The Fifth Sunday of Lent, A

    One very busy week of my early priesthood I remember very clearly. After Masses one Sunday, I drove down to Charlotte from Bryson City – stopping off here in Sylva, NC to help with a penance service – to baptize my niece’s little baby boy. After a couple of days of business there, I came back here for a few days and then had to turn around and go right back to officiate at a wedding at the Cathedral. And finally, the following day I offered a funeral Mass for a deceased parishioner. All in the compass of a week: a baptism, a wedding, and a funeral, a kind of summation of life. We are born into this world with no voice in the matter; we, hopefully, discover what our role or vocation is (most typically seen in the married state); and we die, leaving the world as we came – helpless to make it all any other way.
    There have been those who have reflected on this unalterable rhythm of life and have concluded that it is a cycle of meaninglessness. Such an outlook is even in the Bible, in the book of Ecclesiastes, where the writer complains, “Vanities of vanities! All is vanity. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south, and goes round to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun” (1:2-9).
    Likewise, someone is born into the world, finds a role to play, and then dies, leaving behind, perhaps, offspring and a memory. A child thinks of this swirling, this circle of seasons as for him a never-ending cycle – until he grows toward adulthood and sees that he must make his own way in the world; he looks for love and meaning, for satisfying work. And if he is wise, he observes, and reflects on the fact, that life is so very short. Then he dies… like everyone else.
    A sad picture? Perhaps. Why dwell on this? It is not that there is no real sorrow, suffering and dying in the world. The problem is that we pay so little attention to it. We have even changed – with the new rite – a funeral into a cheery little canonization of anyone who dies. We refuse to really grieve. To do that is to admit the obvious, what we moderns frantically try to avoid at all costs…until the figure in the mirror, so altered by the unstoppable march of time, will not let us settle for silly distractions: Look at me! How old I’ve become!
    Some would cling to Lazarus, risen from the grave. There, see, death conquered! What a marvel: a dead man, stinking after four days in the tomb, raised back to life, back to his family and friends. Stunning! All the more so for the fact that it really happened, that our Lord truly did perform a miracle. But we forget that there in the face of death, facing the burial place of a friend, before He performed a miracle of life, Jesus our Lord wept. And, the Gospel writer, St. John the Beloved, reiterates, “So Jesus, perturbed again, came to the tomb.”
    Why the weeping, the perturbation? I am not sure; maybe many reasons account for it. But this we know: that our Lord wept at the death of His friend Lazarus, even though He knew He was about to restore him to life. And so then, we know that it is most natural and human to be realistic about our human condition and to weep over it. Too, we realize after reflecting carefully on this passage, that this, Jesus’ most stunning miracle up to that time, would not save Lazarus. He would, now brought back into the cycle of life on this earth – he would now have to die all over again. Greatest of miracles, cruelest of miracles…
    So do we go back to Ecclesiastes, back to the mantra, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”? No. That’s a good place to start for so many who will not be real about life but drown out any bit of disturbing reality by exhausting themselves physically and mentally (especially mentally) in work, play and unceasing, nauseatingly unending, entertainment. But no, we don’t end with the Preacher of the book of Ecclesiastes; we come to St. John, the most beloved of Jesus’ disciples, who, because of great love, saw more deeply into the heart of Christ. John knew what we have so often lost sight of – that the greatest of miracles is not Lazarus stumbling out of the tomb back into the light of day, under that sun that “rises and…goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises”; that the greatest miracle is not feeding thousands of people a bit of bread and fish; or making the richest of wines out of plain water. No, these are not the greatest of miracles; they are signs really performed by Jesus, but signs that tell us who this One, Jesus Christ, is. He is the greatest of miracles.
    The wonder of Lazarus rising from the dead is this: that it points to the Conqueror of death, the One, and the only One, who can break, and has broken, through the “endless” cycle of birth, growing old and dying. Lazarus, who would die again, points to the culmination of all signs and miracles: Christ rising from the dead…to die no more!
    So we are not left simply with birth, growing up and old, and dying. No, we Catholics have this and so much more. We know sorrow like all the world, but we do not know a sorrow that is without hope. And the signs of that hope – signs that flow from and point to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ – the signs of that hope are, among others, a baptism, a wedding, and a funeral: born into a world and then raised above its cycle of vanity by baptism; discovering a companion along the way of life, but finding in one’s spouse through matrimony more than someone with whom to commiserate but rather a helpmate toward eternal life; and most gloriously a death – the final experience of all living things in this world – a man or woman’s death marked by that death that killed death and the resurrection that has opened up for us everlasting life – all this freshly presented to us again in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, where His Body, broken for us, and His Blood, poured out for the remission of our sins, nourishes us toward eternity. And it is only in the light of that that the “meaninglessness” of this life fades away at the rising of that Sun who, risen from death, will never set again.