The Fifth Sunday of Lent

So we enter the second week of no public masses, and I'm sure like me you are finding it all very difficult to take on board and comprehend. With the best will in the world, and with no disrespect to our priests, watching the mass being celebrated by them on their own, in an empty Church, through the lens of a TV screen, is hard. But it is what it is, and it is better than nothing at all. I'm sure our priests are themselves feeling the complete weirdness of it all. I liked the inventiveness of the priest in Italy who emailed all his parishioners asking them to send in selfies so that he could print them all out and sellotape the pictures to the pews in his Church, thus giving him at least some semblance of the congregation he knew and loved being alongside him, as he celebrated Mass. Here's a link to the article. It is a lovely idea and one perhaps worth emulating where possible.

That said what are we to make of this Sunday's gospel which is the telling of the raising of Lazarus. It is unique to the Gospel of John and it has a particular strategic meaning within the layout of his gospel. The evangelist has very deliberately divided the gospel into three sections. The Prologue, the Book of Signs and the Book of Glory. The story of Lazarus is the concluding episode in the Book of Signs. We have to ask then what is the sign, and how can we relate it to what is going on in the world at the moment?

If we listen carefully to the message which Martha and Mary send to Jesus, we immediately notice something which we might think is strange. It is a statement rather than a request. "Lord, the man you love is ill". There is nothing else. It is a stark message and it makes its point. I wonder though if there is something here that has a wider connotation about our world at large. That in a real sense our world is itself ill and ailing, and that we all need to turn to the Lord and admit what we all realise - that we are sick and in need of the love that the Lord has for us, a love that will lift us and renew us and bring about the new creation in Christ.

This new creation is what we will now be thinking about, praying for and celebrating in two weeks time as the gospel of John moves us from the story of Lazarus at the end of the Book of Signs, onto the Book of Glory, wherein the passion and resurrection of Jesus unfold as that momentous expression of Jesus' glorification as Lord. It ends in and then begins from a new tomb in a garden, where tears of sorrow give way to tears of joy, climaxing in the risen Lord breathing the breath of new life onto the disciples as they receive the Holy Spirit, the giver of life, who renews the face of the earth.

Let us pray for that great renewal of our world and let us be uplifted as we gather in front of our screens to listen to the Mass this Sunday.