Catholic Audio Media Newsletter from St. Anthony Allston, MA
Catholic Audio Media Newsletter from St. Anthony Allston, MA
Homily: What Is God Doing?
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Homily: What Is God Doing?

Many times you'll see a situation where you have kind of a diversion happening on one side, so you don't see what's going on someplace else. And, you know, magicians use that all the time. They have you focus over here so they don't see what they're doing. Over there. Well, we kind of see a little bit of that in today's Gospel. It is not really done on purpose, but if you see there's a focus in one place and then we have to look to see what else is going on.

If we were to take this whole story and reduce it to its simple, common denominator, we see that it is all about prayer. Let's look at it. Let's look to see what's going on. First, you see, a message that Martha sends to Jesus. The one that you love is ill, Jesus receives the message that's symbolic of prayer, but he doesn't respond right away and when he eventually does Lazarus has died. So, Jesus now comes and he encounters Martha. She is that disappointed person saying where were you?

Remember, he's been going around and he's been healing people. So, she expected that he would come and heal Lazarus. And I'm sure Lazarus thought the same thing and you can imagine the two sisters and Lazarus saying where is he? Why isn't he here? Where is he? What does this mean? Martha encounters him with that disappointment. If you had been here, my brother would not have died.

Jesus does something that he does to every single person He's going to do some form of healing or Miracle to get her to affirm her faith.

Do you believe, I am the resurrection life?

Yes. I do

Your brother will rise?

Yes, I do believe he will rise in the resurrection of the dead.

I am the resurrection and the life, everyone who believes in me will never die. Do you believe this? Yes, I do. That's an important line there then he goes into the town. He raises Lazarus.

He does something that is beyond what Martha asked for. She wanted him to heal Lazarus but he died. What does he do? He responded to her prayer in ways that were beyond her imagination therefore beyond what she could even ask for. And that's an important point about prayer. Karl Rahner says in the YouCats whenever we pray, we expect that the Lord hears our prayer. We have faith that the Lord hears our prayer, but the results are up to him and we have no idea what he's going to do. But we know what we asked him to do. Martha has no idea what the Lord's going to do. But what he does is well beyond anything that she expected and there's a reason for this because there's more to this and he hints that to the apostles.

He says to her. Do you believe that I am the resurrection of the life? Yes. When he raises Lazarus, he makes an intensely powerful statement to everyone.

By that action, He is the Lord of life, and by making that statement, he's making it very clear: this isn't just about Lazarus. He is showing everyone that he is the Lord of Life over death, which he will eventually conquer in a short amount of time. And by doing that, he also splits his followers and detractors right in half those who are on the fence, choose one side or the other. Those who now embrace him and embrace him even more. Those who reject him reject him even more, he splits them right down the middle. As he said he would. He says “I did not come for peace, but I've come for division.”

Those who reject him reject him so much—I use this line every Monday of Holy Week—they plan to kill Lazarus and I always say how evil do you have to be to want to kill someone who was raised from the dead? And that's what they do. Because now, their hearts have turned, totally hard, and they've turned totally against Jesus and the others have totally embraced Jesus, and that division happens. So, what does this teach us? Well, first of all, one important thing is that whole message about Jesus being the Lord of Life. How can that affect us today?

The US Catholic bishops released a letter this week, where they just made it clear that certain new processes coming out after someone, dies are not allowed for Catholics. Basically, what they're all about is allowing the body to become compost and fertilizer. It’s a process they're doing.

Catholics can't be part of that. Well why not? Jesus is the Lord of life, we resurrect body and soul and what that process is more closer to Buddhism than anything else. It goes against what we believe, he is the Lord of life and we believe in the resurrection. Secondly, we notice something else. Martha prays for something. She leaves the results up to God and God responds in a way that's beyond our imagination. We have to do the same thing when we pray. As Karl Rahner says, we leave the results up to God, but there's more to it than that.

We know the Lord is operating in our lives and in our world. One of the things that we've seen for the past 20 years is a lot of the struggles in the church. A lot of people are saying we're trying to fix this and we're trying to do this and we're doing this and they praying over and everything else that's fine. But now we have to say but what has the Lord been doing? And what is God doing now? And how is he operating now? We can't tell, but we know what's happening, which is what Martha and Mary came to realize.

Now we two can wait in expectation. What is the Lord going to do and what is he doing now? But whatever it is, it's in his hands and we trust him. So we see all of that in this powerful message, this powerful story and as I said there's a lot more to it than simply The Story of Lazarus. There's a whole message in there about prayer.

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