Today marks the third and final Scrutiny of the Elect prior to their receiving the sacraments of Christian Initiation at the upcoming Paschal Vigil. Especially to the Elect, I say that if at this point you don’t recognize that you are the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, that you are the man born blind who was given true sight by the Lord, and that you are Lazarus, called forth from the tomb, you may not be ready. This also goes for those of us who are baptized, for whom Lent serves as preparation for renewal of our baptismal promises at Easter.
These passages from Saint John’s Gospel, used by the Church since ancient times for the scrutiny of the Elect, should deeply resonate with us all. This resonance is what the term catechesis means. In nearly 2,000 years of Christian usage, the Greek word katekeo doesn’t mean merely to echo. Echoes quickly fade. It means to resound.
The verb, “to resound” means to fill a place with sound. What the Church resounds is not merely the “teaching” of Christ handed by the apostles and through the Church’s apostolic ministry, but Christ Himself. The Holy Spirit is the mode of His post-Ascension presence in, among, and through us.
Each of these three Gospel passages tells of the kind of personal, life-changing encounter that makes one a Christian. You can’t give faith to anyone and no one, except God, can give you faith. Being a supernatural virtue, faith is a gift from God.
Like love, particularly agape (i.e., self-giving, self-sacrificing love), faith is a verb. In a Christian context, faith is not a generic term, reducible to mere belief in something. For Christians, faith requires, not an object, but a subject. Not a something but Someone: Jesus Christ. It is to Him that a Christian actively and completely entrusts herself.
Foremost, the Church is the community of faith. It is a community of people who haven’t only been given this saving gift (which God offers to everyone) but who have accepted it by embracing Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. Those whose deepest desire is to be like Him.
By its nature, as Christ’s establishment of the Church demonstrates, faith is a team sport, or a communion. More exactly, the Church is koinonia. While “communion” is typically used, there is no English word that directly translates koinonia. Hence, it can be described as fellowship, intimacy, solidarity, sharing, and acting in common.
Of course, the central way we act in common is by participating in the Eucharist. It is the Eucharist that makes us together the Body of Christ and individually members of His Body. In a single word, koinonia captures how Christians are meant to live. Koinonia is how the redeemed are sanctified. Just as one person is no person (there needs to be a thou for there to be an I), one Christian is no Christian. We need one another!
Rather than a moral philosophy or a systematic theology, let alone what author Herman Hesse described as “the glass bead game,” Christianity is a Person. At the start of his pontificate, Pope Benedict XVI insisted:
Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction1There is an interesting line in our long Gospel reading that is easy to pass-by. It is uttered by the same disciple who refused to believe the testimony of the other disciples that Jesus had risen from the dead: Thomas. As a result, he is usually referred to as “doubting Thomas.”2
A few days after learning that His friend, Lazarus, was gravely ill, Jesus said to His disciples, “Let us go back to Judea.” To which someone responded” “Rabbi, the Jews were just trying to stone you, and you want to go back there?”3 To which Jesus, implying that He knew Lazarus was dead or was going to die, replied in the affirmative.
Just before they headed south to Judea, “Thomas, called Didymus, said to his fellow disciples, ‘Let us go die with him.’”4 Die with whom, Lazarus? No, to go to Jerusalem to die with Christ. This exhortation by “doubting” Thomas should not be forgotten when it comes to his insistence on seeing the Risen Lord for himself.
Could it be that Thomas understood what it might mean to die with Christ but fail to grasp what it means to rise with Him to new life? I think sometimes, as Catholics, we understand the dying bit quite well while giving short shrift to living the life of the redeemed. Like those who observe Lent as if Christ isn't already risen from the dead. We even enter Good Friday knowing how the story continues.
It was this excessive, even morbid, focus on dying that prompted Nietzsche, in the voice of Zarathustra, to say this about Christians:
Better songs would they have to sing, for me to believe in their Saviour: more like saved ones would his disciples have to appear unto me!5When Saint Paul refers to “the flesh” in our reading from Romans, he is not referring to the body. Instead, he is invoking the carnal mindedness that results from the fall. (For those who care about these things, it is the sarx/soma distinction) You know, all those natural tendencies that cause you to go against the teachings of Jesus, like holding a grudge or getting even rather than forgiving, returning evil for evil instead returning good for evil, seeing others as a threat rather than a gift, refusing to welcome the stranger, putting your good before that of anyone else. .
Because death is the result of sin, it is these fleshly tendencies, according to Paul, that cause “the body” to be “dead because of sin.” The Christian life, therefore, is not a matter of overcoming your body, which will be raised from the dead, but overcoming sin and whatever leads to you to sin so that your body can be and remain a temple of the Holy Spirit, a place where Christ dwells.6
Just He ordered those present untie Lazarus “and let him go,” Christ wants to liberate you from the bondage of sin that leads to death.7 He wants you to live and to joyfully sing better songs so that others may also believe.
Do you think Lazarus’ life was ever the same after Christ raised him from the dead?
1 Pope Benedict XVI. Encyclical Letter Deus caritas est, sec. 1. Promulgated 25 December 2025.↩
2 See John 20:24-29.↩
3 John 11:7-8.↩
4 John 11:16.↩
5 Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus Spake Zarathustra. XXIV. Second Part. "The Priests." Trans. Thomas Common.↩
6 See 1 Corinthians 6:19-20.↩
7 John 11:44.↩
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