Fifth Sunday of Lent 2020
Last Friday evening in Rome, Pope Francis presided over what was named, An Extraordinary Moment of Prayer in which he blessed the city and the world, a gesture ordinarily reserved for Easter Sunday and Christmas and the election of a new pope. In so doing, he reflected on the situation that has now gripped the world.
“The storm [in which we find ourselves] exposes our vulnerability and uncovers those false and superfluous certainties around which we have constructed our daily schedules, our projects, our habits and priorities. It shows us how we have allowed to become dull and feeble the very things that nourish, sustain and strengthen our lives and our communities. The tempest lays bare all our packaged ideas and forgetfulness of what nourishes our people’s souls; all those attempts that anesthetize us with ways of thinking and acting that supposedly ‘save’ us, but instead prove incapable of putting us in touch with our roots and keeping alive the memory of those who have gone before us . . . In this storm the façade of those stereotypes with which we camouflaged our egos, always worrying about our image, has fallen away . . .” [1]
In other words, what Pope Francis is inviting us to consider is that in the dramatic circumstances in which the world now finds itself, something must die. The times call us away from forgetfulness to a new mindfulness. “We have gone ahead at breakneck speed,” the pope observes, “feeling powerful and able to do anything. Greedy for profit, we let ourselves get caught up in things, and lured away by haste . . . we carried on regardless, thinking we would stay healthy in a world that was sick.”
The death of our previous ways of being, and even ways of relating, invites us to something new. “You are calling us to seize this time of trial as a time of choosing,” says Pope Francis. “It is not the time of your judgement, but of our judgement: a time to choose what matters and what passes away, a time to separate what is necessary from what is not. It is a time to get our lives back on track with regard to you, Lord, and to others.” This is a time for self-reflection, in other words, like no other.
The opportunity of isolation is solitude which is something quite different. Solitude, in a spiritual sense, is something we choose in order to think more deeply about ourselves and the world. It enables to see and hear what our true priorities are, what motivates us most deeply, what we value most importantly. If we take seriously the pope’s call to see this as a time of choosing, then our physical distancing need not become a tomb in which we decay. It can become a place of new life.
As the Gospel this Sunday in Lent puts before us, Jesus comes that we may have life and have life in all its fullness. He is passionately interested in all that robs us of that life. We may have a great fear about what threatens to entomb us, but he does not. He goes to that place ahead of us and looks at it squarely in the face. He has one wish: that the place of death, however that deathliness be indicated, be transformed into a place of life, vitality, promise and possibility. This is the mystery of the Resurrection that we will celebrate in a fortnight’s time, albeit in such a different way this year: the place we would expect death and decay, fear and denial, has become transformed into a place of life and unimagined possibility, a place of hope and new beginnings. The Easter celebration only makes sense in our life when, with courage and confidence, we face the places of death in our own life and begin to wonder about the flipside: the life and possibility that await there to be called forth into the light of day. The celebration of Easter this year, coming as it does in the very midst of the crisis with which we are confronted, is a dramatic call in this historic moment. Something must die, in order that something might live.
In the death of all that is usual for us, and in the silence, something new can rise, something new is being called forth. As he shared last Friday, “Embracing the cross means finding the courage to embrace all the hardships of the present time, abandoning for a moment our eagerness for power and possessions in order to make room for the creativity that only the Spirit is capable of inspiring. It means finding the courage to create new spaces where everyone can recognize that they are called, and to allow new forms of hospitality, fraternity and solidarity.” In other words, we must not cease as followers of the risen Lord, the Lord of life, to look for new opportunities. “Embracing the Lord in order to embrace hope,” says the pope, “that is the strength of faith, which frees us from fear and gives us hope.”
What must die is fear; what must rise is hope. “The Lord asks us from his cross to rediscover the life that awaits us, to look towards those who look to us, to strengthen, recognize and foster the grace that lives within us. Let us not quench the wavering flame that never falters, and let us allow hope to be rekindled.” In Pope Francis’ words, let us not “deprive ourselves of the antibodies we need to confront adversity.” And for us, our most effective antibody, in a spiritual sense, is the hope we have been given in Christ Jesus of a new world – a new world that we can choose to create out of the challenges that are before us.
In this Sunday’s Gospel, to the dead Lazarus, Jesus cries out, “Come forth!” This dead Lazarus is in each of us. It is the world we have known. As Lent comes to a close and as we move into the great festival of Easter let us hear the call made to each of us now and to our whole world.
[1] Pope Francis, Homily at Extraordinary Moment of Prayer, Sagrato of St Peter’s Basilica (27 March 2020), http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies/2020/documents/papa-francesco_20200327_omelia-epidemia.html
