Lent 5
O Israel, hope in the Lord!
For with the Lord there is steadfast love,
and
with him is plenteous redemption
And he will redeem Israel from all his
iniquities.
The psalm today has taken my attention. I have felt them deep in my heart. Like the psalmist, we must have heard the despair of human being when we consider the enormity of our sinfulness, and we know that that sadness should never be far away from us. The hope of humanity must always be intertwined with such a despair, however, because it is that hope, which drives our supplication to the Lord, which marks a person out as human, just as does the sin of Adam and the salvation of Jesus Christ.
Like Ezekiel, we are in the midst of a valley where there seems to be no life, where there are only the dried bones of the past. We have no power to give life, we suffer unspeakably because of our sinfulness, and we are destitute of all that we think important in such difficult times.
We have lost our parents, we have lost our friends, we are strangers in a strange land. No longer do we feel part of something greater than ourselves. We are Ezekiel on the plain where nothing lives apart from ourselves, lonely and abandoned by every one and every thing we used to know. We see only bones drying in the hot sun before us, and nothing else.
Being thus set apart, we must consider ourselves more closely and see whether that separateness is actually the curse everyone says it is.
Paul, like Ezekiel, is on the edge of everything. No longer considered a Jew, although he considers himself to be one, not yet understood as a christian, because he was a Jew and not one of the pagans.
Paul writes about the liberation of the christian in his letter to the church at Rome. “To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set it on the Spirit is life and peace,” writes Paul. Like Ezekiel, he must have seen the valley of the dried bones. Like the psalmist, he must know the despair of his own sinfulness, of his being set apart from his fellows and God. But like the psalmist Paul must know of the great hope which any faith imparts.
Here we are like the family of Lazarus, bereft of all hope. Jesus did not come in time to save our brethren. Our brother lies dead and in the tomb these three days, they say, and Jesus did not appear until now. That is the point: Jesus has come to us. Jesus has appeared in our time in order that we might be transformed. From the hopeless to the hopeful. That is the movement we see in the church when Jesus is let loose in our hearts and the Spirit among the pews. The story of the bringing Lazarus to life prophesies the death and resurrection of Jesus, doesn’t it? The story of Lazarus tells us to hope when there is seemingly no hope; when the fetid air of decay rises round about us, we should understand that that putrid odour is only the flesh rotting away in order to reveal the spirit, the real life which Paul describes in his letter, that real life which the Church has always offered to the faithful who look up to heaven for a glimpse of the risen lord.
This story of Lazarus is one of the miracles Jesus performed for a perverse generation who only sought signs and wonders for their very weak, if any, faith. The miracle is not that Lazarus rose up from that deep sleep of death, but that we can rise up like that man, who was mourned so deeply by his family. The miracle is that the story should be speaking to us today, about our faith, about our hope, about our charity. Let us return to that verse from the psalm.
We are to hope in the Lord, for we are the new Israel, the Israel who wanders in the deserts of modernity. We are the new Israel who must remember the Lord, who is love and redemption itself. That love is steadfast, the redemption is that cup running over with blessing. That cup of living water, the water which bubbles along the channels of hope, that water which we draw from that well of everlasting life. Let us drink deep draughts of such a wondrous nectar, a taste which the drinker will always want, a taste which far outstrips anything we might ever imagine.
All of this in the midst of Lent, when we are to don sackcloth and ashes in our inmost hearts because we know we have sinned. We know that we are unworthy of the gift of life which has been offered to us through the fact of Jesus Christ’s life, death and resurrection.
Perhaps we have this Lent stuff all wrong. Perhaps Lent is when we should realise that there is a very real joy which enlivens us, a joy which raises us up from the valley of despair, that dell so deep that there seems no escape, that trench of the grave.
But there is a prayer and a hymn which say, “Fear the grave as little as one’s bed.” That is what Ezekiel and Paul are speaking about, that is what the story of Lazarus is really meaning.
The bleakness of Lent is only a semblance. There is no real oppressiveness in the observance of a time of fasting. Fasting only brings us quickly to the valley of the dry bones, where we realise that there are two elements to our lives, the Body and the Spirit, just as Paul tells us explicitly in his letters. Lent is the period of mourning the sisters had for Lazarus, but finally it is over. Finally, we know that the fast has purified our thoughts for the sake of our souls. If we look at the story of Lazarus, we find that although we die to the flesh, just as that man did, we will be raised to life through the power of the Lord. Just how this happens is not up to us to dictate, is it? That is just like that miracle, but more so the miracle of the passion.
This most divine miracle is the passion of the Lord for us: that Jesus Christ died so we may live. That must be something to bring us to the true vocation in life, to give us an unshakeable hope, to inspire us to be faithful, perhaps it might even impel us to love.