A Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent
Readings: Ezekiel 37:12-14  Romans 8:8-11  John 11:1-45

Gabriel Marcel combined two worlds that typically stood apart: French existentialist philosophy and Catholicism. In his work The Mystery of Being (1950), he wrote, “You know you have loved someone when you have glimpsed in them that which is too beautiful to die.”

What did Marcel mean? Try as they might, those who truly love cannot imagine the death of their beloved, that singular spot in the wide world too beautiful to die. Of course, they try. We must all prepare for death, envision its reality, but those who have truly loved cannot conceive the loss of their loved ones. They are simply “too beautiful to die.”

Keep Marcel’s words in mind while pondering the raising of Lazarus from the dead. Note that we do not speak of the resurrection of Lazarus, because what St. John records in his 11th chapter is more properly characterized as a miraculous resuscitation. 

What is the difference? Jesus rises from the dead into an utterly new, radically transformed existence, which we call the resurrection. The only continuity between Christ’s earthly life and his resurrected existence is the man himself. He remains our dear Lord Jesus, but all else has changed. It has been raised to God, made glorious.

This is not what happens to Lazarus. He returns to the same life he has previously lived. He remains subject to the law of death. He will die again, beyond the scriptural record. (In fact, John’s Gospel reports plots against him.)

But St. John has his reasons for telling us about Lazarus and his return from the dead. This miraculous resuscitation, difficult enough to comprehend, teaches us something of resurrection, which lies utterly beyond our ken. 

The body of Lazarus lies in a tomb. As Martha notes, “Lord, by now there will be a stench; he has been dead for four days” (Jn 11:39). We typically do not ask, though we should, where the soul of Lazarus is during that same time.

Before the death and resurrection of Jesus, before the Christian faith it birthed, there was no belief in heaven or hell, nor of some portal to heaven called purgatory. No, heaven was birthed in the resurrection of the Christ. According to the catechism, “To live in heaven is to be with Christ” (No. 1025). Heaven is dwelling in a “communion of life and love with the Trinity, with the Virgin Mary, the angels and all the blessed” (No. 1024).

Likewise, before the Christ there was no awareness of an anti-Christ, of what it would mean to reject categorically the gift given by God, “communion with Christ.” So while ancient peoples had no awareness of heaven, they equally had none of hell, its radical refusal. 

What did they believe happened to the dead? If they were being honest, they had no idea. But absolute nothingness is a sophisticated concept. Even the number “zero” did not enter Western Europe until the 12th century, coming from Islam by way of the crusades. 

Ancient people knew that their loved ones were lost to them, but they could not readily picture them dropping out of existence. Hence, they thought of them as shadows, faint and obscure images of what they once had been. The dead entered the underworld: Sheol in Hebrew, Hades in Greek. They were neither rewarded nor punished in death. They simply departed to wander eternity as shadows of themselves. 

Lazarus’s body is entombed, but his soul is lost in the shadows. Lazarus cannot be called into the resurrection of the Christ for that has not yet come. That path has not been trod; heaven does not yet exist.

Martha speaks of a “resurrection on the last day” (Jn 11:24). The idea was gaining currency in first-century Judaism. Surely the same eternal fate could not befall both the just and the wicked. The more progressive Pharisees believed in the notion, the more traditional Sadducees did not. 

Does the evangelist tell us of Lazarus only to contrast his fate before Holy Week with that of Christ during it? Certainly, resuscitation of the dead, whether miraculous or medical, is not resurrection, but St. John wants us to know that the author of resurrection, the undiscovered country, was already among us. 

This is where we return to Gabriel Marcel’s dictum: “You know you have loved someone when you have glimpsed in them that which is too beautiful to die.”

We are told that “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus” (Jn 11:5). This is not a verb the evangelist bandies about. Then we are told that Christ insists upon going to the tomb, that place of ever contagion, death: 

And Jesus wept. 
So the Jews said, “See how he loved him” (Jn 11:36).

What happens next is not resurrection of the dead, but it bespeaks more than resuscitation, miraculous or medical, from the dead. The kernel of resurrection, the love that will not surrender its own to death, is already growing in the heart of Christ, the heart that will sunder itself on the cross and seed the whole world with the new reality of resurrection. 

Jesus calls out to Lazarus. He summons his beloved friend by name: “Lazarus, come out” (Jn 11:43). The sound of this love, calling for its own, shakes the underworld to its foundations. Its time to crumble has come. The dead will soon rise, “those who have done good deeds to the resurrection of life, but those who have done wicked deeds to the resurrection of condemnation” (Jn 5:29). 

Heaven and hell do not yet exist, but they already bloom in the heart of Jesus, one eternally forged in that of his Father. This is the voice that calls into the abyss. This is the heart that knows it has loved because it has seen something too beautiful to die, an eternal soul. This is the sound that summons the beloved back to its side. “Lazarus, come out.”

I am the voice of life that awakens the dead. I am the good odor that takes away the foul odor. I am the voice of joy that takes away sorrow and grief…I am the comfort of those who are in grief. Those who belong to me are given joy by me. I am the joy of the whole world. I gladden all my friends and rejoice with them. I am the bread of life (Athanasius, Homily on the Resurrection of Lazarus).

All of this is prelude to the resurrection, a dress rehearsal in the valley of death. Lazarus, his disciples, the Christ himself are still subject to its laws. The disciples fear even going to Bethany lest they all be seized and put to death. “Rabbi, the Jews were just trying to stone you, and you want to go back there?” (Jn 11:8). But the Christ returns to the place where death stalks him because he has come into the world to seek his own. That can only be done by slaying their captor. 

“You know you have loved someone when you have glimpsed in them that which is too beautiful to die.” Christ, the ancient lover of our souls, knows what he is about. He knows why he has come into the world, why he has returned to this place and what he is about to do, only partially here but completely in his own cold tomb. He calls out to his beloved friend, “Lazarus, come out.”

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.