Fr. Michael Williams

It’s a consoling fact to know that ‘Jesus wept’ at the death of His friend Lazarus. Jesus was disturbed and upset by the death of a close friend, because death is a very distressing event for people to deal with. Over in the Royal hospital recently in I was saying the prayers for the dead for a person who had passed away. The family was very distressed at losing a loved one. I remember one member of the family who was very distressed saying, ‘It’s just not right’. This phrase struck me and stayed with me. I really that what the distressed relative was saying about death not being right is very biblical. Death isn’t right and was never God’s plan. The Sacred Scriptures are very clear about this. The book of Wisdom says, ‘God did not make death, He takes no pleasure in destroying the living’. And the book of Genesis tells us, that death came into the world as a result of man and woman, rejecting and rebelling against God’s law of love and life. And St Paul tells us, ‘it was through one man that sin came into the world, and through sin death, and thus death has spread through the whole human race’. This could be called the bad news.

The Good News is that God, ‘did not abandon humanity to the power of death’. God would mend broken humanity, which appeared irretrievably damaged by sin and death. The Sacred Scriptures, and human history, witness to this rescue mission of God’s. The prophet Ezekiel, who prophesied six hundred years before the birth of Christ, tells us that the Lord ‘will raise you from your graves, my people. And I shall put my spirit in you, and you will live’. Our Lord’s raising of Lazarus from the dead in today’s gospel, is testimony of God’s promise to overcome sin and death for us. St Paul, who was once dead in sin though his murderous actions, experienced a resurrection of the heart, when encountered the Risen Christ on the road to Damascus. St Paul moved from death to life in this life and he would write eloquently on the resurrection of the heart and the body: ‘If the Spirit of Him, who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, then He who raised Jesus from the dead will give life to your own m mortal bodies through His Spirit living in you’. This resurrection of the heart is also spoken of in the parable of the prodigal son, when the Father welcomes his son back from his life of dissipation. The father says, ‘this son of mine was dead and has come back to life, he was lost and is found’. Of course the son was not physically dead, but he was spiritually because of his lifestyle.

The Lord’s raising of Lazarus is a clear sign that He has authority over the powers of death. It is also a sign that points to His own Resurrection, when Christ will overcome death and reveals the Resurrection. Following His Resurrection death has no more power of Him; He has conquered it. He reveals Himself as ‘the Resurrection and the Life. If anyone believes in Him, even though he dies he will live, and whoever lives and believes in Him, will never die’. Like Martha we need to say, ‘Yes, Lord I believe this’. And then we are on the road to the Resurrection, which is always the road of hope. Even death will not make us despair, although it will make us sad, because Christ has the victory and invites us to share in that victory.