Collect and Readings for The Fifth Sunday of Lent – Ezekiel 37.1-14, Psalm 130, Romans 8.6-11, John 11.1- 45
The Prayer for today
Most merciful God, who by the death and resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ delivered and saved the world: grant that by faith in him who suffered on the cross we may triumph in the power of his victory; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Things don’t come much deader than dry scattered bones. It is a powerful image of the totally hopeless, without even whispered memory of life. Ezekiel the prophet speaks God’s unlikely hope to a dislocated and despairing people. In the hands of God there is no abandonment but promise of restoration, bone by bone, sinew by sinew, inbreathed by the Creator’s breath.
Psalm 130 echoes the dazed amazement at the way God proves again and again that with the Lord there is mercy and fulness of redemption. In Romans we find the same realisation worked out in a more cerebral way, celebrating the profound truth, born of real experience, that Spirit-filled life is a completely new and fulfilling life, in comparison with which other life seems like a kind of deadness.
And in this week’s Gospel reading we hear the whole narrative of Lazarus and his sisters, living through his dying and death, while the Lord of life is elsewhere. It is an evocative story, with Jesus portrayed at his most human, and many layers of meaning packed into the event. Why did Jesus delay? What about those conversations, first with Martha and then with Mary?
John is wanting to tell us deep truths about Jesus’ total humanity and divinity; if ever a story revealed the nature of Emmanuel – ‘God-with-us’- then this is it. The practical, less emotional Martha is better able to grasp the logic of what it means for the Lord of life to be present, whereas Mary is simply devastated and feels wounded by Jesus’ absence which doesn’t make sense to her.
We may recognise this terrible sense of loss and distance when in our own lives we feel God ought to be there yet he seems not to be; and Jesus himself knew it on the cross: ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’ But it is this raw grief in all its honesty and candour which tears Jesus’ heart and shakes him with agonised weeping. With us, too, he is there at such times of raw pain, sharing our searing pain and grief and weeping with us. Jesus, as the Lord of life, is God’s voice speaking right into the darkness of death and drawing out life.
Some things to reflect on:
• How will the image of dry bones help the exiled people Ezekiel was called to speak to?
• Compare the responses of Martha and Mary and Thomas. What do we learn about the strengths and weaknesses of each?
God bless
Rev’d Fiona Robinson
