Over
the past few weeks, several people have approached me to share a common
frustration. You see, they live good
lives; they go to church; they pray, but they still seem to be challenged by
sickness or death in their families, financial trouble or great disappointments
of one kind or another. When these
difficulties befall them, they pray all the more. But sometimes things still don’t turn out as
they had hoped, so they get frustrated with God. It’s probably safe to say that we’ve all
shared that frustration at different times in our lives, times when we’ve
considered God’s promise of eternal happiness, turned our eyes to the heavens
and asked, “What are you waiting for?” In
today’s Gospel, Martha and Mary shared that frustration. Jesus provides the answer.
In our Gospel passage,
we hear the familiar story of the raising of Lazarus. Lazarus is dead, and Jesus brings him back to
life. But the story isn’t that
simple. When Jesus learns that Lazarus
is ill, he doesn’t rush off to cure Lazarus, as we would expect. He does something very strange, almost
preposterous. “[H]e remained for two
days in the place where he was.” Lazarus,
Martha and Mary are Jesus’ friends and disciples, but when they call on him in
their hour of need, Jesus waits. What
was he waiting for? Not surprisingly,
Martha and Mary greet Jesus with frustration and disappointment. But interestingly, Martha’s and Mary’s
identical statements of disappointment, are also “implicit acts of faith.”[1] “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would
not have died.” Martha and Mary called
on Jesus because they believed that
Jesus is the Son of God. They were
disappointed with him because he didn’t do what they expected him to do, but
they wouldn’t have had any expectations of him at all, if they hadn’t believed
that Jesus was the Messiah in the first place.
I think there’s a little bit of Martha and Mary in
each one of us. “Who hasn’t felt that
God wasn’t doing what God should be
doing in a painful situation?”[2] We serve the Lord, we listen to his word, so we’re
disappointed when God doesn’t seem to answer when out of the depths of our
sorrow we cry like the psalmist: “Lord,
hear my voice!” (Psalm 130: 1-2) Like Martha and Mary, our disappointment
arises from an implicit faith – from our hope and expectation that Christ will save us. We want
God’s promises to be true, and we want
to believe that God will deliver. Still,
we just can’t help asking, “What are you waiting for?”
Such is the challenge of the spiritual life. God never stops calling us to life in the
spirit, as St. Paul tells us in our second reading. God calls us to life in the spirit because faith
in God gives us the hope of eternal happiness.
“When we believe that God is as Jesus said, we become absolutely sure of
his love . . ., [and] we enter into a new relationship with life.”[3]
Believing that God is love gives purpose
and meaning to our lives. Believing that
God provides all that we need gives us comfort and security. Believing that God “will open [our] graves
and have [us] rise from them,” (Ezekiel 37:12) frees us from fearing illness
and death. Believing that Jesus is the resurrection
and the life gives us the remedy for all of our disappointments. Jesus is the bridge between the spiritual and physical
worlds. Through Christ’s Spirit dwelling
in us, we draw on the eternal joy and peace of the heavens as we face our
earthly challenges. “Christian
spirituality is neither escape from real life nor denial of its pain but a way
of living that is transfigured even now
by the resurrection and the life, which is Jesus.”[4] Even in their grief and disappointment,
Martha and Mary believed in Jesus, and they had hope: a hope that “keeps [us] from discouragement; sustains
[us] during times of abandonment; [and] opens up [our] heart in expectation of
eternal beatitude.”[5]
It’s not always easy to believe. In a world dominated by rationalism, we’re
encouraged to ignore spirituality and religion – to ignore God’s call to
eternal happiness – and we’re scorned and ridiculed when we dare to express
religious belief in the public forum.
We’re told that believing in God is chasing a fiction, and when God
doesn’t act the way we want or expect him to act, we begin to believe it. The sad result is that more and more people eschew
religion and live in fear – fear of disappointment, fear of illness and fear of
death – “the fear [that] is characteristic of a godless life.”[6]
Faced with the choice of denying God and living in
fear, or believing in God and living in hope, one would think we’d all choose to
believe. But not everyone does, and even
those of us who do, aren’t always steadfast in our faith because in making that
choice, we have to deal with the Martha and Mary problem: God doesn’t always act the way we want or
expect him to, so we become frustrated and disappointed. When we choose God, we have to accept that
God’s ways aren’t necessarily our ways – that God acts in God’s time and in
God’s way – and that God’s ways are the best and the only ways to live. To have faith, we have to trust God when he
tells us, “I have promised, and I will do it.”
(Ezekiel 37: 14) God always
delivers, but he does so in his time and in his way.
Readings: Ezekiel 37: 12-14; Psalm 130; Romans 8: 8-11; John 11: 1-45
[1]
Sandra M. Schneiders, Written That You
May Believe: Encountering Jesus in the
Fourth Gospel (New York, The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2003) at 181.
[2]
James Martin, Jesus: A Pilgrimage (New York, HarperCollins
Publishers, 2014) at 322.
[3]
William Barclay, The Gospel of John, vol. 2 (Louisville, Westminster John Knox Press, 1975) at 95.
[4]
Schneiders at 179 (emphasis added).
[5]
Catechism of the Catholic Church
1818.
[6] Barclay at 95.
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