Today’s readings: Ezekiel 37, 12-14; Romans 8, 8-11; John 11, 1-45.

In the face of the big questions that hassle us, the more we enter into subtle disquisitions, the more we end up against a brick wall with no exit. In the daily struggle to catch up with ourselves we very often risk being so taken up that we hardly have the possibility to grasp the depths within us.

In his book Scar Tissue, Michael Ignatieff recounts his mother’s voyage into a world of neurological disease, losing her memory and then her very identity, only to gain a strange serenity at the very end. Obsessed with his mother’s transformation, he sets out on his own quest for self-discovery.

He writes: “Her death had emptied me of any religious feeling I might once have had. The more I read, the more certain I became that the fasting, mortification and cleansing which all religions require of believers before they submit to God, expressed an idea I profoundly believed: that a self must be lost, before it can come to itself again.”

After Martha and Mary sent a message to Jesus about Lazarus being sick, Jesus “stayed two days longer in the place where he was”. Then finding Lazarus dead, he said: “And for your sake I am glad that I was not there, so that you may believe”.

There is often a perceived absence of God in the dull experiences of life, like this absence of Jesus at the moment Lazarus died, which we easily figure out as a prime cause of the calamities we undergo. But John, in this iconic narrative in today’s gospel, is telling us something radically different from our way of seeing things.

Words like “I am the resurrection” or “If anyone believes in me, even though he dies he will live” can never be explained on a purely logical level. Jesus is not the philosopher who persuades us to accept death or to die. Death in all its forms poses serious objections against God, and the conflict between life and death shapes much of our daily thinking and living.

We may believe in life and love it; but death remains always there on the horizon. It is part of the reality of life and it constantly contradicts much of what we appreciate in life and much of what we claim to believe. The Christian, as everyone else, has difficulties in coming to terms with limit experiences. Faith empowers the believer to venture beyond and not be falsely resigned.

In the history of humanity and in different religious traditions, many have responded otherwise to the deepest of questions, and their responses are timeless and continue to restore in us in all times a certain taste for living. Etty Hillesum is a case in point. She was a young Dutch Jew who volunteered working in a hospital of a transit camp from where eventually she herself one day was carried off and died in Auschwitz. Through her life, as she herself writes in her diary, she communicated the idea that in the midst of what we go through, we can help God rather than be helped by Him.

Christianity is the process of resurrection in the spiritual history of mankind and of the world. It is this idea of resurrection that transpires from Ezekiel in the first reading, who speaks of opening graves and “putting my spirit in you”. He is there reaching out to the people in exile and without a homeland. In his understanding, resurrection is liberation from exile.

In his book Covenant of the Heart, Valentin Tomberg writes that the raising of Lazarus is not the resurrection of Lazarus but the miracle of the calling back of his soul-spirit being into his healed body. Lazarus was healed and reawakened, but he remained mortal like all other human beings. The Lazarus miracle, and the affirming presence of Jesus throughout all the narrative, reawakens in us the firm belief that in our being mortal human beings, with all that it entails, we can be at the same time healed and so favorably impact on the world around us.

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