Fifth Sunday of Lent

Today's Readings

Many of us try to put some effort into Lent, albeit with varying degrees of success. Maybe we subdue our senses, mortify our bodies and generally try to concentrate more on the spiritual dimensions of our lives. This is how we undertake Lenten practice: we pray, we fast, we give alms and these are all physical activities.

But while in Lent we intentionally reign in our bodies and the pleasures that engage our senses, we also pay attention to how our bodies and physical senses are places of encounter with God. Two Sundays ago we heard in the Gospel about an encounter Jesus has with a woman seeking to quench physical thirst, yet who learns something important about spiritual thirst. Last Sunday there was the story about Jesus healing a man born without the sense of sight and how that man was held at arm's length, an outcast, presumed to have been a sinner. After he's healed he learns about the connections (and distinctions) between physical and spiritual sight. Today we read of Jesus performing the most amazing kind of miracle, how he restores someone's entire body, the whole complexus of their senses, into a temporarily new body -- and then promises a whole other kind of body to come "in the resurrection from the dead."

These stories reveal to us that the human body, even Jesus' body, is at once something to be held in check (since it needs to resist the temptations in the desert) but also to be touched, reverenced, acknowledged as an instrument of God's action in the world. God's glory is shown this week, in particular, because Lazarus' fleshly body has died and Christ, with his intervention of crying, weeping and sighing, has a voice to command that body to rise and to have its shroud thrown away. This flesh, Jesus shows then, is important for our salvation.

How difficult it is for many of us to receive this message when our human community globally and locally is engaged in actions to help heal and protect bodies suffering and dying because of a new virus. We're called into unfamiliar actions and unwanted restraints that at the very least are inconvenient and at the most are truly heroic as some put health and life at risk to care for others. This struggle is all worked out in our bodies and serves, likely for many of us, as an unwanted lesson in the fragility of our flesh. Did anyone, even the most piously penitent, want to observe a Lent like this?

But here we are, encountering the same difficult mysteries that were known by the Samarian woman, by the man born blind and by Lazarus, Mary and Martha. We witness and experience thirst, the need for sight and the yearning for healthy physical life. And we also hope that in witnessing the actions of those directly affected by COVID-19 and those on the front lines caring for the sick some of the same dialogue that Jesus had with his own people is shared with and by us.

For the religiously observant of any tradition it is painful not be able to gather physically with other believers, and particularly difficult at this time of year when the Abrahamic traditions are entering into the celebrations of Passover, Holy Week and Ramadan. Maybe this enforced fast from bodily fellowship will make us especially appreciative when it returns. From the Christian perspective, though, there is an understanding that as confusing as all of this is, it is through this that God enters our world: historically, politically, emotionally. This happens because he is of our flesh. In Jesus, God enters into the vast scope of humanity as well as the intimate complexity of each individual person. The renewal that Christ offers the world (the resurrection to new life he offers Lazarus, for example) is offered to each of us.

I would never have chosen this Lent for myself, and certainly not for anyone who is suffering right now. But it's the one that I, and we, have been given. All the more important to receive it in solidarity with Jesus who came to serve, suffer, die -- and rise again.

Dr. Joel Warden
Catholic Scholar-in-Residence