According to John, Jesus went to Bethany, to the house of his dear friends, the siblings Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, six days before Passover. Of course, it was during Passover that Jesus underwent his passion and death.
John makes a point of telling us, twice, that Jesus’s visit to Bethany occurs after he raised Lazarus from the dead. We heard about this on the Fifth Sunday of Lent during the Mass at which we celebrated the Third Scrutiny. Jesus’s bringing Lazarus back from the dead is perhaps best described as a resuscitation rather than a resurrection. But it is no less marvelous for that distinction.
As a result of having been resuscitated after being dead for several days, long enough for his body to begin to decay, Lazarus was no doubt something of a curiosity to many people. Because many began to believe that Jesus was Messiah and perhaps even Lord because he raised Lazarus, many of the Jewish leaders (not all, at least not Nicodemus or Joseph of Arimathea) wanted to kill him as well as Jesus.
We see in our reading tonight the stirrings of Judas’s betrayal when he says about Mary anointing Jesus’s feet with costly oil, “Why was this oil not sold for three hundred days’ wages and given to the poor?”1 His silence in response to Jesus’s words about the poor always being present but he would not be seem to indicate that Judas did not believe Jesus’s claim to be Messiah and Lord, despite what he had witnessed.
This brings us to the relevant question: Who do you think Jesus is? If you remember, before raising Lazarus from the dead, Jesus tells Martha that he is the resurrection and the life. He then asks her, “Do you believe this?”2
It’s clear that Mary, the one who sat and listened at Jesus’s feet while her sister, Martha, hurried about getting everything ready and complaining to Jesus about Mary just sitting there, believed Jesus to be the resurrection and the life.3 Messiah, in Greek Christos, means Anointed One. Mary anoints Jesus, taking no heed of the cost, because, unlike Judas, she believes.
Last week in a conversation about very brief homilies, Fr. Andrzej told me that a priest in Poland on Easter once gave a very short homily: “Christ is risen! But you don’t believe it.” The question early in this Holy Week, then, is, Do you believe that Christ is risen and alive? It is a question you can only credibly answer with your life. In other words, you can’t really believe this and remain unchanged. To repent is to convert and to convert means to change.
Our reading from Isaiah insists that the one to whom it refers, for us this is Jesus, was “formed and set… as a covenant of the people, a light to the nations.”4 “The people,” of course, refers to Israel, while “the nations” refers you, me, and the rest of the human race. More relevant to the point, he came to bring sight to the blind. The blindness Jesus seeks to cure, as we learned in the Gospel reading for the Second Scrutiny, is not physical. As he says to those who doubt him: “If you were blind you have no sin; but now you are saying, ‘We see,’ and so your sins remain.”5 Despite it happening right in front of their eyes, they remained blind to God’s salvation and so they remained unchanged.
It makes all the difference in the world whether you believe Jesus is a remote figure who lived some 2,000 years ago or believe that he is alive and present in a way more powerful than if he had remained on earth.
The way Christ is present not just to us but among us and even in us is none other than the holy Spirit. As Paul insisted: “no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the holy Spirit.”6 How else if not by the holy Spirit did the centurion in yesterday’s Passion, who stood watch at Jesus’s crucifixion, whose job it was to ensure he died, upon seeing him expire proclaim, “Truly this man was the Son of God!”?7
1 John 12:5.↩
2 John 11:25-26.↩
3 See Luke 10:38-42.↩
4 Isaiah 42:6-7.↩
5 John 9:12.↩
6 1 Corinthians 12:3.↩
7 Mark 15:39.↩
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