A Prophet who weeps

Jesus never hides his affection for the two sisters and their brother who live in Bethany.  Surely, they are the ones who welcome him to their home whenever he goes up to Jerusalem.  One day Jesus gets a message:  Our brother Lazarus, “the one you love,” is sick.  Before long, Jesus is headed towards their small village.

When he gets there, Lazarus is already died.  When Mary, the younger sister, sees him arrive, she bursts into tears weeping.  No one can console her.  When Jesus sees his friend weeping and the Jews who are with her weeping as well, he cannot contain himself.  He too starts “weeping” alongside them.  The people remark:  “See how he loved him.”

Jesus does not just weep because of the death of a very dear friend.  It breaks his spirit when he feels everybody’s powerlessness in the face of death.  All of us carry in the very depth of our being an insatiable desire to live.  Why do we have to die?  Why is life not happier, longer, more secure, more lively?

People today, like those of every age, carry hearts that are pierced with the most unsettling question that is the hardest to answer:  What’s going to happen to each and every one of us?  It is no use to fool ourselves.  What can we do?  Rebel?  Be depressed?

Without any doubt, the most usual reaction is to just forget it and “keep plugging away.”  But is the human being not called to live life and live it lucidly and responsibly?  Is it only our end that we have to approach thoughtlessly, irresponsibly, without taking any stand?

In the face of the ultimate mystery of our destiny it is not possible to appeal to either scientific or religious dogmas.  They cannot guide us beyond this life.  The more honest stand seems to be that of the sculpture Eduardo Chillida.  I heard him say on one occasion: “About death, reason tells me that it is final.  About reason, reason tells me that it is limited.”

We Christians do not know any more about the next life than others do.  We too need to approach humbly the dark fact of our death.  But we do it with a radical trust in the Goodness of the Mystery of God that we catch a glimpse of in Jesus, this Jesus whom we love, without having seen him, and in whom, without seeing still, we place our trust.

This trust cannot be understood from outside.  It can only be lived by the one who has responded with simple faith to what Jesus says:  “I am the resurrection and the life.  Do you believe this?”  Recently Hans Küng, the most critical theologians of the twentieth century, already close to his end, has said that for him, to die is “to rest in the mystery of God’s mercy.

José Antonio Pagola

April 6, 2014
5 Lent (A)
John 11, 1-45