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

We all have problems of imagination when we struggle to come to terms with our faith affirmations on hope that stretches beyond death. Beyond the mystery of death, there is a much bigger mystery of life as it unfolds with all its complexities and darkness.

It is striking how in the first reading from Ezekiel, the prophet is addressing Israel in exile not to accept the exile as the culmination of its destiny. Yet Israel’s narrative about its own liberation from bondage into the land of promise is only late in the Old Testament stretched beyond death to point to life after death.

Throughout the gospels, Jesus points constantly towards love of life. He speaks and acts more in terms of making life liveable, and less in terms of relocating hope beyond death. This because there are so many graves in life that instil fear in us much more than the final grave where we shall be laid to rest.

The exile for Israel was a grave, just as immigration today for many can be a grave or a failed marriage and so on and so forth. The grave of life is where living, we can be dead. It is where our worries accumulate, where our wounds fester and our pain is mostly burdensome. Losing heart can easily be a way of burying oneself.

Who can roll away the stone that seals our tomb, that isolates us from the world of the living? What can make us pluck the courage to stand in front of the Lord just as we are, fragile, wounded, without hope, even haunted with sin and guilt? The great message of this season is not that we are sinners, but that we have been justified in Christ, and that, as Ezekiel most significantly today affirms: “I shall resettle you on your own soil”.

It is on our own soil that the Lord “resettles” us? It is precisely where we stand and with who we are that the Lord connects with us. As Jean Vanier remarks, commenting on this Lazarus account from John: “Are there not parts in each one of us that are dead?”

The story of Lazarus is the story of each one of us. When we examine ourselves, we very easily come to realise how we judge and condemn and push people down, refusing to listen to those who are different. All this has its origin in all that is dead within us, all that creates a stench in the hidden parts of our being, which we do not want to look at or admit.

Like Martha, we may say it is too dirty and smells too bad. Yet it is precisely there where Jesus stands to call us by name, to make us rise up, and make us a bit more whole and holy. This great narrative of Lazarus in John, and when we are nearing the Great Week that has ever since marked human history, we are again being challenged to a profound inner transformation.

Like Lazarus, we all are being called back to life, to discover what is killing hope in us and what can unbind us to make life more liveable.

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