+I WILL PUT MY SPIRIT WITHIN YOU 5th Sunday of Lent A, 2017
We have just heard God’s word through the prophet Ezekiel telling us “I will put my spirit in you that you may live. Then we heard from Paul to the Romans that “if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the spirit is alive because of righteousness.” And then in our gospel we hear Jesus saying “I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”
Our readings today are so rich that one can only glaze the surface with whatever comment I may offer. Let me advise you as Bishop Daniel Flores of Texas recently told the community while visiting us, to reflect among yourselves what today’s readings are saying. Each of you gathered here has some thoughts about what you have just heard and what a moving thing it will be for you to share them with a friend or family, and this may be far more fruitful than anything I say this morning.
Right here, right now, as we believe in Christ, allow his Spirit to dwell within us, we have passed from death to live. Our sharing in this Liturgy of the Word and of the Sacrament of the altar is all about believing in him who has so loved us that he gave himself up to death that we might become sharers in his own divine life. May there be fulfilled among us the opening prayer: “Lord our God, may we walk eagerly in that same charity with which, out of love for the world, your Son handed himself over to death.”
Isn’t this what Jesus is calling us into through the whole of the gospel this morning? Jesus as a friend loves Lazarus and his sisters Martha and Mary. They have sent Jesus word of their brother’s failing condition but he delays, seeing in this an opportunity to teach them and all of us about the meaning of his own life and passing from this earth. He tells the messengers: “This illness is not to end in death, but is for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”
Jesus allows Lazarus to die, to be buried in a tomb for four days before he comes to them, that he may show then how the real meaning of life and death. It is has to do with his own life and death for the whole of the human family. Our own perception is so limited, we see one thing but God has a far larger design. Life and death are all about how we relate to Jesus in our day to day lives, whether we will allow him to speak to us about how we are to think and act, about now we are to hear and respond as his disciples.
This Eucharistic celebration draws us right into his own most loving mystery. To believe in Jesus is to have passed already from death into life. To believe in Jesus means letting him live in us all day long, live a life that reflects our readiness to share in his own life.
The Eucharist we celebrate calls us ever deeper into faith, into letting ourselves become the bread and wine that are brought to this altar. When we offer our own lives and let them be filled with the Holy Spirit, Christ becomes fully alive in us, in all our thoughts and desires, in all our words and deeds. The Word of God that took flesh in the womb of Mary continues to take flesh in us whenever we believe what he came to accomplish. May this holy season give us such a living sense of his loving presence that we yield our lives entirely to him. Amen
Ezekiel 37:12-14; Romans 8:8-11; John 11: 1-45