Lent 5 A Lazarus

“Lord, him whom you love is ill.” The same can be said of us. We are sick to death by sin, and we need Jesus to either cure us or resurrect us from death. He loves us with divine love and he is ready to come to help us at very short notice. But, can it be said the other way around? Can others say to Jesus: your friend, the one who thinks about you, who wants to spend time with you, who visits you and likes to receive you frequently, is in need of you? Jesus loved to stop over at Bethany, the house of his friends, to spend time with Martha, Mary and Lazarus. Saint Josemaria used to call the tabernacle, Bethany. Do we like to stop over at a church and spend time with our friend? Can we tell Jesus: Lord, I love you and I am ill?

“If you have been here my brother would have not died.” It is a very strong statement. It is like saying: you are responsible for the death of our loved one. How many times we blame God for our sufferings, our illnesses, our accidents? We ask, where was God then? Martha and Mary could talk to Jesus in this way, because they were very close to him. If we could see their faces at the time, they would have shown a smile among their tears. It was not blaming him, but showing their pain for the death of their brother. Do I have the same confidence in Jesus, to tell him what is in my heart? Jesus, I am sick of everything.

“Take away the stone.” But Jesus, he’s been there for four days already; he is really dead. For the Jews four days was the sign of real death. “Take away the stone.” But Jesus, his body is corrupt and he stinks. “Take away the stone.” I have been in that cave for many years now and it is impossible for me to move. Trust me, take away what separates you from me, a stone, a wall, a barrier, whatever it is. Jesus is telling us to take away what is between us and him. We are slow to follow his command and we have many excuses not to remove the obstacle from our path. If you don’t remove it, you cannot come out.

“Lazarus, come out!” It was a strong voice, loud enough for the dead ears of Lazarus to hear from inside the tomb. It goes through the rock. It is the voice of Jesus, manly, well balanced, deep and harmonious, a voice impossible to resist. It is the word of God. The same one that still resounds from the beginning of time. The voice we hear at Mass: this is my body, a body that died for us and rose from the dead. Lazarus came out like a robot, a zombie, an automatic response, against his will. He was sleeping peacefully, more in the other life than here, and didn’t want to come back. An imperative command to come out. His voice is irresistible: Come out of yourself!

“Unbind him and let him go.” It must have been an amazing scene. They were all paralysed and terrified. Nobody could move, not even run away. They were all tied to the ground looking at him like a ghost, like a mummy. When we take away the stone, he lets us free. There is always something that enslaves us, either a little thread or a chain. Something that doesn’t allow us to fly, to follow the path God wants us to walk. Unbind the ropes that tie you to earth and go, run towards eternity.

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Saint Joseph

We don’t know much about about Saint Joseph. His life is shrouded in silence. There is a book entitled “Joseph the Silent”, trying to interpret his silences, reading between the lines of his quiet life. We haven’t got anything left from him, not a relic, not a piece of furniture made by him, not the place where he is buried. In the Gospel he doesn’t say anything, not a single word. We always see him in the background, behind Mary, as a shadow, a bit passive. We don’t even know when he died. This is why it is not easy to talk about him.

We say that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was bestowed by God with the best qualities possible in a human being, to be able to fulfill her divine motherhood. God normally gives us the graces we need to carry out our mission. We can also say that after Mary, Joseph. He too had a difficult task, to be the putative father of Jesus, and God gave him what he needed. If it is difficult for us to acknowledge what God did for Mary, it is harder for us to recognise who Joseph was, clouded in the silence of his humility. He could have done whatever he wanted in life. He could have become the Roman Caesar if he tried to; he had the talents to do so. What did he do? He spent his life cutting pieces of timber. He came, he fulfilled his mission, did what God wanted him to do and disappeared. And here we are, twenty centuries afterwards, talking about him, trying to decipher his life. We ask Joseph to help us to know him better, to be able to become closer to him, to learn from him.

He was an ordinary man, a worker, who earned his living working with his hands. He provided for his family and protected the life of his wife and child. We can relate to him. We are trying to do the same, live our lives, working, looking after our families, striving to provide for them and give our children a good start in life, like the lives of most human beings. Joseph lived in a village in the middle of nowhere, with no electricity or any of the modern comforts. He was essentially a worker. This is why we have the feast day of Joseph the Worker on the first of May. He spent his life working, like each one of us; we always depict him at his workshop, labouring as a carpenter.

In the midst of this normal, ordinary, you could say boring life, he had the best two treasures a human being could ever have: Mary and Jesus. You can imagine the life at Nazareth among what we called the Holy Family or the Trinity on earth. No other family can be compared to this. It is the model of all Christian families. This is the life we should try to live, because they are close to us and we can live with them. Saint Joseph is our best teacher because he is more like us. We feel at ease with him; his silent life doesn’t threaten us. We can place ourselves easily in his shoes.

Saint Teresa of Avila had Saint Joseph as her favourite saint. She placed her first convent under his patronage. She says that Saint Joseph never let her down; whatever she asked of him he delivered. The Carmelite nuns still have an image of the Saint who used to talk to her, with his mouth still open. Today we can ask Saint Joseph to talk to us, to show us how to find Mary and Jesus in our lives.

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The blind man

Last Sunday we looked at one of the four natural elements, water, indispensable for human life. It is very much part of the beginning of our Christian life, when we are baptised. Without water there can be neither natural nor supernatural life. This Sunday we consider another crucial element, light, without which life cannot grow either. It is part of the rite of Baptism, when we bring to the newly baptised person a lighted candle, symbolising a cleaned soul, full of light. Christ is the light who came to dispel darkness. On the Easter vigil we are reminded of this reality, when we bring the Easter candle into the darkness of the church, and little by little, by lighting the candles people are carrying in their hands, the whole church becomes illuminated.

Today in the Gospel we come across a man blind from birth. It is hard for us to realise what it is to be blind. Try to close your eyes and keep them closed for a lengthy period of time; you won’t last too long. Blindness from the beginning is a harder reality: you cannot dream with images. Once they tried to explain to a blind man what the colour red was; and after much explanation, trying to compare it with a hot instrument, he said that it must be similar to the sound of a trumpet. Colours don’t have much to do with sounds; imagine spiritual things. We are blind from birth to them, because of original sin, and we need Jesus to cure our blindness, to be able to see him.

Jesus made clay with his saliva, placed mud on the blind man’s eyes and told him to wash himself in the pool of Siloam. Why did he do that? He could have touched his eyes and cured him straight away. It is a reminder that we are made of clay, that our feet can easily break. The pool of Siloam was outside the walls of the city. He could have gone to the nearby fountain and washed his eyes, but it wouldn’t had worked. Jesus wanted him to walk with faith and show others his trust in God. He could go with mud on his eyes because he was blind and knew the way by heart. We also need to show others that we trust in Jesus. God’s saliva cured him, but it had to be mixed with our clay, with our humanity.

We miss something when we don’t have it. We don’t normally realise that we are blind to the spiritual world. Once we cannot see, we notice our eyes, as when they hurt or we need glasses. We have two of them because they are very important. We have also two ears, to listen better; but only one mouth not to speak too much. We know we are blind because we realise that the saints can see things we don’t see. We would like to see what they see. Better, we would like to see with Jesus eyes. Saint Teresa of Avila wanted to know the colour of Jesus’ eyes when he appeared to her; she says that when she tried, the apparition disappeared altogether.

Today we ask Jesus to cure our spiritual blindness. First we need to acknowledge that our soul has eyes and that they are closed. Then we have to allow him to put mud in them, and walk with a dirty face for a while, showing others our blindness, till we reach the waters of the Sacrament of Confession. And we need to do this not once, or twice, but a thousand times. Slowly we are going to start seeing; first some shadows, then some sparks of light. The more we clean them, the more light we are going to see. We cannot see the full light from the beginning: it would destroy our eyes completely. And slowly we are going to discover the wonders of the spiritual life.

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