The hope of the rich is that death is the end; the hope of the poor is that death is not the end!
Over the last three weeks we have listened to the stories in which the three disciples on the Mountain, the Samaritan woman, the blind beggar and now the sisters of Lazarus, Martha and Mary, encounter the presence of Our Lord. We have also seen how Our Lord transfigures the desert, sinners, the blind and how he tranfigures thirst, water and light into symbols of who Our Lord is and what he is doing. Today, we consider how Our Lord transfigures the reality of death.
Many of us are a bit shocked by Jesus’ seemingly flippant way of dealing with the approaching death of his friend, Lazarus. He seems to purposively delay going to him and only arrives after Lazarus has been dead for four days!
So the sisters sent word to him saying, “Master, the one you love is ill.”
When Jesus heard this he said, “This illness is not to end in death,
but is for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”
Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when he heard that he was ill, he remained for two days in the place where he was.
The whole story seems to be haunted by death for both the disciples and Jesus knew that to go back into Judaea was to court death. As John relates:
Then after this he said to his disciples, “Let us go back to Judea.”
The disciples said to him, “Rabbi, the Jews were just trying to stone you,
and you want to go back there?”
Hence, the statement of Thomas who echoes this theme of death: ’So Thomas, called Didymus, said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go to die with him.”
What now unfolds is how Jesus reacts to death in contrast to all those around him and it is summarised by one of the great I am sayings of Jesus when he says: “I am the resurrection and the life.” For when Jesus says ‘I am the bread of life’, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’, ‘I am the light of the World’ and ‘I am the resurrection and the life’ he is using the divine name revealed to Moses in Exodus 3:14:
God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: 'I AM has sent me to you.'"
In other words, Jesus is stating categorically that he is God! He has a view of death that only God can have, a view that says death should not be the end of the story of Lazarus or of any human being. For Our Lord Jesus who with a divine eye and a profound divine sigh expresses in his weeping and deeply disturbed reation to the death of Lazarus that death and the corruption of death was not what God wanted for his beloved creatures made in his image.
When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who had come with her weeping,
he became perturbed and deeply troubled, and said, “Where have you laid him?”
They said to him, “Sir, come and see.” And Jesus wept.
Indeed, death and the corruption of death was worse than leprosy, blindness, deafness, dumbness or being paralysed, crippled or sick all of which Our Lord had healed before the he called out Lazarus from the tomb. All his miracles led to this moment, a moment Our Lord described as one that would manifest the glory of God. For the glory of God was manifested with the raising of Lazarus which it too was a sign and a pointer to Our Lord’s greatest work, the Resurrection! Truly, the Glory of God was manifested in all its glory at Easter. For the Glory of God is a man fully alive and one cannot get more fully alive than the one who was crucified unto death and rose from the dead in a state beyond even that of Lazarus’s resuscitation!
Now the discussion with Martha reveals that she knows he could have saved Lazarus but she still believes something more is possible but is not quite clear what this more could be. As she says:
“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you.”
When Jesus says: “Your brother will rise.” Martha does believe in the General resurrection of the dead at the end of time and so believes that Lazarus will rise again when she says in reply: “I know he will rise, in the resurrection on the last day.” But Jesus makes clear that it is in him and through him that the resurrection will happen and it begins not at the end of time but here and now him such that he calls her to a personal belief in him:
“I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” She said to him, “Yes, Lord. I have come to believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world.”
Martha is on the verge of both the new and fuller faith in his divine personhood but she is not quite there yet with regards to his divine power to raise even the dead. So with a sigh he goes to where Lazarus lies in the tomb. Here he meets Mary and she is alarmed when he asks them to roll away the stone that covers the tomb for the stench will be great after 4 days. The people who gather complain that he did not come in time to save Lazarus and all around Jesus is that doubt that haunts humanity about death. It is then that Jesus shows the power of who he is and the power of his word even over the dead when he says: “Lazarus, come out!”
We as mortal beings may be haunted by death but Jesus is not for he knows the truth of death and the corruption of death that Original Sin brought to humanity and he also knows what lies on the other side of the curtain of death that for us seems so final. He is truly the resurrection and the life that death does not overcome and he is about to prove this in an amazing way by first raising Lazarus from the dead and then at Easter when he rises from the dead after dying and descending among the dead.
Jesus, as the Light of the world, reveals the truth about death and the fear of death that haunts the disciples of Jesus, the sisters Mary and Martha and the crowd at the death of Lazarus. He is going to lead them into the light of the greatest hope for all mankind, namely, that death is not the end of all our lives or our stories for there is now the awesome and wondrous future for each of us who harken to his call to follow him in his life, ministry, passion and death to the glory of Easter where there shines out the eternal life and wondrous future of the glorified body of the Resurrection. All of us are haunted by death but it is Christ that reveals that death is not annihilation or oblivion but rather a door, a curtain, a veil on the other side of which Jesus will stand as conqueror, liberator, the Good Shepherd and Judge who calls and leads his flock out of the valley of death into the kingdom of summer that is eternal life. Here lies that eternal victory over death that is the hope of the poor, repentant sinners and the beatitudes.
Yet many today believe that death is the end, a form of annihilation or oblivion but Christ shows this is a lie, a devilish lie. Now why do so many hope that death is oblivion or annihilation?
It is because many of the rich and the many who are wicked hope in oblivion where they escape paying the price for their sins. This is why they hope that death is annihilation or oblivion for then they can escape justice for their wickedness. Indeed, many today, even Catholics, do not want funerals to refer to the doctrine of divine judgment when every soul must stand before God to give an account of their lives. If they did this would mean harkening to the call to repentance and to a change of life, here and now before it was too late! But being attached to wealth or to a sinful life style they do not want to give these up but hope that death is final. Indeed, they hope in and hope for a death to be one of annihilation and oblivion. For, as it turns out, the greatest fear in human beings is not death but rather the last Judgment and the reality of Hell! The greatest fear of the wicked, the greatest fear of unrepentant sinners and the godless is that there is a reckoning beyond the grave that they cannot escape!
The raising of Lazarus prepares us for the resurrection of Jesus which is to be of a higher order altogether. It is a higher order that promises us all a resurrection, a resurrection that begins here and now! A physical resurrection that follows on from a moral and spiritual resurrection for it is the good news that Sinners can become saints. It is also reveals the secret and divine rhythm that underpins our lives from the time we are baptised. A rhythm that is the three-fold heart beat of the Sacred Heart that embraces all repentant hearts. What is this divine three-fold heart beat but life-death-resurrection. A divine rhythm that helps us never to give up on God’s mercy even when we fall for every failure and every fall can be a sacrament of moral, spiritual and physical resurrection!
It is again why the poor and the just, who suffer in this world, hope that death is not the end; whilst the rich and the powerful, who do all the oppressing, hope death is the end!
