Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year A
Life is like a box of chocolates, it is bitter sweet. When someone we know dies, particularly someone close to us whom we love, there is an emptiness and seemingly inconsolable sorrow. In our grief we feel our whole world is shifted. At the loss of his wife, C.S. Lewis wrote, ‘Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.’ We loved them, we valued their presence, but their death makes things seem hopelessly lost. How do we move on? What hope have we in our darkness? What about my own death? Have I thought about that? All I have set out to achieve in this life, my motivation for being, all that I accomplish in this life seems swallowed up by death.
We are haunted by death and in parts of our culture we tend to shy away from this reality. But it must be faced if we are to live our life authentically. We fear death. In the Gospel, Jesus hears that his beloved friend is dying, and yet he does not go to be with Lazarus in those precious final moments. Why is this the case? So that he can reawaken Lazarus from the dead as a sign of the life ahead, a sign of the eternal reality with God which looks beyond death itself. Death, this last enemy, the depressing bane of our existence the sum of all our fears, the finality of our reality. Jesus wants to break through this pain, showing us not to fear even death, because it is not the end, it is just a sleep from which God will awaken us.
Martha and Mary cling to the relationship they held with their brother in this life, ‘Lord if only you were here my brother would not have died.’ Lazarus is really dead, and it seems final. It has already been a few days, so you can imagine Lazarus’ decomposing corpse. Christ’s response to this is, ‘I am the resurrection and the life.’ Like Martha we may believe that he will save us and raise us up in the fullness of time, but like Mary the distress of our loss can be overwhelming. Jesus witnesses this sorrow, the tragedy, the helplessness and pain of the human condition. Jesus experiences grief not just out of love for his dead friend, but also for those who are left behind and the heartbreak of the whole human experience. Jesus is confronting not just the human condition of Lazarus, but the death he himself is to face in the passion of the cross. Jesus weeps with those who mourn. God is not aloof from our pain. On the contrary, God enters into our suffering and anguish in the presence of death.
In our grief, we sometimes question our existence and our faith. What do we weep for when someone dies? The deceased? Ourselves? The pain of suffering? The fear of the unknown? The whole human experience is compressed in the event of death. Our greatest enemy is death and Christ has come to confront it. He wants us to know that there is more to life than death, and he will show us what that ‘more’ is at Easter. Lazarus is risen from the grave. The grave is not the end because Jesus has come to unbind and liberate us from death.
Fr William Loh, O.P. Chaplain for Monash University.
