5th sunday of Lent year A

What do we do is the question in today’s Gospel.

Old Mr. Cruz lay in his bed, dying. In fact, he had been dying for several weeks. And, during that time, Father Michael, his parish priest, had visited him almost daily. Then, one night, when the weather outside was frightful, old Mr. Cruz took a turn for the worse. "Mary," he called out, "Mary, come quickly" --and his wife came running to his bedside. "Mary," he said, "my time has come. I'm being called to the bosom of the Lord. Please call the rabbi from the synagogue around the corner. Hurry, please!" Mary was astonished. "Call the rabbi?" she said. "Poor darling, I think your fever's running high. I'll just call Father Michael." Again the dying man begged, "Please call the rabbi before its too late." Mary clasped her hands and looked up toward heaven. "Lord, forgive my raving husband. He must have gone out of his mind. Why else would he be asking for the rabbi instead of his friend, Father Michael, in his last hour?" Hearing this, old Patrick lifted his eyelids and said, "Because there's a terrible storm blowing outside and I don't want a priest to come out on a night like this! Call the rabbi!" The Gospel tells us Martha and Mary calls for Jesus to tell him about their dying brother. Then Lazarus died. What are they going to do? Let say you found a dead donkey in your front yard. Well there is this story about a priest who woke up one morning, looked out the window and saw a dead donkey in his front yard. He hadn't the slightest idea how it got there, but he knew he had to get rid of it. He called the Sanitation Department. He called several other agencies, but no one in the bureaucracy seemed able to help him. In desperation, he called the mayor and asked what could be done. The mayor must have been having a bad day. "Why bother me with your problem," he answered. "You're a clergyman. It's your job to bury the dead." Whereupon the clergyman lost his cool and snapped back, "Well, I just thought I'd better notify the next of kin." If you have a dead donkey on the front yard of your life this morning and you don't know what to do with it, the Resurrection Power of God is present to you at that point of need. What do we do?

A story came over the news wire services about a man who had died. After his burial, a letter from the County Department of Social Services arrived at his home. The letter said, in part: Your food stamps will be stopped effective March 2011 because we received notice that you passed away. You may reapply if there is a change in your circumstances.

In today's Gospel, After having said to Lazarus' sister Martha, "Your brother will rise again...I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE," Jesus brings Lazarus back to life. (Jn. 11:23,25).

"I am the Resurrection and the life." On the first Easter Sunday those words came alive. It was then that Jesus' followers realized that the Almighty God was present in the death of Jesus Christ in a way that conquered death. Think about that! Death, our greatest enemy, is overcome once and for all. Think about that! THE SIGN OF THIS RESURRECTION POWER WHICH JESUS GAVE WHEN HE RAISED UP LAZARUS IS A REALITY IN EVERY ONE OF OUR LIVES.

The process of moving from death to Resurrection is going on in our lives at this very moment. Because ours is a Resurrection Faith, we know there is a new world coming: coming in joy; coming in peace; coming in love; coming in brotherhood.

Last year, a college newspaper offered a prize to the person who submitted the best definition of life. The entries came pouring. Among them:

"Life is a joke that isn't funny...Life is the jail sentence we get for the crime of being born...Life is a disease for which there is only one cure: death."

But there is another vision, a positive vision, a Gospel-truth vision of life which provides direction and purpose and meaning for our lives; which opens us to the experience of a Loving God's Presence in our lives; which enables us to face any anxiety or fear with genuine hope in the Lord's promise to be with us always.

A medical doctor tells this moving story of a wonderful Christian mother and her five-year-old son who was in the hospital dying of a painful cancer:

One morning, before the mother arrived at the hospital, a nurse heard the little boy saying, "I hear the bells! I hear the bells! They're ringing!" Over and over that morning nurses and staff heard him.

When the mother arrived she asked one of the nurses how her son was doing, and the nurse replied, "Oh, he's hallucinating today. It's probably the medication. He's not making sense. He keeps on saying he hears bells."

Then that beautiful mother's face came alive with understanding, and she shook her finger at the nurse and said, "You listen to me. He is not hallucinating and he's not out of his head because of any medicine. I told him weeks ago that when the pain in his chest got bad and it was hard to breathe, it meant he was going to leave us. It meant he was going to go to heaven -- and that when the pain got really bad he was to look up into the corner of his room -- towards heaven -- and listen for the bells of heaven -- because they'd be ringing for him!" With that, she marched down the hall, swept into her little son's room, swooped him out of his bed, and rocked him in her arms until the sounds of ringing bells were only quiet echoes, and he was gone.

"You'll never convince me," the doctor said, "that that great woman in her gallant act of mothering did not leave the hospital a different place from what she found it! In today's, Gospel Jesus, by raising Lazarus, gives us a truly awesome definition of life! "Life is stronger than death," He is telling us. And because of this Gospel truth, in God's own time this world of ours will be a different place from the one we found.

We can talk, talk, talk forever about the Resurrection Power of God working in the world and still miss the point if we fail to realize that to accept Jesus as the "Resurrection and the Life" is to accept simultaneously His call to action. This does not mean that you are called to solve the world's problems all by yourself, but it does mean that there is something God is depending on you to do. There are limits to your resources, your strength, your money, your power, but there is always something you can do through the Resurrection Power of God that lies deep within you.

The Season of Lent is a time to take stock, see what resources we do have and to emphasize these instead of those we do not have:

I am only one; but I am one. I cannot do everything, But I can do something. What I can do I ought to do; And what I ought to do, By the grace of God I will do.

4th sunday of lent

Today's gospel centers on the analogy and distinction between physical and spiritual blindness, as do most of the Gospel miracle stories where Jesus heals blind people. The early Christians saw physical blindness as a metaphor for the spiritual blindness which prevents people from recognizing and coming to Jesus. These stories testify, therefore, to the power of Jesus to heal not just the blindness of the eye but, above all, the blindness of the heart.

The clue that the evangelist intended this story to be read on these two levels, physical and spiritual, is found at the tail end of the story:

Jesus said, "I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind." Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, "Surely we are not blind, are we?" Jesus said to them, "If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, 'We see,' your sin remains." (John 9:39-41)

The mission statement that Jesus gives here is valid not only for the Pharisees but also for the men and women of our time. To learn from Jesus we must first admit our ignorance, to be healed we must first acknowledge our blindness, to be forgiven we must confess our sins. The I'm-OK-you're-OK mentality so prevalent today may in fact not be too far from the mentality of the Pharisees. The great archbishop Fulton J. Sheen used to say that in the past only Catholics believed in the Immaculate Conception but today everybody thinks they are immaculately conceived and, therefore, sinless.

From earliest times today's gospel story has been associated with baptism. Just as the blind man went down into the waters of Siloam and came up whole, so also believers who are immersed into the waters of baptism come up spiritually whole, totally healed of the blindness with which we are born. For, like the blind man in the gospel, we are all born blind - spiritually, that is.

It is, in fact, a story of how a blind man who used to sit and beg became a disciple who went about witnessing to Jesus. As in last week's story of the conversion of the Samaritan woman by Jacob's well, this story of the healing of the blind man shows that the one thing you need to qualify to bear witness to Jesus is not doing a certain kind of studies but having a certain kind of experience. The crisis of faith in our time is not very different from the crisis of faith of the Pharisees, namely, thinking that true piety means knowing and following the Book. But Christianity has a lot more to do with knowing and following the Person, the person of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The crisis of membership and commitment we have in our churches today can be traced to the understanding in the past that being a Christian was a matter of following certain doctrines and rituals. The most important thing, bringing people into a relationship with Jesus was neglected. The irony of the situation is that it is only after such a personal relationship with the Lord that people can begin to appreciate the importance of church worship and doctrine for the life of faith. Faith experience comes before theology. That is why the blind man arrived at the true faith in Jesus before the learned Pharisees. So, when in our ministry we stress doctrine and ritual over personal encounter with the Lord, one begins to wonder whether we are not putting the cart before the horse. Let us today admit our spiritual blindness and pray with St Augustine of Hippo in the spirit of Lent and today's gospel: "Lord that we may see." The Lord will give us light and spiritual insight.