(Homily for the Fifth Sunday in Lent, using the ‘A’ readings: Exodus 37:12-14, Psalm 130, Romans 8:8-11, John 11:1-45)

There is a passage in this gospel that never fails to annoy me, and another passage that never fails to touch my heart.

Every time, I ask myself, what is the deal with Jesus, hearing that one of his good friends is in trouble, stays where he was, for two more days? This part always rattles me. Wouldn’t our instinct be to get to where the friend is, right-the-heck-now? Aren’t we designed to be there when somebody needs us?

The biblical scholars say this detail is in the story to show that Jesus really did have divine power. There are other stories in the gospels of Mark and Luke where Jesus revives someone who had just died. The people of that place and time would believe that the dead person’s soul was still in the vicinity of the body. But they wouldn’t believe that of a person already buried in a tomb. Lazarus’s body was beginning to decompose. He was really dead, not able to be resuscitated. So what Jesus did at Bethany shows that he really is God Incarnate, with power over death.

Looking at the annoying part that way, I like to match that up with the part of the story that doesn’t bother me at all. “And Jesus wept.” After meeting his friend Martha, Jesus weeping shows he is really human too. He feels the pain and grief that we feel; he shows it.

One verse shows us Jesus is truly God, and one verse shows us Jesus is truly one of us struggling humans. Putting them together, we get a picture of who Jesus really is. Truly God, genuinely human, and wholeheartedly for us.

We hear these particular scriptures at Sunday Mass this weekend because we have the Third Scrutiny at the 8:00 Mass. The people of the RCIA, who have been preparing for the Easter Vigil where three of them will receive baptism and all of them will receive the Eucharist and Confirmation, are about to gather in our presence for the last of three special prayers we call the Scrutinies.

Last week at the second Scrutiny, we heard a gospel that establishes Jesus as the light of the world. In today’s gospel, Jesus talks to his followers about the “light of the world,” and he says it in response to their question about fear. He does not seem to have any. The people in Judea were going to stone him the last time he was there, and now he wants to go back there, to be with his good friends, Martha and Mary, whose brother Lazarus – Jesus already knew – had just died.

Each of his friends Martha and Mary greets him the same way: “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.” I think they are revealing some of the same annoyance and bewilderment that I was just talking about. Why didn’t Jesus show up? Where were you when we needed you? Jesus himself felt it; that’s when he went to the tomb, saw his friend Mary, and began to cry.

In the Apostles’ Creed, we pray that we believe in the resurrection of the body. What does it really mean to us? We know that Father Time is undefeated. These bodies of ours, God’s marvelous works of art, which eat, dance, play, work, kiss and hug, cry, ache. These bodies feed the hungry, visit the sick and imprisoned; they carry clothing and shelter others in need. They see and hear and smell and touch and feel, experiencing the beauty in the world, especially in each other. These bodies are all going to stop working some day. On this side of eternity, losing is part of the deal. It’s not about winning.

We teach and believe that each of us will die and rise again, as Jesus did. We teach it and believe it, and we still don’t understand it. (You can’t really “understand” a mystery; all you can do is embrace it and surrender to it.)

One thing we could all understand better is that our participation in this paschal mystery, our dying and rising with Christ, isn’t just something we do once at the end of our time here. In the first reading today, from Ezekiel, God says I will open your graves and have you rise from them. It sounds like Ezekiel was predicting the story of Lazarus and the story of Jesus, but what Ezekiel was really talking about was the people of Israel, with God’s help, pulling their lives together again.

Our dying and rising isn’t a one-time thing; it’s a way of life, going on over and over in all of our lives. We die a little every day; we rise again a little, every day. There are some days where life is too full of the wrong things. Days when our troubles just suck the life out of us. Those are days from which we rise up again. We have to.

The second reading, Romans 8, tells us to let the Spirit of God who raised Jesus from the dead live in us. That’s not about rising from a grave; it’s about being alive.

Today’s psalm response, Ps 130, is about forgiveness: We fall down; we get back up. Sometimes we hit the bottom, and God forgives us. Always.

It reminds me that Lent is the proper season for the Sacrament of Reconciliation. It’s never the wrong time, of course, but especially for those of us not in a habit of celebrating this sacrament, and those of us who haven’t experienced it in a while (no need to raise your hands), Lent was made for this.

God doesn’t want us feeling brought down in Lent; God wants us to feel relieved, happy to be brought back to life. Come back to confession and give yourself a chance to feel what Lazarus felt, when Jesus said to untie him and let him go free.