Lazarus received a small taste of the Spirit of Christ dwelling in him. I don’t believe it was by chance that Jesus raising someone from the tomb in front of a large crowd of witnesses happened to be someone he knew well. Our Lord was friends with Martha, Mary, and their brother Lazarus. Thus, it’s fair to assume that the first open instance of Jesus raising someone from the grave in John’s Gospel was intentionally a person close to him.
As friends, Lazarus possessed this Spirit of Christ by way of inviting Jesus into his home, conversing with the Lord, enjoying his company, talking about late winter snowstorms and how much they hate them, and getting to know the Lord intimately. And, of course, there was Mary, the sister of Lazarus, who anointed the feet of the Lord with perfumed oil, and wiping it down with her hair. A very intimate action. This family was very close with Jesus.
So, when St. Paul writes in Romans, “If Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the spirit is alive because of righteousness…” in this case the righteousness of welcoming Christ into our homes each day, prepares our dead bodies one day for the Spirit of Christ to raise us up. Lazarus was ready for Jesus to do what he did in Bethany on that day, because he welcomed Jesus into his home. May we be ready also.
What our readings treat us to on this 5th Sunday of Lent, preparing us for the great and holy event in two weeks, is an evolution toward resurrection by way of God returning life back to dead spirits and dead bodies.
In today’s first reading from Ezekiel, we heard these words proclaimed: “I will open your graves and have you rise from them, and bring you back to the land of Israel.” This is God’s promise to the Israelites whose bodies are alive, but dead in spirit. Their spirits have been killed. But God’s promise here to the Israelites is a first step towards the raising of Lazarus. How so?
God is promising his people he will open the grave of Babylon where their dead spirits presently were, and he will uproot them all, and return them to the promised land where they long to be. By being captives in Babylon, even though their bodies are alive, their spirits are dead. Have you ever felt like your spirit was dead? There are moments when we go through that. That’s the deadness of all the Israelites in Babylonian captivity. So, their returning to the land God gave them is, for them, a form of being raised from the dead.
When they were conquered and overtaken by the devil, by the Babylonians, and removed from their God-given land, and the U-Haul truck stopped in Babylon – this is where we get off for the next 70 years – they were dead. Their spirits were dead. And God said, “I’m going to bring your spirit back to life by opening the grave of Babylon and return you to Jerusalem.” This is form of resuscitation number one, part of the evolution toward resurrection in the Scriptures.
Form of resuscitation number two, which we heard in today’s Gospel, evolves from dead spirits in bodies that are alive, to real death, death in the body. It is no longer about returning people to their land, God-given or not. Opening graves now advances to literally opening a grave- “Take away the stone,” Jesus says.
Whereas God returned thousands of Hebrews to the holy land, away from the dead land of Babylon, here we have one man and two distraught sisters, the one man literally dead in body. But what Jesus does with the one man’s dead body is far greater than God awakening the spirits of thousands in Babylon.
The evolution toward resurrection with Lazarus is not simply about moving a group of people from one place to another, amazing as that can be. It’s about one man’s dead body in a tomb for 4 days, calling his spirit back into his body, and handing him back to his sisters. “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?” In an instant, tears of sorrow become tears of joy. The joy of the Israelites returning to Jerusalem and all the holy cities and towns that make up the promised land, as great as it was, their joy was a blip on a screen when compared to the joy of Martha and Mary, just two people.
In Ezekiel, God revealed his power to remove a people from one physical place to another, opening the graves of dead spirits in alive bodies. In John, Jesus reveals his power over the permanent death, death in the body.
But we know, as good as Mary and Martha had it with the return of their brother whom they loved, it’s still just another step in the evolution toward resurrection. Lazarus is only resuscitation number two in Scripture, greater than number one found in Ezekiel. Lazarus, we know, will die again. Thus, what happened with Lazarus, as powerful as it was, was not even close to being good enough for God. There’s a third step in the evolution of resurrection.
God’s love for us is not halfway stuff. Halfway can define human ways of love at times. But with the Lord, it’s either the ultimate good for us, or it’s nothing. Lazarus dying again is not the ultimate good. Resuscitation number two fails miserably in the end.
The next step in the evolution toward resurrection is for God to call a dead body back to life, out of a tomb, and create a new condition where that person will never die again, and extend that gift to the entire human race. And we’ll talk about that in two weeks.