FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT -A2 2017
I’m pretty sure that you have all heard this saying: “There are only two certainties in life: death and taxes.” Death and taxes.
We can understand the second one, taxes, because it just makes sense that the health, the safety, and even the beauty of our civic community require that everyone contribute to the cost involved in assuring these things. Taxes make sense. They don’t have be as high as they are, but taxes make sense.
On the other hand, death, even though it is inevitable, doesn’t make sense to us. Not only does death not make sense to us, it is the thing we fear more than anything else, more than snakes, more than spiders, more than having to go an entire day without WiFi. Not only do we fear physical death, but we fear all those experiences in life that are the shadows of death: failure, heartbreak, rejection, loss.
But when we think about it, even though we don’t like it, we face some form of death every day. We have to.
The infant in us has to die in order for the child to live, the adolescent in us has to die in order for the adult to live. The narcissist in us has to die in order for the mature lover to live. At the very moment we surrender the security of our mother’s lap to interact with the rest of the world, we begin an extraordinary journey which involves necessary losses.
Our life experience teaches us that the road to authentic human growth is paved with renunciation and sacrifice. If we look closely at our own stories, we know that we grow only if we are capable of giving things up. We give up some of our deepest attachments to others. We give up parts of ourselves that we cherish, we surrender wonderful and beautiful times in our lives. Those of you who are seniors are about to experience this death firsthand as your graduation approaches and you step into the rest of your lives.
You and I both know that there is nothing more obnoxious in our relationships or more dangerous in our world than the person who remains paused, stuck in adolescence, living in willful ignorance, refusing to grow up, taking the easy road, demanding, as all narcissists do, to be the center of the universe. But the truth remains: The one who cannot sacrifice cannot grow, and the one who cannot grow can never love.
Accepting any death in life is always painful, surrendering to loss and growth is always difficult, and we fight it. We want to take advantage of as much of this life’s blessings as we can, but we shrink away from the very process of sacrifice that makes life possible. As Gandhi pointed out. the culture we live in conditions us to believe that we can have everything in life. And in this ruinous naiveté, we are led to believe that we can achieve wealth without work, that we can have continual pleasure without the nuisance of an intervening conscience, and most relevant to tonight’s gospel reading, we believe that we can practice a religion which requires no sacrifice of us. We try to fashion a religion that makes us feel good all the time, but which should never be allowed to challenge us toward a deeper truth, toward a more consistent personal morality, toward a purer and more adult and inclusive love.
In tonight’s gospel reading, Jesus raises Lazarus, one of his dearest friends from the dead. And although he doesn’t explain this usually unwelcome phenomenon, he does illustrate that He has power over death, both physical death and over all the shadows of death. First of all, Jesus teaches us that it is OK to mourn. In tonight’s reading we find the shortest verse in the entire Bible which consists in only two words: “Jesus wept.” He was not insensitive to the pain of loss, either for Himself or for those He loved. And Jesus also teaches us that neither the death of the body nor the necessary losses you and I face daily are final, that, especially through the love of others who “roll back the stones of the tombs” and “unbind us and let us go free,” the darkness of death gives way to the bright promise of the immortality Jesus won for us through His own death and His own resurrection.
Death is only final when the soul dies, when one stops caring or stops even bothering to care, when one stops nourishing life with habits of the heart: courage, justice, compassion, hospitality, fidelity, hope, joy, love. And when this happens, one is dead even though they may still be breathing.
Tonight we nourish ourselves with the Eucharist, the food we need to stay alive in Christ, His body and blood. Without Him, we may be walking, but not living, we may be encountering but not loving.
He is the one who said: “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me, even though they die, will live.”
I think we should take Him at His word.
Amen.