Fifth Sunday in Lent 2026
The prophet Ezekiel, the last of the four major prophets in the OT, was unique. He was of the four spokesmen for God the most visionary. From him we have the vision of Israel in exile as a great field of dry human bones, of the glory of God as a kind of winged creature flying out of Jerusalem, and of the healing grace of God as water flowing from the Temple to make the Dead Sea fresh. We hear Ezekiel’s prophecy over the field of dry bones today as “Then you shall know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves and have you rise from them, O my people!”
Certainly, these prophecies must have come to mind when Jesus stood outside the tomb of His friend Lazarus, and, in a loud voice, cried “Lazarus, come out!” Christ’s disciples had seen so many impossible healings and signs over three years, we can imagine that they realized Jesus was divine when they saw the dead man hop or fly out of the burial place, revived even after he had begun to stink from decomposition.
And Ezekiel was a master mime. On several occasions he acted out what the Lord wanted to say to His people and let his audience draw conclusions about their moral lives or the history of their nation in exile. Because Ezekiel was the only major prophet to be dragged off to Babylon in that horrible first captivity five hundred ninety-seven years before Christ.
When Ezekiel promised that the Lord would open the Jews’ graves and raise them, he made sure to teach that the spirit of God would make this happen. “I will put my spirit in you that you may live, and I will settle you upon your own land.” This was God’s promise to everyone who had faith and obeyed Torah, the law of the covenant. It would be a new creation, even better than when God had breathed upon the clay He had fashioned from earthen dirt and brought Adam to life in the beginning.
Our psalmist today stands in prayer much like the exiles. He is in a bad way because of his sin and the offenses of his people. But he also knows that YHWH is a God, the only God, who forgives those who repent of sin. All who pray this psalm must realize that each of us has sinned and our only hope is in God’s merciful forgiveness. Thus we watch for signs of that mercy like night watchmen, who fear the perils of night, but wait for the light of dawn to relieve them of their fear.
St. Paul has written in his letters to the churches many passages worth memorizing, and today we hear a little of his eighth chapter to Rome. But first we need to parse this Greek word translated “flesh.” Paul tells us “Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. But you are not in the flesh; on the contrary, you are in the spirit, if only the Spirit of God dwells in you.”
Take a second to touch somebody else’s arm or hand. (Don’t be fresh!) That is not “flesh” in St. Paul’s vocabulary. The Gk word is s??? sarx. The material part of all of us is called our “body,” s?µa soma. When Paul runs down the “flesh,” he is reminding us that it’s one of the two tendencies operating in humans. It’s the tendency toward evil. Unredeemed men and women tend to be driven by sinful, selfish tendencies like pride, lust, greed, laziness. Redeemed people are full of the spirit, p?e?µa pneuma, which raises us up to good thoughts and deeds. Paul is encouraging us to recognize that we live in Christ by the same spirit who raised Him from the dead. That same spirit will, at the Second Coming, reunite our souls with our risen bodies so that we can live in Christ, in the Blessed Vision of God, forever. That sounds like the call of the Lenten season: turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel.
When we read the Gospels, we may occasionally ask ourselves the question, “who were the friends of Jesus?” We read about His relatives like James, and there were His disciples, attracted to Him by His teachings and signs. But He didn’t seem to have many plain ol’ friends like Martha and Mary and Lazarus, who would put Him up when He made pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and who are prominent in today’s Gospel. Bear in mind that Jesus was on His final pilgrimage to the center of Jewish worship, but that was the center of resistance to His message and his person. He had stopped for a time on the other side of the Jordan River and got an urgent message from Martha and Mary: “Master, the one you love is ill.”
Jesus used this situation to begin the sixth of the seven signs in John’s Gospel that prove His divine origin and lay the foundation for the sacraments, especially Baptism and the Eucharist. As He often did, He began the process with a profound teaching: ‘When Jesus heard this he said, “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.”’ He waited another two days and then mustered His disciples to cross the Jordan and go to His friends’ home. His disciples were somewhat confused by this, so He said: “Our friend Lazarus is asleep, but I am going to awaken him.” He clarified, “Lazarus has died. And I am glad for you that I was not there, that you may believe. Let us go to him.” So they went to Bethany and found that Lazarus had been in the tomb for nearly a week.
The scene in Bethany is emotionally charged. Jesus had to listen twice to the sisters’ accusations: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” But He also heard Martha’s encouragement: ““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."
"Do you believe this?” And He heard her profession of faith in Him: “Yes, Lord. I have come to believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world.”
Jesus witnessed everyone from Bethany and Jerusalem weeping and wailing over their loss of a brother and good friend. St. John, who was there with Jesus, writes that He was tarasso, deeply troubled, and that He wept with human sorrow.
Notice that there are some skeptics present, who said, “Could not the one who opened the eyes of the blind man have done something so that this man would not have died?” But Jesus knew that human minds and hearts are burdened by the fleshly tendencies we all inherited from our first parents. Those tendencies operate against our yearning for God’s power and glory to be manifest.
Jesus then acted so that anyone who was present or just heard or read the story of the day would be forced to make a decision about Jesus and His claims. He went to the tomb and, despite the protestations of the practical friends around Him, told the workers to roll the tombstone back. He even provided a commentary: “Did I not tell you that if you believe you will see the glory of God?”
He prayed to the Father and cried out in a loud voice, ““Lazarus, come out!” Brought back to life by the power of the Word, Lazarus comes out and is released from his burial shroud. The sign Jesus had worked provoked one of two possible outcomes. Many of the Jews believed in Him and formed the community that would come together in faith after Christ’s Resurrection and Ascension.
But some of the Jews and Gentiles heard the story, refused to believe, saw Jesus as a threat to their self-interest and power, and actively conspired to kill both Jesus and Lazarus. We’ll hear that part of the story over the next couple of weeks, the holiest in our Church year.
All of us should pay attention and focus on our own decision. Do we really believe in the Paschal mystery of Christ, or not?
