Editors’ notes: James Martin, S.J., delivered the following speech at the 2025 assembly of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious in Atlanta on Aug. 14. The speech has been edited for length and style.
Like many of you, I’m getting older and belong to a religious order that, while graced with vocations every year, is aging, at least in the United States. That is not true for all religious orders: Some more traditional ones in the United States are exploding with vocations. And overseas, especially in the developing world, many orders of both men and women are growing.
But like so many religious men and women, many of you are facing the reality of apostolates being closed, consolidations of orders, deaths of sisters, declining vocations and even communities discerning what the Sisters of Charity in New York have called a “path to completion.” At the same time, women religious are still in the forefront of Catholic education, pastoral work, social justice and spiritual direction. Moreover, all sorts of ministries and new initiatives are started every year. And both Catholics and non-Catholics still look to you for moral leadership. So where is God in all of this?
A reflection on the story of the raising of Lazarus, as it is recounted in John’s Gospel, can serve as a framework to understand where God might be leading us. It’s a tale about love, illness, death, grieving, honesty, openness, uncertainty and, ultimately, new life.
What can it teach us?
Facing the unknown
First, it teaches us love. This story is mainly about love, the source and ground of all our religious orders and the beginning of all our individual vocations. When Martha and Mary send word to Jesus that their brother Lazarus is ill, they don’t say, “Lazarus, our brother, is ill,” as you might expect. They say something more important: “He whom you love is ill.”
This is the foundation of all our vocations, all our communities, all our ministries and all our futures. Our founders and foundresses were all in love with Jesus. And in some way, each of us has fallen in love with Jesus. All of us were attracted to the person of Jesus, have spent time with him in prayer, have studied the Gospels, have encountered him in the sacraments, have met him in those we meet and have lived out our lives in service to him. And as St. Ignatius Loyola said, “Love shows itself more in deeds than in words.”
Even more important is knowing that he loves us. Notice that Martha and Mary don’t call Lazarus “The one who loves you.” But, rather, “He whom you love.” All this starts with Jesus’ love for us, which we’ve experienced in so many ways. We must start with that in any discussions about our futures and rely on the sure knowledge of his love for all of us, even when things look confusing, as they did for Martha and Mary.
After the sisters send word to Jesus about their brother’s illness, something surprising, perhaps even confusing, happens. John writes, “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.” Accordingly? Well, at least we’re told he loved them. But his delay and seeming indifference raise the question of “Where are you, Jesus?” Or “What are you doing?”
We often hear that question echoed in our own hearts. We can wonder why we are no longer getting as many vocations, why so many in our circle of friends are dying and why our beloved ministry sites are closing. And we can wonder: Jesus, where are you?
Martha and Mary didn’t understand where Jesus was. And Catholic sisters, as well as religious men, and many others, don’t understand this.
Jesus’ delay in coming to help Lazarus points to the essential unknowability of God’s plans. “Why is this happening?” is often a question that, for now, is unanswerable.
When the disciples hear the news of Lazarus’s death, they are confused. Jesus says that Lazarus has fallen “asleep,” and he is going to awaken him. But the disciples misunderstand, as they often do in John, and think he means ordinary sleep, and they say, “He will be all right.” So Jesus is blunt with them, as he has to be with us. He says, “Lazarus is dead.”
This is an important insight. Some things are gone. In my own Jesuit province, in just the last few years, we’ve sold several retreat houses, which provided for the spiritual care of thousands of people for decades and were beloved not only by the retreatants but by the Jesuits. And it’s painful.
But we all have to face this reality. Like Lazarus, who was loved by his sisters, some things are dead. It’s important to name that, be grateful for what went before, grieve and accept it. Some ministries and houses and events and people, all beloved to us, all parts of our lives, all who made us what we are and contributed to the church, are dead. There is a need to celebrate what has happened, savor it and then give it over to God.
I once asked my friend Janice Farnham, R.J.M., how she felt about the ending of some apostolates and even some women’s religious orders. “Well,” she said, “it’s like a person’s life. We come into this world, we do what God asks of us, and we leave this world. In a sense, it’s a natural progression.” Death is part of life and part of religious life, both individually and corporately.
But that is not the end of the story. Before we can even get to Jesus giving Lazarus new life, emotions have to be expressed. When Jesus finally reaches Bethany, Martha and Mary greet him, and they tell them how they feel.
When Jesus finally comes to Lazarus’s tomb after a delay of several days—imagine how upsetting it must have been to wait for him to come, as we wait for a change that never comes—Martha is honest with him. “Lord,” she says, “if you had been here, our brother would not have died.”
How can Martha be so blunt? Well, she knows Jesus. It’s an invitation for all of us to be honest with God about pain, death and loss. And about our hopes for the future. Because Martha also says she knows that God will give Jesus anything he asks.
When Jesus asks where her brother is laid, she says, “Come and see.” What a powerful invitation! Martha uses the same words to Jesus that he used for his disciples at the beginning of his public ministry. Sometimes in our prayer, we have to invite Jesus to see something. Come into my life and see what I’m experiencing.
When Jesus comes to the tomb, he weeps. It’s one of the most famous phrases in the Gospels: “Jesus wept.” It’s often seen as a sign of his sadness over Lazarus, and a sign of his humanity. Which it is. But New Testament scholars point out the words used in Greek are less about sadness and more about anger. Jesus seems to be angry. Why? Well, perhaps over the sheer fact of death or perhaps at what he knows is coming (that the raising of Lazarus will lead to his crucifixion).
But mainly, scholars say, he is angry about the lack of faith of the people, who seem not to believe that he can do something extraordinary. Do you ever wonder if God gets frustrated by our doubting what God can do with us?
Then Jesus says something strange: “Take away the stone.” Why couldn’t Lazarus just have appeared? My sense is that Jesus is asking the crowd to participate in the miracle, in the freeing, just as we are invited to help do that with our friends, our sisters, our brothers. What are the stones that keep our sisters and our orders from being freer? What keeps us from seeing the light? Where are the stones in our congregations?
But Martha is focused on something else. When Jesus asks her to roll away the stone, she says that there will be a “stench.” Like so many of us, Martha is focused on the practical, the rational, the facts. She still can’t see that Jesus has something else in store for her. Also note that Jesus is not worried about looking inside the tomb. He’s not worried about looking at the parts of our lives that seem rotten, smelly or even dead. He’s not worried about our confusion or our doubts or our fears. He is willing to look at that with us. So he asks Martha: Don’t you believe in me?
Martha believes, like we all believe, even in the face of struggle. She says earlier, “I know you are the Messiah, the Son of God, and the one who is to come.” But Jesus is even more than what Martha can imagine as the Messiah. And as if in reward not only for her faith but her honesty, he reveals who he is: “I am the resurrection and the life.”
Here is the place many of us stand in our lives as religious and in our communities: afraid of the darkness inside the tomb. At the same time, still believing, still hopeful, knowing that Jesus is always with us, and wondering what is going to happen. When my dad was diagnosed with cancer 20 years ago, I confessed to my friend Sister Janice Farnham that I didn’t know if I was going to be able to handle it. She said, “Can you surrender to the future God has in store for you?” This is our invitation, no matter which congregation we belong to.
Leaving the tomb
Now, at the dramatic high point of the story, Jesus utters his famous words, “Come forth!” Here I’d like to look at this story from the point of view of Lazarus and ask what it has to do with religious life.
First of all, what this story offers us is the invitation to leave behind in our tombs anything that keeps us stuck or bound or unfree. We are invited to ask: What is keeping us from hearing God’s voice in our lives, in our congregations, in our communities? Is it a fear of change? A fear of being seen as not important? A fear that we made wrong decisions? Is it the fear of leaving something behind? Even a fear of physical death? Can we leave all those fears and worries and regrets in the tomb? Are there resentments or grudges or disappointments that you have? Can you leave that behind? What do you, what do we, need to leave behind to hear God calling us into a surprising new life?
Second, I want to share an insight that a woman shared with me during a talk about my book. She said that Lazarus, who was brought back from death, as he is lying on his tomb, had to decide to do something that no one else ever had to do. And that’s where we are today as religious, whether we’re young or old, or our communities are expanding or shrinking, or are being founded or moving onto the path to completion. What do I mean by that?
Each of us as individuals and each of our congregations has our own unique constellation of joys and hopes and griefs and anxieties. Everyone here has their own unique set of problems: physical, emotional, mental, even spiritual issues. And we all have our own set of gifts and graces: talents and skills and hopes and plans. So it’s easy to feel: No one understands me. No one has this precise set of problems and opportunities. So it’s easy for us to say, “I can’t do this.”
But that was precisely Lazarus’s situation: No one else ever had to do what he did. So he had to say, “I can do this.” And here’s the point: What enabled him to respond to that invitation? It was precisely this: He knew who was calling him.
Lazarus does not leave his tomb because he thinks it’s a good idea or some committee told him that he needed to or he read a book on self-improvement. Lazarus leaves the tomb because he knows who is calling him. Lazarus can say yes to that voice because he knows that voice. His moving ahead is only in response to a person. Like Martha and Mary, who knew Jesus well, Lazarus trusted in Jesus’s love. This is what enables us to move ahead in our own lives and in our community discernment: knowing who is calling us—Jesus.
Lazarus comes out, bound head and foot in his burial clothes. Notice that he is wearing them, while Jesus’s burial clothes are rolled up and remain in his tomb on the morning of the first Easter. Why? Because Lazarus will need them again; Jesus will not.
And when Lazarus emerges from the tomb, Jesus says, “Untie him and let him go.” Again, this is an invitation for the crowd to participate in freeing. Where can you help people in your community be free? How can you help untie those grave clothes? The move toward new life comes from God, but sometimes we need people who see that we are newly risen and help us take off our grave clothes.
Toward new life
What does new life look like for Lazarus? Well, he doesn’t know. Neither do we. But let’s consider a few possibilities, based on the three people in our story who encounter Jesus.
Like Martha in this story, can we not focus on the stench but on the promise of new life? And, as in the story in Luke’s Gospel, when Martha complains about being burdened by work, can we be open to Jesus’ challenge about how we spend our time? About what we’re doing? Martha is working hard in her house, but, as Luke tells us, she’s doing the wrong thing for that particular time.
So what are we invited to do now, based on the signs of the times? Let me suggest a few things.
As we all know, there has been a shift in many young people’s desires for the church, and it is more toward the traditional. It’s not the case for everyone, but overall, many younger Catholics seek more traditional devotions, like adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, devotion to modern-day saints like Carlo Acutis and Pier Giorgio Frassati, as well as more traditional liturgies. These young people sincerely seek a deeper identity as Catholics. In this audience are hundreds of women who have spent their lives teaching, counseling and accompanying young people. All of you have taken seriously your own relationships with God. With these young people, then, can you meet them where they are, accompany them and then help them in their relationship with God?
Likewise, many young people strongly desire a sense of community. We saw that recently in the vast crowds that came to Rome for the Jubilee for Youth. What can our experience of community, not only in what our founders and foundresses have taught, but also our own lived experience, teach them about community? About praying together? About supporting one another? About forgiving one another? There is so much wisdom here.
In other words, are we busy with many things but not the right ones? What are we doing in the course of a day as leaders of congregations, organizations and ministries? Are we about the work of the Gospel, building relationships, building bridges, free from the need to feel gratified that we have done something others can see, and even freed from the need for approval from familiar places?
One sister suggested this: What if we kept a “Martha Journal” and noted what tasks fill our hours? How would what we’re doing reflect the invitation Jesus offers us today? How are we called to identify the work of these times, which is based on the signs of the times, signs that are different than they were even a few years ago. Remember that turn towards the traditional among so many youth.
In short, Martha asks us: What are we called to do?
Like Mary, who knelt at Jesus’s feet in Luke’s Gospel and did the same in the story of the Raising of Lazarus, can we grow in interior freedom so that we can more fully rely on Jesus and then offer the world and each other a contemplative presence? Notice that in the story of Lazarus, Mary doesn’t initially rush out to see Jesus when he arrives. She waits for Jesus to call her. As in the story in Luke’s Gospel, Mary is free of the need to do, do, do, and instead listens. Mary also does something that probably bothers Martha: She waits. Where are the places where we need to step back, to pray and listen more—even at the risk of initially not knowing what to do?
In short, Mary asks us: How are we called to pray and discern?
Finally, like Lazarus, can we let go of whatever keeps us unfree? All the ways to which we have become accustomed to living, thinking, loving, praying, working, serving, creating, responding and leave those grave cloths in the tomb, knowing that death never has the last word—that with God all things are possible—that this change of era in which we find ourselves is where God needs us to be and the unfamiliar land of “not knowing,” no longer leaves us hesitant or timid.
In short, Lazarus asks us: Who are we called to be?
Can we, like Lazarus, fully trusting in Jesus, confident in the future because we are confident who it is who is calling us, say yes to God? Because the invitation for all of us, as men and women religious, as Catholics and Christians, is indeed, on every day of our lives, to listen to Jesus’s voice and to “Come forth.”
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