The Creed ends with the words: "I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come". This proclaims the fact that Christianity neither affirms the world as it is, nor denies it; it aims and hopes to transform it. Christianity is the process of resurrection in the spiritual history of mankind and the world.
This is the theme of this Sunday during Lent, both in Ezekiel's vision in the first reading and in the raising of Lazarus in the Gospel of John. The account of the seventh miracle in St John's Gospel concerning the sickness, death, and raising of Lazarus is the climax of the path of destiny after death. Christianity's history is not that of adjusting to world progress. Its path is not so much a forming of the future as a resurrection of the past - not the mere return of the past, but the reawakening of its eternal core of truth.
The miracle of the raising of Lazarus was more than a revival of a dead person's body. It was actually the coming into being of a new Lazarus who was born anew - as the concrete answer to the question that Nicodemus put to the Master during their night-time conversation. The Lazarus miracle is that of the calling forth of light out of darkness. It signifies the awakening of consciousness for all that which is relative. It is the miracle that constantly reveals in the history of mankind the power that comes from God the creator, which stops the natural process of degeneration.
The seven typical miracles in John are not events that took place only once at some time in the past, but are consistently repeated and belong to the very structure of mankind's spiritual history. They are timeless, and the sacraments we celebrate in our liturgies rest on this timelessness. Even Ezekiel's vision is to be interpreted in terms of such awakening. Ezekiel is not just speaking of graves and cemeteries. The 'graves' he speaks about are the lost hopes in exile. For him, resurrection means the return from exile.
Easter is about life and death. We continue to experience death's victory over life daily in our hearts and around us. But Lent guides us to gradually celebrate and even experience in Christ's victory over death. Death does not have the last word, though in so many situations in life the feeling that surfaces is often similar to that of Martha: "If you had been here, my brother would not have died".
Speaking about resurrection, we need first to identify and acknowledge situations where we are in exile. Going to our burial places with Jesus and Martha means revisiting all the signs of death we carry in relationships of perpetual conflict, or in the many addictions that create new forms of poverty and multiply new victims in our modern societies. We are called also to shoulder politically at least some responsibility for the way our seas are being transformed into mass graves for the shattered hopes of thousands of so-called 'illegal' immigrants, by right fleeing from their political and financial exiles.
The miracle of the raising of Lazarus speaks to us of all this, so that what is forgotten may be remembered, what sleeps is awakened, and where there is death, life may enter.
In the Gospel, when Martha says, almost with a polemical tone: "I know he will rise again at the resurrection on the last day", Jesus answers: "I am the resurrection", implying that there is no need to wait so long! His call "Lazarus, come forth" can awaken new insights on many issues. Out of the dark cave of forgetting emerge newly awakened memories of lost wisdom.