The Fifth Sunday of Lent Ez 37:12-14; Ps 130; Rom 8:8-11; Jn 11:1-45
As we approach the climax of the Church’s liturgical year, which is the celebration of the life, Passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, also called the Paschal Mystery, the Scriptural readings on this Fifth Sunday of Lent set before us the theme of death and new life from different perspectives.
While we are familiar with the physical death of the body, so dramatically depicted in the Gospel account of the Lord’s raising of Lazarus from the tomb, Scripture teaches that there is another kind of death, a spiritual death, which threatens the believer and which so preoccupied the Apostle Paul. It is a struggle in which we are all involved. This fight has been likened to a battleground where the spirit and the flesh are engaged in constant conflict.
The exilic prophet Ezekiel offered the encouragement of a new beginning to the displaced people of Israel. They would indeed return from their enforced exile in Babylon and resume life in their homeland. Ezekiel wonderfully describes this homecoming as a resurrection from the dead. Almighty God’s infinite power would ensure that his people would ultimately triumph over this spiritual captivity and death in an alien land. By means of such striking language and the vision it presents, centuries before the coming of Christ, we can see how God gradually instructs and prepares his people for Christ’s victory over suffering and death, and his resurrection to a new and indestructible life on Easter Day.
John the Evangelist devotes an extended chapter to the raising of Lazarus. The story is dramatic and carefully crafted. Jesus was a personal friend to the family of Lazarus and had a deep affection for them, but now death had cast its long shadow and left the sisters, Martha and Mary, desolate and grief-stricken.
The deep emotion and inner turmoil felt by Christ in the face of death, the ancient enemy of humanity, fully underscores his human nature. When we personally suffer bereavement and are confronted with the mystery of death, we can draw much comfort and hope from the fact that the Son of God too was perplexed and profoundly affected at the death of a close friend.
The careful reader of the Fourth Gospel will note the ascending scale, as it were, of the miracles of Jesus – what John calls “signs”. He promises the Samaritan woman living water as opposed to ordinary water, and restores to full health a man who had been paralysed for 40 years. The multitude have their physical hunger appeased, but the Lord Jesus speaks of another kind of food which endures and which he alone can offer: the bread of life come down from heaven.
In the prologue to his Gospel, the Evangelist John declares that Jesus is the true light which gives light to every person, and we see this graphically realised in chapter 9, in the account of the man born blind who has his sight restored. Each of these signs performed by Christ reveals something important about him, who he is, and what he came on earth to do.
These signs reach their climax in the raising of the dead Lazarus, when the Son of God exercises his authority and power to break the stranglehold of death and mortality which from the very beginning have held humanity in their grip. “I am the resurrection and the life,” proclaims Jesus, as he stands by the tomb of Lazarus, being the life-giving God’s defiant cry in the face of corruption and decay. This is the greatest sign of the earthly Jesus and a pointer to a greater sign, quite beyond our understanding, when on Easter Day he would shatter once and for all the bonds of death, holding out to us believers the hope and vision of eternal life, a life no longer marked by limitation and suffering, but sharing fully in that glory which will be revealed.
The liturgy of Lent takes us on a journey, leading us ever deeper into the mystery of Christ. We are being taught afresh Sunday after Sunday the story of our faith and the wonderful work which God the Father has accomplished for us in Christ. While we listen and hear again the initiatives almighty God has taken on our behalf, we are at the same time being made aware of the truths about ourselves.
The tone of Lent is set with the story of Christ’s forty days of struggle and temptation by Satan in the wilderness, and this is a pointer to the kind of path which each follower of Christ must take, not only through Lent, but also on his or her lifelong journey.
As we draw near to the solemn celebration of Easter, the liturgy of this Sunday raises our minds and hearts to what this greatest of all feasts represents: the renewal of our faith in the risen Saviour who, in the words of the Apocalypse, holds the keys of life and death, and who will die no more.
The Rt Rev Michael G Campbell OSA is the Bishop of Lancaster. This is the sixth in our Lenten series written by bishops from across Britain
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