Fifth Sunday of Lent

From an internet list of 100 euphemisms for the word we dread to speak:

Angels carried them away; Asleep; Bereft of life; Bit the dust;Bought the farm; Breathed their last; Cashed in their chips; Cashed out; Ceased to be; Crossed the Great Divide; Deceased; Defunct; Departed; Entered the Pearly Gates; Expired; Faded away; Gave up the ghost; Got their wings; Is in a better place; Joined the ancestors; Reached the Journey’s end; Kicked the bucket; Knocked on heaven’s door;  Left this life; Met the maker; Out of business; Passed; Passed away; Passed on; Resting in peace; Rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible; Shuffled off the mortal coil; Sleeps; Slipped away; Undergone a substantive negative outcome; Succumbed; Terminated; Was called home; Went to the Happy Hunting Grounds

So many ways to avoid saying “died…”

Today, as we draw nearer and nearer to the mysterious dark and light of Holy Week, the scriptures bring us up hard against the reality of our own mortality. However we disguise the word, disguise or run from the fact, we are all going to die.

In these changeable, beautiful days of Spring that’s hard to take. The trees are budding; we are feeling more energetic as the days grow longer. When the Olympics and Ranier come out of hiding, we want to hold onto this place, this experience forever. We want to hold onto one another forever. We want to live forever.

Twice in today’s gospel, a gospel we all have heard at every funeral we’ve gone to, we hear our own voices echoing in the words of Martha and Mary.
“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” If only you could fix this one thing, Lord, fix our mortality, we would be fine.

Jesus wept at the death of his friend Lazarus, and wept with Martha and Mary, weeps with us. He weeps for his own mortality as he wept for Lazarus. As he passes through Judea, he is facing his own death, as he approaches Jerusalem and his final Passover.

Martha and Mary protest: “Lord if you had been here, our brother would not have died.” Yet despite that protest, they believe: “Our brother will rise, in the resurrection on the last day.” Before Jesus opens the stinking grave of Lazarus and draws him back to life, he makes the most preposterous, most wonderful, most hopeful statement of all of his ministry, all of his life: 

“I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”

The power of God transforms the tears of Jesus into life for Lazarus; in the dawning of the first day of the week, the glory of God will transform the broken body of Jesus into the living source of hope for us.

“I am the resurrection and the life,” says the Lord. As Jesus stands outside Lazarus’ tomb in Bethany, he stands on the brink of his own mortality facing his own death, his own sacrifice as the new lamb of Passover whose sprinkled blood will save not just the chosen people in Egypt but us all, in every generation. Here more than anywhere else in the Gospels, we see Jesus’ faith in God his Father, God of the living and the dead. He calls out to Lazarus, and the dead man lives, and is unbound from death’s dark bonds. Jesus gives glory to God, becoming the Lord of Life by passing through our human death. Not passing away, but passing through, passing over. By his Passover through our human death, everything is changed, everything is made new.

We believe, and pray to believe more and more, that for us death is not kicking the bucket or expiration or termination or passing away. We believe that Jesus who passed over through death into risen life will call us each by name in the hour of our death, unbind us, and set us free for life and light eternal. Let us together celebrate the Passover of the Lamb, our hope of immortality.

Thomas M. Lucas S.J.