From: John 11:19-27
The Raising of Lazarus (Continuation)
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Commentary:
1-45. This chapter deals with one of Jesus’ most outstanding miracles. The
Fourth Gospel, by including it, demonstrates Jesus’ power over death, which the
Synoptic Gospels showed by reporting the raising of the daughter of Jairus (Mat-
thew 9:25 and paragraph) and of the son of the widow of Nain (Luke 7:12).
The Evangelist first sets the scene (verses 1-16); then he gives Jesus’ conversa-
tion with Lazarus’ sisters (verses 17-37); finally, he reports the raising of Lazarus
four days after his death (verses 38-45). Bethany was only about three kilometers
(two miles) from Jerusalem (verse 18). On the days prior to His passion, Jesus
often visited this family, to which He was very attached. St. John records Jesus’
affection (verses 3, 5, 36) by describing His emotion and sorrow at the death of
His friend.
By raising Lazarus our Lord shows His divine power over death and thereby gives
proof of His divinity, in order to confirm His disciples’ faith and reveal Himself as
the Resurrection and the Life. Most Jews, but not the Sadducees, believed in the
resurrection of the body. Martha believed in it (cf. verse 24).
Apart from being a real, historical event, Lazarus’ return to life is a sign of our
future resurrection: we too will return to life. Christ, by His glorious resurrection
though He is the “first-born from the dead” (1 Corinthians 15:20; Colossians 1:
18; Revelation 1:5), is also the cause and model of our resurrection. In this His
resurrection is different from that of Lazarus, for “Christ being raised from the
dead will never die again” (Romans 6:9), whereas Lazarus returned to earthly
life, later to die again.
21-22. According to St. Augustine, Martha’s request is a good example of confi-
dent prayer, a prayer of abandonment into the hands of God, who knows better
than we what we need. Therefore, “she did not say, But now I ask You to raise
my brother to life again. [...] All she said was, I know that You can do it; if you
will, do it; it is for you to judge whether to do it, not for me to presume” (”In Ioann.
Evang.”, 49, 13). The same can be said of Mary’s words, which St. John repeats
at verse 32.
24-26. Here we have one of those concise definitions Christ gives of Himself, and
which St. John faithfully passes on to us (cf. John 10:9; 14:6; 15:1): Jesus is the
Resurrection and the Life. He is the Resurrection because by His victory over
death He is the cause of the resurrection of all men. The miracle He works in
raising Lazarus is a sign of Christ’s power to give life to people. And so, by faith
in Jesus Christ, who arose first from among the dead, the Christian is sure that
he too will rise one day, like Christ (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:23; Colossians 1;18).
Therefore, for the believer death is not the end; it is simply the step to eternal life,
a change of dwelling-place, as one of the Roman Missal’s Prefaces of Christian
Death puts it: “Lord, for your faithful people life is changed, not ended. When the
body of our earthly dwelling lies in death, we gain an everlasting dwelling place in
Heaven”.
By saying that He is Life, Jesus is referring not only to that life which begins be-
yond the grave, but also to the supernatural life which grace brings to the soul of
man when he is still a wayfarer on this earth.
“This life, which the Father has promised and offered to each man in Jesus
Christ, His eternal and only Son, who ‘when the time had fully come’ (Galatians
4:4), became incarnate and was born of the Virgin Mary, is the final fulfillment of
man’s vocation. It is in a way the fulfillment of the ‘destiny’ that God has prepared
for him from eternity. This ‘divine destiny’ is advancing, in spite of all the enigmas,
the unsolved riddles, the twists and turns of ‘human destiny’ in the world of time.
Indeed, while all this, in spite of all the riches of life in time, necessarily and inevi-
tably leads to the frontiers of death and the goal of the destruction of the human
body, beyond that goal we see Christ. ‘I am the resurrection and the life, He who
believes in Me...shall never die.’ In Jesus Christ, who was crucified and laid in the
tomb and then rose again, ‘our hope of resurrection dawned...the bright promise
of immortality’ (”Roman Missal”, Preface of Christian Death, I), on the way to
which man, through the death of the body, shares with the whole of visible crea-
tion the necessity to which matter is subject” (Bl. John Paul II, “Redemptor Ho-
minis”, 18).
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Source: “The Navarre Bible: Text and Commentaries”. Biblical text from the
Revised Standard Version and New Vulgate. Commentaries by members of
the Faculty of Theology, University of Navarre, Spain.
Published by Four Courts Press, Kill Lane, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, Ireland, and
by Scepter Publishers in the United States.
From: Luke 10:38-42
Martha and Mary Welcome Our Lord
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Commentary:
38-42. Our Lord was heading for Jerusalem (Luke 9:51) and His journey took Him
through Bethany, the village where Lazarus, Martha and Mary lived — a family for
whom He had a special affection, as we see in other passages of the Gospel (cf.
John 11:1-14; 12:1-9).
St. Augustine comments on this scene as follows: “Martha, who was arranging
and preparing the Lord’s meal, was busy doing many things, whereas Mary pre-
ferred to find her meal in what the Lord was saying. In a way she deserted her
sister, who was very busy, and sat herself down at Jesus’ feet and just listened
to His words. She was faithfully obeying what the Psalm said: ‘Be still and know
that I am God’ (Psalm 46:10). Martha was getting annoyed, Mary was feasting;
the former coping with many things, the latter concentrating on one. Both occu-
pations were good” (”Sermon”, 103).
Martha has come to be, as it were, the symbol of the active life, and Mary that
of the contemplative life. However, for most Christians, called as they are to sanc-
tify themselves in the middle of the world, action and contemplation cannot be re-
garded as two opposite ways of practising the Christian faith: an active life forget-
ful of union with God is useless and barren; but an apparent life of prayer which
shows no concern for apostolate and the sanctification of ordinary things also
fails to please God. The key lies in being able to combine these two lives, with-
out either harming the other. Close union between action and contemplation can
be achieved in very different ways, depending on the specific vocation each per-
son is given by God.
Far from being an obstacle, work should be a means and an occasion for a
close relationship with our Lord, which is the most important thing in our life.
Following this teaching of the Lord, the ordinary Christian should strive to attain
an integrated life — an intense life of piety and external activity, orientated to-
wards God, practised out of love for Him and with an upright intention, which ex-
presses itself in apostolate, in everyday work, in doing the duties of one’s state
in life. “You must understand now more clearly that God is calling you to serve
Him in and from the ordinary, material and secular activities of human life. He
waits for us every day, in the laboratory, in the operating room, in the army bar-
racks, in the university chair, in the factory, in the workshop, in the fields, in the
home and in all the immense panorama of work. Understand this well: there is
something holy, something divine, hidden in the most ordinary situations, and it
is up to each of you to discover it [...]. There is no other way. Either we learn to
find our Lord in ordinary, everyday life, or else we shall never find Him. That is
why I can tell you that our age needs to give back to matter and to the most tri-
vial occurrences and situations their noble and original meaning. It needs to re-
store them to the service of the Kingdom of God, to spiritualize them, turning
them into a means and an occasion for a continuous meeting with Jesus Christ”
(St. J. Escriva,”Conversations”, 114).
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Source: “The Navarre Bible: Text and Commentaries”. Biblical text from the
Revised Standard Version and New Vulgate. Commentaries by members of
the Faculty of Theology, University of Navarre, Spain.
Published by Four Courts Press, Kill Lane, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, Ireland, and
by Scepter Publishers in the United States.