We lost a good priest last night. A good and gentle shepherd with a pastors heart, formed after the model of Christ, the Good Shepherd. And our hearts broke when he died.
For in Bishop George Rueger we met Christ. In his paternal care for us we caught a glimpse of the love which flows from the heart of God. He was an alter Christus for us and for me.
Nearly sixty years ago, in the old Church of our Lady of Lourdes, the young father Rueger, in his first assignment as a curate, gave me my First Holy Communion. A couple of years ago, just a few feet from where I stand, I handed the chalice with the Precious Blood to this good priest, who looked up at me and said "Pal, I gave you your First Communion, now you're giving me one of my last!”
Yesterday we buried Father Kelly, the last of four priests to die since the first of the year. It’s as if God understood that we needed to hear today’s Gospel, where we heard about the family of Lazarus, with whom Jesus was a friend. Now we don’t often think about Jesus as having friends. We thing of him as teacher or miracle worker, but remember that he was fully human and fully divine, and an indispensable part of being fully human is to love and be loved, which is why Saint John tells us simply that “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.”
So his good friend Lazarus is dying, and Jesus hears about it while he is a long way off proclaiming the Kingdom of God and he cannot get there until four days after the burial. When he arrives he is met on the road by Lazarus’ sister.
Now there’s something poignant in those six little words we heard a couple minutes ago: “she went out to meet him.” I suppose that lacking a “Find my Friends” app on her IPhone, that means that Martha must have been staring down the road, longing for Jesus to arrive for four days! After burying her brother she just stands there, waiting for Jesus to arrive, and figuring out what she is going to say to him.
And when she runs out to him, she does not cry, or greet or embrace Jesus or even tell him about her brothers last minutes. No, she boldly looks into his eyes and says, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” And even though she quickly follows this with a profession of faith, her first words are stark and fearsome and can be read in an angry frame: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
Any one of us who has buried someone we love knows the feeling. Why Lord? Where were you when I needed you? Why one so young or so good or whom I needed so much. Where were you?
But Martha is not the only one experiencing deep emotions, for in two remarkable phrases we gain a singular insight into the inner life of the Lord. Jesus, we are told became “perturbed and deeply troubled,” and then when he sees the grave of Lazarus his friend, John uses just two words: “Jesus wept.” Not cried, wept. That gasping, choking, overpowering cry from a broken heart. He wept.
But then Jesus does something that made no sense. He commanded them to take away the stone from the front of his tomb. Martha objects that “there will be a stench,” his rotting flesh will smell. But Jesus asks Martha and me and you and every living person infected with thanatophobia a simple question: "Did I not tell you that if you believe you will see the glory of God?”
So they took away the stone and Jesus calls Lazarus by name. And Lazarus rises from the dead.
Simple as that. Through the fog of fear and pain and sickness unto death, by the bedside of everyone you have ever loved, in the face of every death that has made you weep, before every deadly fear there stands Jesus, tears running down his very human face, calling out the name of the one he loved, calling him out from death to life. As he will one day, when he calls out everyone whom you have loved, calls them by name, calls them out from death to life.
“Do you believe this?” he asked Martha. Do you believe that I am the Son of the Living God through whom all things were made, the Resurrection and the life who will come to judge the living and the dead and call them out from their graves?
Yes, Lord, she responds, “I do believe.” And so do we.
