Saint Callistus

First Reading: Ezekiel 37:12-14

Second Reading: Romans 8:8-11

Gospel: John 11:1-45

Today’s Gospel speaks of Jesus’s conquest of death in the raising of Lazarus. What if death is not at all what God intended? Mind you, I mean death as we experience it—as something fearful, horrible, terrifying. This comes from having turned from God.

Jesus came primarily as a warrior whose final enemy is death. It is easy to domesticate Jesus, presenting him as a kindly moral teacher. But that is not how the Gospels present him. He is a cosmic warrior who has come to do battle with those forces that keep us from being fully alive.

Throughout the Gospels, Jesus deals with the effects of death and a death-obsessed culture: violence, hatred, egotism, exclusion, false religion, phony community. But the final enemy he must face down is death itself. Like Frodo going into Mordor, he has to go into death’s domain, get into close quarters with it, and take it on.

Coming to Lazarus’s tomb, Jesus feels the deepest emotions and begins to weep. This is God entering into the darkness, confusion, and agony of the death of sinners. He doesn’t blithely stand above our situation but rather takes it on and feels it at its deepest level.