now, Jesus will make it happen [or, perhaps, the Father, in and through Jesus, will make it happen].  But we need to be part of the process, too.

Jesus uses the word to believe in to describe our co-operation.  When we say the Creed in a few minutes time, we’ll say: We believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord…  The believing that Jesus talks about is more than that.  It is not just believing a fact.  It means a profound psychological and spiritual engagement.  Believing in him means trusting him – totally.  It involves trusting his vision, his values and his life-style.  It involves entrusting – entrusting myself, totally.  It involves relationship, total openness and total intimacy.

To me, this suggests a third symbol of resurrection and of transformation – and that is a marriage relationship.  As spouses learn to trust each other, and to entrust themselves to each other, they become increasingly one, increasingly transformed, increasingly alive with, and through, each other’s life.

Through resurrection, we become Christed, christened.  We celebrated its beginning at our baptism.  The process is already under way.

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.

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.

Homily 6 - 2023 

I find it wonderfully encouraging to be reminded of just how special his friends were to Jesus. One of the things that struck me in today’s Gospel Reading was the author’s comment: “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus”, and his observation how, when Jesus saw the tears of Martha and Mary at their brother Lazarus’s tomb, he even started weeping himself — prompting the bystanders to remark, “See how much he loved him”. I think it was the only occasion in all four Gospels where we read that Jesus wept.

Jesus’ openness to friends, male and female, put me in mind of the conclusion of a psychological survey taken many year’s back somewhere n the United States, that very few men have genuine male friends — mates, brothers and cousins, and acquaintances, yes; but not close friends.

Recently I read the comment of an American priest whose ideas I find I generally agree with. He was writing about the issue that many of us worry about — the perplexing drop in numbers of people coming regularly to Mass. His view was this: “Faith is not easy today for any of us. To have real faith, an actual belief in God, requires something more than simply continuing to roll with the flow of our own particular faith communities. I say this because it is becoming clearer that today it is much easier to have faith in Christianity — in Jesus’ moral teaching, in a code of ethics, in God’s call for justice, in an ideology of Christianity, and even in the value of gathering for worship, than it is to have a personal and real relationship to God.”

I think that Pope Francis would agree with him. He raised this issue recently when he was talking to group of young people in Rome. He was saying while many Catholics are quite comfortable in their faith and continue coming regularly to Mass, he lamented [and these are his words]: “although they recite prayers and perform works of piety, they never really engage in dialogue with the Lord.”

Today’s Gospel started me wondering how many Catholics could class Jesus as a genuine friend, how many ready to “really engage in dialogue with the Lord” — indeed, how many even want to.