Fifth Sunday of Lent Yr A 2026

Title

Alive and Awaiting Resurrection

Outline

We often think of the fall of our first parents as an unmitigated tragedy

It certainly was a tragedy, for they lost their relationship to God, were shut out of eternal life, and were on their way to physical death. In effect they died spiritually, socially, and physically.

But that is to look at it in a temporal context, for from God’s point of view: “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.” God who is beyond time always could see the ultimate good in the temporal evil.

That is why this theme of the glorification of God and Jesus as the resurrection in person is repeated throughout the resurrection narrative.

The issue is that in the narrative no one gets the distinction between the resurrection of our spirit and the resurrection of the body

Martha believes in the resurrection of the body, but views it as temporally distant. Mary, Martha, and the Jews all believe if Jesus had been there (temporally) Lazarus would not have died. Ezekiel prophesies a resurrection of the body, a recreation, so to speak (I will put my spirit in you), and an entry to the promised land, but in Jesus we view this as typological: the entry into a new promised land, the renewed earth, in the ultimate resurrection.

Paul sorts out the two resurrections

The Spirit is in the eternal now and that is what our spirit was destined for, so that happens at baptism, when the Spirit of God starts to dwell in you. “Whoever does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.” Yet Paul recognizes that this happens within the temporal sphere in which “the body is dead because of sin” and so only at the end of this temporal sphere will it be renewed: “If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, the one who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also, through his Spirit that dwells in you.” It is renewed through the final return of Christ to recreate the temporal sphere in the eternal now.

So the raising of Lazarus is a type of the full reality

Lazarus has died so that God may be glorified. He died indeed because Jesus by the will of God was not there. But now he has arrived. The resurrection is here: ““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.” But the two parts of the sentence are paradoxical.

Jesus enters into their sorrows in this world for he is fully part of this world and weeps and groans with them.

Then he reveals the glory of God, to use his words, crying out into the open tomb, “Lazarus come out, “ which does, bound hand and foot with face covered. The Church does for the spiritually resurrected what the Jews do for the physically resurrected Lazarus: “untie him and let him go.”

And at this point the narrative breaks off with many Jews having seen the glory of God coming to faith.

The story has enormous significance for us

As in the case of Lazarus we are dying unless Jesus becomes present to us as we come to him in trust.

Unlike Lazarus the presence of Jesus to us is first of all Spirit and life, as Jesus says elsewhere. We live in the really real unless we turn from this life and redo Adam: 1 John tells us that there is a sin unto death. But barring that, we need the help of mother Church to be untied from what binds us and to be let go.

One means of this is the regular coming of Jesus to us in the Eucharist, which is a transformation of the substance of bread and wine into the resurrected sphere that serves as ongoing transformation for us spiritually and the guarantor or eventual physical resurrection.

When the time of God has come Jesus will come and be eternally present to us, never to go away, and transform our bodies into what he is so as to live in his presence in the new heaven and earth.

Our need now is to identify what binds us so as to bring them to Jesus and the Spirit to set us free, often with the help of Mother Church, so we enter more and more into the freedom of the children of God awaiting death, yes, but as a transformation, a sweet sleep, until like Mary we hear the voice of Jesus saying, “Arise my love and come with me.”