My Dear People, 

When Jesus hears of the illness of Lazarus, he actually delays his travel to Bethany because he loves the whole family! So, we see that the death and resurrection of Lazarus is a premeditated act of Jesus’ love.

By the time Jesus arrived in Bethany, Lazarus had been dead for four days. As many have pointed out, the Jewish understanding was that the first three days of death were an intermediate state, in which they should stay close to the body. But after three days, death was final.  

Martha is consistently the more extroverted and proactive of the two sisters. While Mary sits and weeps, Martha goes to meet Jesus and more-or-less rebukes him: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” But she is not subtle about what she wants Jesus to do: “Even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you.”

Martha gets a bad rap in the Gospels, always being compared unfavorably with her sister Mary, who chose what is better. But look at her profession of faith in the rest of this dialogue with Jesus, which always profoundly moves me: “Yes, Lord. I have come to believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world!” Home run, Martha! I want to be like her. This is a confession that ranks with that of Peter and Thomas in other parts of the Gospels. Which raises an interesting question: Does the text of John 11 suggest that the resurrection of Lazarus is in part a response to Martha’s faith-filled request?

Mary comes to Jesus and repeats Martha’s implicit protest as she falls at the Lord’s feet: “Lord, if you had been here. . .” 

In response to Mary’s weeping and that of the other mourners, Jesus becomes “perturbed”—“He becomes angry within himself.” What is the cause of Jesus’ anger? The brute fact of death in a fallen, sinful world? A lack of faith among the mourners? Commentators have not come to a satisfactory consensus. Surely, though, one of the purposes of St. John in reporting the emotion of Jesus is to stress his sharing in our human nature, including the depth of human emotion. It is often said that the Gospel of John portrays Jesus as most clearly divine among all the Gospels, at the same time, John portrays Jesus in some of the most deeply human moments of his ministry: “Jesus weeps.”

The Lord commands the stone to be taken from Lazarus’s tomb, but Martha intervenes with a very down-to-earth and personal objection. “Lord, by now there will be a stench.”  So practical, the response of someone accustomed to good housekeeping and high standards of hygiene. Our Lord points out that her worries are in contradiction to her expression of faith only a few minutes earlier. 

The calling forth of Lazarus, as dramatic as it is, remains only a miracle in the physical order. The greater miracles are in the realm of the spirit. Though it may not seem so to us, the redemption of the world is a greater act than its creation. 

The rising of Lazarus, like the precious Lenten Gospel from John (Chs. 4,9) points to Baptism. Paul says, “We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too,might live in newness of life” (Rom 6:4). In fact, Romans 6:1-14 is appropriate follow-up and application of the message of John 11.

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. 

For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our former man was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For he who has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we also live with him. For we know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die, again; death no longer has power over him. The death he died he died to sin, once and for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So, you also must consider yourself dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies; to make you obey their passions. Do not yield your members to sin as instruments of wickedness but yield yourselves to God as men who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments of righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over him, since you are not under law, but under grace.

The link we observe between sin and death in this passage from St. Paul has striking connection to the narrative of Lazarus: when Jesus commands Lazarus to be loosed and “Let. . . go,” he employs power (Luke 13:16; 1 John 3:8) from sin and death—which usually means “forgiveness of sin” in the Gospel. This resurrection, then, is also a “release” and “remission” of sin, death, and Satan, a further typification of Baptism.

Fr. Reginald Garigour-LaGrange, O.P. wrote, “Even the raising of the dead to life, the miracle by which a corpse is reanimated with its natural life, is almost nothing in comparison with the resurrection of a soul, which has been lying spiritually dead in sin and has now been raised to the essentially supernatural life of grace.”

And St. Augustine said, “The justification of the ungodly is something greater than the creation of heaven and hearth, greater even than the creation of the angels.” 

You’ve got to love rising from the dead!

[Source Reflection on the Sunday Mass for Year A by Dr. John Bergsma]

Yours in Christ.

Fr. Vincent Clemente