Untie yourself!

 

Our Lenten Journey continues this week with the gospel story of the raising of Lazarus from the dead.  The images in this gospel passage from Saint John are stark and compelling.  If you can, read this account [John 11:1-45] slowly and pay special attention to this raw moment, not only for Martha and Mary, the sisters of Lazarus, but for Jesus Himself.

The sisters sent word saying, “Master, the one you love is ill.”

"The one you love is ill."   Often in his gospel, John doesn’t use a name: The woman at the well [John 4:4–42]. The Man Born Blind [John 9:1-12].  Lazarus is called: 'the one you love.'  The one you love is ill and needs healing.

I think that maybe John writes so that any of us could enter into that experience: asking for the water of life; for sight and healing.  Entering into the experience of Lazarus, knowing that each of us can feel we’re the one Jesus loves.  We’re loved ones who need new life.

John offers us a story with a miracle – what he calls a sign, and as always with John, it’s not to dazzle or impress.  It is for the glory of God, and he’s  more explicit in this Gospel – that the Son of God may be glorified through it.

So when he heard that he was ill, he remained for two days in the place where he was.

This isn't what we might expect here.  Jesus loved Mary, Martha and Lazarus, so we want to hear that He went to them right away - but He doesn’t.  He remained for two days.

As in many of John’s gospels, I feel this is a teaching moment.  This is not what we expect, but we’ve learned that whatever happens, it will be for the glory of God.

He said to his disciples, “Let us go back to Judea.”

The disciples said to him, “Rabbi, the Jews were just trying to stone you, and you want to go back there?”

Jesus says, “Let us go back to Judea.”  He’s saying, “Let’s go back to Jerusalem.”  His passion and death are waiting for Him in Jerusalem and He knows it and we’re invited to go to Jerusalem with Him.

The power of this story is not only that Jesus raised His friend Lazarus from the dead as His final sign.  Lazarus, after all, will die again.  The deepest power is that this is just days before Jesus Himself will die and be raised from the dead.

We don’t always get the resurrection.  We don’t feel the power of it in our hearts because we have to really embrace death to understand what it means, and we live in a culture that’s in denial of death.  In previous ages where death was more a part of everyday life, the Good News of the resurrection was tremendously good news.

We don’t lack a fear of death because we don't believe it, but because we deny it.  In fact, it’s a great fear inside of us.

When I sat at the side of my brother Tom, and watched the life slip out of him, I grieved for him along with the rest of our family and friends, but I don’t think it made me think of my own death.  My death is … out there at some vague time in the future... when I’m really old.

But now I’m turning 70 this year.   How much more time do I have?  All of us will die.  Everyone reading this reflection will die and we don’t want to really think about that.  We’re going to die this year, or next year, in ten years, twenty-five years.  We don’t know.

The invitation in one of the Eucharistic Prayers is “to be ready to greet him when he comes again in glory,” to be ready to die.

There was a time in my childhood when I was always terrified of death.  I dwelled on it a lot because I was so afraid of it.  I believed that at the end, I was going to be punished for my bad life by a God who was waiting to judge me.  So I’ve tried to live a good life and raise my family in a manner pleasing to God that I’ve learned through going to Masses and reading scripture and Catholic magazines and other sources, hoping it’s enough.

But now toward the end of my life, I’m trying to move my relationship with God from my head to my heart.  Sometimes my relationship with God is still clearly one of fear of the big, judging God.  It’s not as warm  a relationship as it should be.  It’s cautious and leery.  On those days I truly get close to God in meditation or prayer, I imagine falling into the arms of a loving God, and I hear Jesus saying to me, “Stephen, come out!  Let yourself free!”

So Thomas, called Didymus, said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go to die with him.”

That’s kind of a remarkable thing to say, from Thomas, who would be the doubter among them, expressing the doubts we all have.  But Thomas is also the one who says to Jesus, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going.  How can we know the way?”  Jesus answers: “I am the Way.” [John 14:1-6]

So what is the path we’re to take?  The path of Jesus; we imitate Him and follow Him.  This is the way to eternal life!

Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you.”

There’s a little edge in this.  After all, it’s understood that Jesus had the ability to reach Lazarus while he was still alive because He was only two miles away.  Mary and Martha knew this.  So, when Jesus did arrive, days late, I would imagine the sisters being very angry.  Martha is blaming Him for the loss of Lazarus, and she doesn’t really believe it when His next line is “Your brother will rise.”

“Right, right,” she’s probably thinking.  “In the resurrection on the last day.”  “Yeah,” Martha says, “I get it.”  But she blames Jesus for not saving him now.  Mary does too.

How often do we blame God for the pains and sorrows in our own life and for the deaths of so many things in our lives.

There are real deaths and losses and deaths of relationships.  We also have to face the loss of expectations for ourselves, for others, for our children.  And we ask: “Why weren’t you there for me, Lord?  We just can’t see that this is all so that the glory of God can be revealed.”  So, we don’t believe.

This is why deep in our hearts, deep in our souls, we have this longing for a real connection, a friendship with Jesus.  We need to get rid of the image of a God who keeps a record of all of our sins, one who can’t wait to punish us.  Jesus is a God who weeps with us in our sorrows, and who loves us endlessly.  Jesus can’t wait to greet us with open arms when we arrive in eternity.

I read a story of a mother who died after a long bout with Alzheimer’s.  Over the years her daughter would fly out to visit her and find that her mind slipped.  But there was something so joyful about going to see her.  She would walk into her room and her face would light up and she would say, “Oh, Maureen! I am so happy you came to see me!”  She was thrilled, ecstatic.

If the daughter left to go down the hall for a minute to get some water, she would return to her mother’s room and she would look up and squeal!  “Oh, Maureen!  What a surprise! You’re here!  I’m so thrilled to see you!”  The daughter could leave her mother’s sight for 30 seconds and every time she walked back in the room, her mother was thrilled.

I think that’s the way God is with us except we’re never out of God’s sight.  God remains delighted, thrilled, ecstatic to see us, at every moment in our lives.

The last time I spoke with my mother a couple of days before she died, she was calm and peaceful, saying, “I’ve been preparing for this my whole life.”  That's the way I want to face my death.  But I can only see it that way when I feel myself wrapped in God’s love.

Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!”  The dead man came out, tied hand and foot with burial bands, and his face was wrapped in a cloth.

It wasn’t just Lazarus who was in that tomb.  Jesus may have been looking in at His own upcoming tomb.  And when we picture Jesus standing in front of that rolled away stone, we can know that we are in the tomb.  Each one of us is tied up with things that bind us to a certain way of living, a regular pattern of behaving.  We believe that it will never change.  We believe that we simply have to stay tied up for all of our lives in a dark and lonely place.

This Gospel invites us into death – a dying to ourselves, a death to putting ourselves first and our needs before anything else and a new life in thinking of others first.   A good place to take that dying to self is into our marriages.  That's a place where we tend to think we can’t break out of the patterns that have been there for years, the way we’ve always been.

When my wife and I got married in 1974, the word OBEY in marriage vows was considered an old-fashioned concept.  What a shame!

The root of Obey means: To listen to, or to put the needs of another ahead of my own.  Isn’t that a good thing?  What if we lived our marriages by putting the needs of the other ahead of our own?  We do it with our young children all the time.  But in our marriages?  Not so much anymore, if you read the news.

What if during this Lent, we unbind ourselves from the old way we’ve lived our marriages?  What if we spent the rest of Lent obeying, putting the needs of our spouse ahead of our own?   There’s certainly a dying to ourselves and our own needs when we do that.  What if we stopped keeping score?   Stopped saying, “He never asks how my day was!” or “Why do I always have to apologize to her?”

In a profound way we’re being called to care for one another in a gospel-like way: to die to our own needs and to love someone else more deeply -- our spouse, our parents, our children.  We’re being called to take care of others before we take care of ourselves.  It’s counter cultural when everything in our lives and world says "it’s all about me. I’m an army of one.  Make sure I get what I need first."  Yes, you have to put on your own oxygen mask before you help others.  But in our closest relationships, we’re invited to cherish each other.

Jesus stands at the end of our tomb and calls to us, “Come out!  Be free!  Unbind yourself from score keeping in your marriage. Let yourself be free from focusing only on your own needs and desires. Untie yourself from limiting your love.”

If we begin to love our spouse freely, not keeping score, not keeping grudges, it will change our relationship.  Not overnight.  But we learn, as we slowly untie the burial bands that have held us so captive, that we can trust that eventually, with our constant love and with Gods’ loving grace, our spouse will notice a difference.  And respond.

This is not something a wife does for her husband, or a husband does for his wife.  This is the way Jesus calls us to a marriage -- or any loving relationship.  If we do this over and over, with the utmost patience and courage, we will see a difference.

And we can picture Jesus, standing by the rolled away stone, calling to us by name, “Come out!”   As we stumble out into the light, He says so gently, "Untie him.  Untie her - and let them go!"