Lent Day 19

Lazarus, Come Out!

Jesus raises three people from the dead in the Gospel stories: the daughter of Jairus, the son of the widow of Naim, and Lazarus. In the symbolic language of the Gospels, these physical resuscitations are evocative of spiritual raisings from sin to spiritual health.

St. Augustine says that the young girl, who dies inside her house, symbolizes the sin that takes place in our thoughts and our hearts but that has not yet borne fruit in action. The son of the widow of Naim, carried to the gate of the house, represents sin that has expressed itself concretely in action. This dead man is raised and given back to his mother, who stands for the Church.

Thirdly, and most drastically, we have the case of Lazarus. He stands for the worst kind of moral/spiritual corruption: sin that has been expressed in the world and become embedded in evil custom and habit. This is the rot that has really set in, producing a spiritual stink.

In the Gospel of John, the raising of Lazarus takes place just before the Passion, just before the climactic moment when Jesus defeats death by succumbing to it. When told that Lazarus has died, Jesus says, “Our beloved Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to wake him” (John 11:11). With these words, he signifies we are in a new world. Within the confines of the old world, the old consciousness, death is ultimate, and its very finality gives it its power, but referring to it as “sleep,” Jesus is signaling that through God’s power and according to God’s purpose, death is not ultimate; it is not the final word.

“When Jesus arrived at Bethany, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days” (John 11:17). This is to signal that there is no mistake; the man is truly and definitively dead. But this is no concern for the one who transcends both space and time, whose power stretches beyond life and death as we know them.

Martha comes out to meet him and indicates her incipient belief in his identity and power: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother never would have died. Even now, I am sure that God will give you whatever you ask him.” Jesus replies, “Your brother will rise again…I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11:21-25). God hates death and doesn’t want its phony finality to ruin human life.

Coming to Lazarus’s tomb, Jesus feels the deepest emotions and begins to weep. This is God entering into the darkness and confusion and agony of the death of sinners. He doesn’t blithely stand above our situation, but rather takes it on and feels it.

But then, like a warrior, he approaches the enemy. “Take away the stone,” he directs. Those who are stuck within the confines of this world protest, “Lord, surely there will be a stench.” They are saying, “Don’t mess with death; you can’t reverse it. Its power is final.”

Jesus is undaunted. He commands, “Lazarus, come out!” This is the voice, not simply of a hopeful human being, not simply of a great religious figure; this is the voice of God who hates death and has dominion over it. And therefore “The dead man came out.”

Jesus finally says, “Untie him and let him go free.” Just as he freed Lazarus, so Jesus liberates us from our thralldom to death.

Lent Day 20

Calling Us Out of the Tomb

Let's reflect a bit more on Jesus' encounter with Lazarus. At the tomb of Lazarus, Jesus “groaned in spirit.” Jesus’ trouble here is the result of his identification with sinful humanity. He goes all the way to the bottom of it, letting its truth affect him. Jesus does not just love us abstractly or from a distance; no, he comes close to us. More to the point, this groaning of Jesus signals the pain that God feels at our imprisonment. If his glory is our being fully alive, his agony is our sin. How salvific it can be to listen to this groaning of the Lord at our own lack of life.

In the same vein, Jesus weeps for his friend. There is something heartbreaking about this for it is the only time in the Scripture that Jesus is described as weeping. Whatever form death takes in us—physical, psychological, spiritual—it is something deeply troubling to God.

One detail is particularly moving: Jesus asks, “Where have you laid him?” Sin alienates us from our God, making us strangers to him. Just as God in the book of Genesis looked for Adam and Eve who were hiding from him, so here God incarnate doesn’t know where his friend Lazarus is.

Then the Lord comes to the tomb. We hear that it was a cave with a stone laid across it. When things are dead, we bury them away, we hide them. When we feel spiritually dead, we lock ourselves up in the darkness of our own anxiety and egotism and fear. But there is a power, a divine power, sent into this world whose very purpose is to break through all such stones.

“Lazarus, come out!” Are there any words more beautiful and stirring in the whole New Testament? From whatever grave we are lying in, Jesus calls us out.

Lent Day 21

Something from Nothing

The God of the Bible creates ex nihilo, from nothing, and this is incomparably good news. It applies not only to creation in the grand metaphysical sense but creation in a spiritual and physical sense as well.

The story of Elijah and the widow of Zarapheth demonstrates this. It was a time of drought in Israel, and Elijah is desperate. So Yahweh gives him instruction and invites him to trust. But the Lord sends the prophet to about the least likely place of succor: to a widow in a town outside of Israel’s borders.

Widows were practically helpless at this time, and indeed when Elijah asks her for something to eat, she says that she only has enough for one more meal for herself and her son. But then comes a mutual act of faith. Elijah trusts that God must have sent him to the right place, for he asks for her to make him a cake. And she trusts in him and does what he asks. What happens? The flour and oil do not run out for a year.

Both the prophet and the widow were in dire straits and both found what they needed. But the story goes on. Elijah stays with the widow and her son, and the son becomes deathly ill and finally dies. The widow—already bereft of her husband and now without any means of support, emotional or financial—despairs and lashes out at the prophet.

But once again, as she is striking bottom, the prophet asks her to trust: “Give me your son,” he says. Elijah takes the young man upstairs and cries aloud to God. Then stretching himself three times on the child’s body, he supplicates the Lord again. And the young man came back to life!

An absolutely hopeless situation became a place of hope. Not only did the young man come back to life, but the widow regained her faith.

If you feel hopeless or despairing this Lent, remember that God can bring something from nothing.

Lent Day 22

The Gaze of God

What is it about a face? When we meet someone, we study that person’s face. The face gives away the soul. We can read so much in a person’s facial expression. So much of the texture of what she’s thinking, feeling, and experiencing can be sensed in the face. When we want to be honest and direct, we look someone in the face. When we resolve to meet a difficult situation, we face up to it.

On other hand, standing before the face of another can be threatening and shaming, but also sometimes enlivening.

In the book of Numbers, the Lord instructs Moses how he wants the priests to bless the people: “Speak to Aaron and his sons and tell them: this is how you shall bless the Israelites. Say to them: The Lord bless you and keep you! The Lord let his face shine upon you, and be gracious to you! The Lord look upon you kindly and give you peace” (Numbers 6:23-26).

This is all about the face of Yahweh. We often speak about man's search for God. But the thrust here is in a different direction. It is much more interested in God’s quest for us. God looks upon us with love and searches us out when we run from him.

Think of Psalm 139 in this context: “Lord, you search me and you know me; you know my resting and my rising; you discern my purpose from afar. Before ever a word is on my lips, you know it, O Lord, through and through…”

Many of us are, despite ourselves, deists. That is, we think of God—if we think of him at all—as a distant force, a creative power indifferent to the world.

But that just isn’t biblical religion. God knows us, loves us, searches us out, and makes his face to shine upon us, looking upon us kindly.

Think of the experience of being gazed upon by someone who loves you and whom you love. In that gaze—penetrating, knowing, benign—you find, not oppression, but joy and peace. That's how God looks upon you

Lent Day 23

Beasts of the Earth

During Lent, we may spend time doing battle with what we call our “animal passions.” But this may not be the right way to put it because God’s covenant is made, not just with men and women, but with the animals as well.

I know this sounds strange to us, but that is because we are the heirs of modernity, a philosophical movement that tends to separate human beings radically from other animals and from nature. Modernity sees nature as, at best, something that might serve us or be mastered by us. But God has a much more integrated vision of things. All creatures, coming forth from God, are ontological siblings—brothers and sisters. In finding oneness with God, we find, ipso facto, oneness with the rest of creation.

This idea is reflected in much of the great tradition prior to modernity. St. Thomas Aquinas says that vegetables, plants, and animals are ensouled like us. In fact, the word “animal” just means “thing with an anima, a soul.” Thomas Aquinas saw us as part of a great chain or hierarchy of being. For the modern consciousness, we are, essentially, the masters of nature, and this is part of the problem for us, of course. We have so mastered nature that we are, effectively, alienated from it.

The Bible would have named this as one of the faces of sin. Sin, the caving in on oneself prompted by fear and pride, effectively cuts us off from each other, but it also cuts us off from the non-human world around us. It cuts us off from our love for it, our curiosity about it, our care for it, and our fascination with it. (This was one of the major themes in Pope Francis' encyclical, Laudato Si'.)

But Jesus, in his own person, joins together the disparate elements of creation, the spiritual and the material, angels and wild beasts.

Lent Day 24

Animals and Angels

Medieval scholars said that the human being was a kind of microcosm, since he bore within himself the spiritual and the physical. Through his body, man reached down to the lower elements and was one with the animals and minerals, but through his mind, he reached upwards to God and the angels.

We know instinctively how right this is. On the one hand, we can explore the intricacies of mathematics and geometry. We can soar with Mozart and Shakespeare. We can design high-level computers and machines that can move through the galaxy. We can enter into the depth and silence of prayer, becoming as much like the angels as possible. In so many ways, we strain upward to our home among the spirits.

On the other hand, we are, like it or not, animals. We need food and drink. We get too hot and too cold. We experience instincts and emotions that often get the better of us. We revel in the sheer pleasure of the senses and the thrill of being touched. We love to run, to exercise our muscles. We exult in the rough and tumble of very physical competition and play.

This is our glory—in a sense we combine the best of both worlds—but it is also our agony. It is the source of much of our sadness and conflict for it entails that we are a hybrid, a half-breed, something of a metaphysical mongrel. We bring together two qualities that are at odds with each other. The spirit strains against the body, and the body strains against the spirit. Sometimes the spirit commands and the body refuses to obey; sometimes the body makes demands that the spirit cannot or will not accommodate. This tension is one of the faces of sin. It is the result of the dislocation between ourselves and God.

The harmony of spiritual and physical seems to be what God savors and intends: the spirit commanding the body, but the body also informing the spirit. There is a proper hierarchy between them, but it must never become a tyranny. The demands and goods of the body must always be respected, and must even, to some degree, shape the life of the spirit. We were made as embodied spirits, or if you prefer, as spiritualized bodies. And we will be saved as spirit-body composites.

Lent Day 27

Sheer and Shocking Grace

In his letter to the Galatians, St. Paul tells the community his own story and how he came to Christian faith. It didn’t happen through study or through someone else's tutoring. It came as a sheer and shocking grace to the most unlikely of people.

“You heard of my former way of life in Judaism,” he says with almost comical laconicism. Paul’s conversion story must have been well-known at the time. “How I persecuted the church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it.”

Let those words sink in. Paul wasn’t just opposed to Christianity; he didn’t simply argue against it or ignore it. He actively, brutally, and violently persecuted it.

The Acts of the Apostles speaks of Paul “breathing murderous threats” and seeking to bring Christians back in chains. He was, in a word, about as far from Christian faith as you could get. He was spiritually dead.

Yet Christ brought him back to life: “When God, who from my mother’s womb had set me apart and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me…” (Galatians 1:15).

God fashioned Paul’s Christian faith from nothing, and here’s the application for all of us: don’t give up hope, even when you are in desperate straits. Don’t surrender, even when things seem utterly void of meaning and hope.

You may be on your last legs; you may have nothing left in the tank; you may be moving in the wrong direction.

But don’t give up! God’s grace can bring you back and renew your life again.