22 March 2026 – 5th Sunday of Lent, Year A
22 March 2026 – 5th Sunday of Lent, Year A
(1) Ezekiel 37:12-14
During the exile, God’s people were like a pile of dried bones
Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act,” says the Lord.
Responsorial: Psalm 129
R./: With the Lord there is mercy and fullness of redemption
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord,
Lord, hear my voice!
O let your ear be attentive
to the voice of my pleading. (R./)
If you, O Lord, should mark our guilt,
Lord, who would survive?
But with you is found forgiveness:
for this we revere you. (R./)
My soul is waiting for the Lord,
I count on his word.
My soul is longing for the Lord
more than watchman for daybreak.
(Let the watchman count on daybreak
and Israel on the Lord.) (R./)
Because with the Lord there is mercy
and fullness of redemption,
Israel indeed he will redeem
from all its iniquity. (R./)
(2) Epistle to the Romans 8:8-11
In baptism we have died to sin, to rise to new life
Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.
Gospel: John 11:1-45
Jesus’s raising of Lazarus shows his divine power
Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill. So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.”
But when Jesus heard it, he said, “This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” Accordingly, though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was. Then after this he said to the disciples, “Let us go to Judea again.”
The disciples said to him, “Rabbi, the Jews were just now trying to stone you, and are you going there again?” Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Those who walk during the day do not stumble, because they see the light of this world. But those who walk at night stumble, because the light is ot in them.” After saying this, he told them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to awaken him.”
The disciples said to him, “Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will be all right.” Jesus, however, had been speaking about his death, but they thought that he was referring merely to sleep. Then Jesus told them plainly, “Lazarus is dead. For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.” Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”
When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some two miles away, and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother.
When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home. Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.”
Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” She said to him, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”
When she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary, and told her privately, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you.” And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him. Now Jesus had not yet come to the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. The Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary get up quickly and go out. They followed her because they thought that she was going to the tomb to weep there. When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”
Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.” When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.” Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him.
Living life to the full
It seems a bit strange to have this gospel on the Fifth Sunday of Lent. It seems to be clearly about the resurrection and yet we are still plodding through Lent and have to get through Good Friday before we get to Easter. What’s going on; have the Church’s liturgical engineers got it all wrong? Can I suggest that this text is more about death than resurrection? After all, Lazarus isn’t walking around today; he had to undergo another death. This text is more about our life and death here and now rather than about the resurrection. We will have time enough to consider the resurrection when we get to Easter Sunday and the weeks of celebration afterwards.
In his Spiritual Exercises St Ignatius Loyola suggests that when reading a particular Gospel passage we should put ourselves in the place of each character in turn and use our imagination to see how we would feel in those circumstances. This can be a most revealing exercise. How about putting myself in the place of Lazarus? I am dead to everything and then I hear a voice: ‘Come out, Lazarus.’ There I am, lying in a tomb swathed in bandages and surrounded by darkness. If we wonder how we would feel in this situation, the answer would be different for everyone but I think many might say: Thanks Lord, but I’d prefer to stay where I am.
While attempting to put ourselves imaginatively in Lazarus’s place we might become aware of how tomb-like our present way of life is, and rekindle a longing for freedom which has perhaps been buried for years. Putting ourselves into the place of a character from scripture can awake all kinds of thoughts within us and lead us to turn to God in prayer with new words on our lips. Yet it is something so simple that we are surprised that we never thought about it ourselves. This Gospel features here in Lent to help us come to live life to the full; for often it is only in the face of death that we are shocked into this realisation. This can happen to us in all sorts of ways on the occasion of a loss or bereavement. It is amazing how often it takes overcoming a negative experience to make us realise afresh how much there is that is truly positive and makes life worth living.
Key Message:
Can you work with Lord Jesus for a miracle?
Homily:
We are all aware of the famous story of the transformation of Saint Augustine. Can we ponder the same story with reference to today’s Gospel teaching.
Monica wept for her wayward son Augusting for over 15, with her grief described as exceeding that of a mother losing a child. She followed him from city to city, praying, fasting and begging our Lord Jesus to change his heart. Still Augustine was not changing. Instead he was going from bad to worse. Saint Ambrose, who was Bishop then comforted her saying, “The child of so many tears shall not perish”.
In the above real life story (sequence1) we see two great transformations:
1. From sad mother Monica to Joyful Saint Monica
2. From rebellious sinner Augustine to Saint Augustine, Doctor of the Church
Their story still reverberates hope to generations, especially mothers.
Let us consider the same story with a different course of action from our Lord Jesus (Sequence 2).
Restart the same story: Monica weeps for her son Augustine. Within a year our Lord Jesus transforms Augustine’s heart. Both mother and son are happy.
End of the story:
1. Mother Monica remains mother Monica
2. Rebellious sinner Augustine becomes good Augustine
As per our human desire we long for “Sequence2”. But our Lord Jesus Christ has big plans for our lives like “Sequence1”.
Our waiting period is a gift from our Abba Father. During this waiting period, we undergo the transformation from where we are to where we should be.
Martha says in today’s Gospel, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Mother Monica may have thought the same. Many times we would have wondered, “Why can’t Jesus cure me in a moment?”. It takes hardly a minute for my Lord”. Yes it does not require 10 hours of work for our Lord Jesus to transform St.Augustine or to wake up Lazarus. There is a wonderful thing happening here. Guess what? “Our Lord Jesus Christ is WAITING for us”.As we think, we are not waiting for Him. He is waiting for us to transform.Our Lord Christ was waiting for 15 years for mother Monica to become Saint Mother Monica. Then her son Augustine was transformed.
When we are waiting for something, our Jesus is actually waiting for us .
Still we can be happy. Since we still persevere in our prayers. The Holy Spirit will do His teaching, transform and resurrect us.
Are you asking our Lord Jesus, “Are you seeing my agony?”.Though our Lord Jesus knew that Mary and Martha were going to be immensely happy shortly, still He couldn’t see them crying. He who did not weep when He was arrested and scourged, wept as soon as He saw Mary and Martha crying. Our God got His new name “God who sees” from a woman crying in the desert.In the Old Testament we came to know, our God is “God who sees”. In the New Testament, we know what our God does when He sees our sufferings. His heart moves with compassion and He weeps for His children.
Our Lord Jesus asks us to take steps of faith, believing that our Lord Jesus will perform the miracle. Our Jesus instructed, “Roll away the stone”. When they rolled away the stone, it showed their faith and obedience. Hence when we take steps of faith, then our Lord Jesus will do the miracle. Take for instance, our Lord Jesus is standing in front of the tomb. He asks the people to roll away the stone. The people are not rolling away giving lots of excuses. Then our Lord Jesus will not be able to do the miracle, even if He is willing. So our Lord Jesus is moved when He sees us moving the blocking stones in our lives.
Now let us consider the moment after our Lord Jesus performs the miracle. Lazarus is alive but still not yet free. He is still tied in his grave clothes. Are you facing this issue? What are the grave clothes binding your life?
What are the new opportunities which our Lord Jesus has opened up?Is your child trying to change, but still not able to give up bad habits due to his old friends? Have you helped him by moving to a new locality?Has the Holy Spirit showered you with new blessings, but you are hesitant to take it, since you do not want to give away the comfort of known acquaintances?Has the Holy Spirit moved you to help someone?
We can be the Mary/Martha/person who rolled the stone/ person who unbinded Lazarus. Or we can be Lazarus and simultaneously we can be someone’s Lazarus. All we need to believe is Jesus is there, everyone is taken care!!
Death
In Lent, it is needful to address the phenomenon of Death. Chapter 11 of John’s Gospel is perhaps the most sustained meditation on Death in the New Testament, and it turns out to be a very encouraging one. The long gospels from John that have guided us through the season – the Samaritan woman (ch. 4), the blind man (ch. 9), and today Lazarus (ch. 11)– might all be suited for group recitation like the Passion. The raising of Lazarus is the last of the “signs” that are a feature of the first half of the Gospel and that are usually marked by a revelation of an aspect of Jesus’s being, which is received in a confession of faith. (Today, we have “I am the resurrection and the life” and Martha’s response: “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.” Each of the Gospels and each of the Passion narratives has its own particular climate. Mark is sudden, enigmatic, bedrock; Matthew presents the new Law from Jesus as the new Moses, founding a new community; his passion story intensifies the themes of temptation and betrayal—dramatizing Judas’s remorse and despair, Pilate’s uneasy conscience—his wife’s warning and his unforgettable gesture of washing his hands; all betray Jesus and the hearers are prodded to repent; Luke presents Jesus as a gentle martyr, “Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me”; “Father forgive them for they know not what they do”; “This day you will be with me in paradise”; “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit”; the climate of John may be called sublime, and in the Passion Jesus is calm, entirely in charge, sovereign. The unpleasantness of death is transferred to the Lazarus story and Jesus’s death is his being “lifted up from the earth” and entering into his glory.
Some claims that John’s Gospel, “the spiritual gospel” as Clement of Alexandria called it, presents a Jesus who is a god walking around in disguise with no fleshly reality. But the very core of the Gospel is the declaration that “the Word became flesh” and all the references to Jesus’s flesh carry maximum impact, e.g. when he sits fatigued at the well (“quaerens me sedisti lassus”), when he uses his spittle to heal the blind man, and when he weeps, sharing the grief of Lazarus’s sisters. He enters deeply into human experience and invites us to enter into his experience as the Son of God. He speaks of “my Father and your Father, my God and your God” (20:17). When he says, “I came from the Father and have come into the world; again I am leaving the world and am going to the Father”(16:28), he is catching us up into the movement of his life, with death as return to the Father.
I listened to a lecture on what carers report about the last moments of life, an I found it encouraging, if even half of it is true. (What Really Happens When You Die | Peter Fenwick’s Studies of End-of-Life-Phenomena.) This area is a happy hunting ground for all sorts of spiritualists, such as W. B. Yeats, and even when reinforced by the authority of the Dalai Lama, one is slow to take as “gospel” its accounts of how the dying are visited by benign spirits, such as those of their parents, to help them make the transition to the new mode of being. A condition of making the transition serenely is to let everything go, to let one’s ego go as one unites with the cosmos (are we ready to do that?). These experiences are real, as psychological events, and can allow death to be lived as a peaceful homecoming.
You may think that old people think a lot about death, but often the primary worry people have about aging lies elsewhere. Fear of abandonment, of not having time to get one’s work finished, of grim prospects of physical and mental health, or of having missed out on crucial life experiences, can predominate over the intangibilities of death. (People emerging from “near-death experiences” report two imperatives: to learn and to love.) Rousseau has an interesting remark: “The study of an old man, if he still has any to do, is uniquely to learn to die, and this is precisely what one does least at my age; one thinks of everything except that. All old men hold on to life more than children and leave it with less good grace than young people.” Old people do not like to be reminded of death (even on their death bed) and think it rude to be reminded that their time is running out. Yet the body itself prepares us to die. If we are lucky enough to get through the “asteroid zone” of the seventies when anything can hit us, luckily escaping accident or disease, in the eighties the processes of a physiological winding down take over. Adjusting to this as a dispensation of Providence, the wise learn to greet death as a friend when it comes at last.
“Life is changed, not taken away,” the church tells us. It is not a philosophical maxim, but an expression of faith in the Risen Christ, who in his life, mission, passion death, and resurrection maps out luminously all the stages of our path, a map lighted up in contemplative depth in the Gospel of John. After Easter we will be hearing much more of John, especially the discourses placed at the Last Supper, and we will realize more concretely that “the spiritual gospel” does not mean something vague but rather the powerful presence of the Holy Spirit, leading us into the full truth about life and death.