FIFTH SUNDAY IN LENT, YEAR A

March 22, 2026

Saints Matthew and Mark, Barrington, R. I.

 

Ezekiel 37:1-14

Romans 6:16-23

John 11:17-24

 

These five Sundays in Lent have presented us with a series of striking images and contrasts. Four weeks ago, on the First Sunday, we explored the contrast between Adam’s disobedience and Christ’s obedience in the face of the temptation to sin. The following week, we considered faith as the response to God’s call to an adventure in the unknown, exemplified by the Patriarch Abraham. On the Third Sunday, we engaged with the image of water, as a sign of God’s loving providence for the Hebrews in the desert and as a symbol of God’s grace in the Lord’s dialogue with the Samaritan woman at the well. Then, last week, we considered the contrast between blindness and sight, light and darkness, in the stories of Samuel anointing David and Our Lord healing a man born blind.

 

Today’s readings culminate the series by bringing us to the most gut-wrenching contrast of all: life and death. We don’t often like to talk about death, because deep down we know the ultimate futility of all our efforts to resist it. Death is omnivorous. It gets us all in the end. But if we find that thought depressing, then today’s readings offer a powerful message of comfort, reassurance, and hope. They testify to God’s unbounded creative power: a love strong enough to bring light out of darkness and life out of death.

 

Both the Old Testament and Gospel readings begin with scenes of utter hopelessness. The prophet Ezekiel is transported in a vision to a valley littered with dry bones—likely the scene of some great battle where hundreds of corpses have been left with no one to bury them. Over the years, these bones have been picked clean by vultures and vermin, washed by the rain, dried by the wind, and bleached by the sun. The question, “Can these bones live?” seems totally rhetorical. Of course, the answer is no.

 

When Jesus arrives in Bethany, his friend Lazarus has been in the tomb for four days. The dead man’s sisters, Mary and Martha, believe that had Jesus been there, he could have prevented Lazarus’s death. But he wasn’t, and now all hope seems lost. 

 

When Jesus asks that the tomb be opened, Martha probably thinks he wants one last look, to pay his respects, and to say farewell to his friend. So, she protests: “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” That’s a huge improvement over the Revised Standard Version’s “by this time there will be an odor.” The King James Version similarly captures the graphic force of the original Greek: “By this time he stinketh.” We’re way beyond any possibility of resuscitating a still-warm corpse. By now, the terrible processes of physical decay and dissolution have set in. Better to leave the stone in place and remember Lazarus as he was.

 

So, in both the valley of dry bones and at the tomb of Lazarus, it seems that the grip of death has taken its victims past the point of no return. And yet, in both cases, the creative, life-giving power of God shows itself stronger than death.

 

Ezekiel prophesies to the bones, and a great sound of rattling fills the air as bone joins to bone, sinews and flesh miraculously regenerate, and the breath of life reanimates a host of newly resurrected bodies. Likewise, standing outside the tomb, Jesus cries, “Lazarus, come out,” and the man, four days dead, emerges to be unbound and released. Clearly, the power at work in both instances is nothing less than the same power that created the universe and brought forth life in the first place: God himself restoring and renewing his creation.

 

The message here is that if God can do this for the dry bones and for Lazarus, then he can certainly do it for us. In the Christian tradition of interpretation of this Gospel, the raising of Lazarus has a threefold significance.

 

First, the raising of Lazarus anticipates the resurrection of Jesus. Strictly speaking, what happens to Lazarus is not resurrection, because once raised from his premature death, he grows old and dies again. But the raising of Lazarus points beyond itself to something infinitely greater. And when Jesus is raised from the dead, unlike Lazarus, he’s raised to eternal life, never to die again.

 

Second, the raising of Lazarus anticipates our own resurrection. An article of Christian faith is that the resurrection of Jesus is the first fruits, the token, the pledge, of what will happen to us on the last day. Just as Jesus has the power and authority to raise Lazarus from the dead, so, on the last day, he shall raise us in what’s known as “the general resurrection.” As Jesus tells us earlier in John’s Gospel, “the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.” Or, as Saint Paul puts it in today’s reading from the Letter to the Romans, “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.”

 

And third, the raising of Lazarus points to Our Lord’s power to bestow new life, here and now. In addition to physical death, there’s such a thing as spiritual death, manifested in a life lived apart from God. Even though we may be physically alive, so often we make our life here on earth a living death, walled up in tombs of our own devising: with walls made not of stone but of self-pity, jealousy, anger, bitterness, and all the other barriers that cut us off from God and one another, and so keep us from truly enjoying the fullness of life as God intends.

 

Today’s readings proclaim that God is infinitely stronger than all the forces separating us from him. Just as Jesus called Lazarus by name, so he calls each of us, and bids us come forth from the darkness of our self-made tombs. Still he commands us to be unbound and released from all the sins and vices that cling round us like a death-shroud. Still he invites us into the light and joy of his presence. Saint Irenaeus of Lyon summed it up well in the second century when he wrote: “The life of humanity is the vision of God, and the glory of God is humanity fully alive.”

 

So, we remember that the resurrection to eternal life takes place not just in the past or in the future but also in the present. We begin to share in this resurrection even now when we turn to God in repentance and faith, finding new and eternal life in Christ.

FOURTH SUNDAY IN LENT, YEAR A

March 15, 2026

Saints Matthew and Mark, Barrington, R. I.

 

I Samuel 6:1-13

Ephesians 5:8-14

John 9: 1-13, 28-38

 

 

The great medieval theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas once noted that among our five senses, the two that most help us understand the world around us are sight and hearing. If we can’t hear what people are saying, we usually don’t know what they’re trying to tell us. [Although, of course, many deaf people are able to do amazing things with lip reading and sign language.]

 

And without sight, it becomes difficult to find our way, as we've likely experienced when the lights go out and we stumble over furniture and other obstacles in a suddenly darkened room. Along with touch, sight is the sense that most directly connects us with our physical environment. Furthermore, our ability to see helps us determine which objects in our field of vision are nearby and which are farther away, thereby putting them into proper perspective.

 

This visual sense, in turn, evokes a broader understanding of the word “perspective”: the ability to recognize which issues, concerns, problems, tasks, and goals should take priority in the big picture of our lives, and which should be pushed into the background or periphery. In this way, seeing becomes a metaphor for understanding. When we try to explain something or make a point to someone, we often end by asking, “Do you see?” In other words: “Do you understand?” The typical response is: “Yes, I see. Yes, I understand.”

 

All three of today’s scripture readings use seeing as a symbol for spiritual understanding. Throughout them runs a clear contrast between blindness and sight, light and darkness, seeing and not seeing, perceiving and not perceiving, understanding and not understanding.

 

Our Old Testament reading from First Samuel highlights the difference between how God sees and how we see. Jesse of Bethlehem brings his oldest son to the prophet Samuel, who has come to identify and anoint the next king of Israel. Samuel thinks, “Surely this is the Lord’s anointed.” But God tells Samuel, “Don’t be impressed by his appearance or his height … you look on the outward appearance, but I look on the heart.” And so Samuel remains in the dark until God finally reveals his choice of David, Jesse’s youngest son, who was considered so insignificant that he was left out in the field tending the sheep.

 

A similar contrast between darkness and light pervades the Gospel reading from Saint John. The man born blind gains his sight in more than one way. On a natural level, a miraculous healing takes place. Someone who was blind from birth sees with his physical eyes.

 

At the same time, his spiritual eyes are opened as well. The people around him naturally want to know what’s happened. Each time he tries to explain, he shows a deeper understanding of who Jesus is. First, when his neighbors ask who healed him, he answers simply, “The man called Jesus.” But later, when the Pharisees ask what he thinks about the man who opened his eyes, he answers, “He is a prophet.” Then, when the Pharisees accuse Jesus of being a sinner for healing on the Sabbath, the man born blind defends him: “If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” Because of this, they insult him and expel him from the synagogue. Finally, when he meets Jesus again, he exclaims, “Lord, I believe,” and worships him. So, he has received his sight both physically and spiritually. He has come out of the darkness of spiritual ignorance into the light of faith in Jesus as the Son of God.

 

The healing process itself is imbued with sacramental symbolism. After making a bit of mud, Jesus smears it on the man’s eyes and tells him to go and wash in the Pool of Siloam. The act of washing clearly alludes to baptism. From the earliest days, Christian baptism also included an anointing, and this story features an anointing of sorts, though with mud rather than the oil of chrism. Symbolically, the story shows us that Holy Baptism brings us out of darkness into the light of Christ. 

 

In today’s Epistle reading, Saint Paul clearly references conversion, baptism, and the baptized life when he writes to the members of the Church at Ephesus, “once you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.” His message is that those of us who have been baptized must continually grow into our new identity in Christ: “Walk as children of light . . . and try to learn what is pleasing to the Lord.”

 

In the eighteenth century, Anglican Evangelical preacher John Newton started out as the captain of a slave ship. But when he encountered Jesus, his life changed profoundly. Eventually ordained as a priest in the Church of England, he became a leader in the movement to abolish the slave trade. In his beloved hymn ‘Amazing Grace,’ he could repeat with full conviction the words: “I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.”

 

The Evangelical Anglican movement to which Newton belonged provided a healthy alternative to the eighteenth-century philosophical movement known, ironically, as the Enlightenment. Especially in France, but also in England and the American colonies, thinkers and writers of this so-called Enlightenment focused on human reason at the expense of divine revelation and religious faith. Their outlook narrowly constricted the human vision of reality.

 

We need to remember, however, that the term “enlightenment” originally belonged to the Church. The early Church called baptism “enlightenment” and referred to the newly baptized as “enlightened ones.” In the Christian tradition, enlightenment signifies the opening of our eyes to a vast new field of vision, infinitely wider and deeper than any secular philosophy can offer: a perspective that allows us to see ourselves and our world in light of the great cosmic drama of time and eternity, creation and redemption, death and resurrection to eternal life. 

 

We pray that God will continue to enlighten our minds with the truth of His Word. Jesus is the light of the world. Today’s readings invite us to enter into His Light. Then, and only then, will we truly be able to see as God intended us to see from the beginning.

 

 

 

SECOND SUNDAY IN LENT, YEAR A

March 1, 2026

Saints Matthew and Mark, Barrington, R. I.

 

Genesis 12:1-4a

Romans 4:1-5, 13-17

John 3:1-17

 

Some versions of Christianity have been criticized for making salvation too easy. Simply profess your faith in Jesus as Lord and Savior, and you’re guaranteed a place in heaven. And I suppose that if faith is reduced to canned formulas – however sincerely recited – the criticism has some merit. But today’s readings offer us a picture of faith that’s so much more challenging and exciting than that.

 

In the epistle, the Apostle Paul holds up the Patriarch Abraham as the model of faith: “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” We’ve already encountered Abraham in the Old Testament reading from Genesis, when he was still known by his original name of Abram.

 

Contemporary readers are apt to miss the profoundly shocking quality of God’s call to Abram: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation …”

In the Ancient Near East, respectable deities didn’t do things like that. The gods and goddesses of Egypt and Mesopotamia were, for the most part, conservative upholders of the social and political status quo. Such societies held a place for everyone, and everyone knew their place. Kings were kings, nobles were nobles, artisans were artisans, merchants were merchants, and slaves were slaves – all because the gods said so. You were born, lived, and died in your appointed station in life according to divine decree.

 

Against this background, God’s call to Abram represented an unheard-of upheaval of the settled social universe. Abram was called to leave behind all those things that gave people in the ancient world their deepest sense of belonging and identity: “country and kindred and father’s house.” Moreover, God’s promise to make a no-account upstart like Abram into a great nation, a blessing to all the families of the earth, likely seemed downright subversive and revolutionary.

 

Abram’s faith can be fully appreciated only in relation to this radical disruption of everything that has given his world order and stability. He leaves it all behind to venture forth into an unknown future based solely on trust in God’s promise. I once heard the biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann say that the three most shocking words in the Old Testament are those in our first reading today: “So Abram went …”

 

Thus begins the journey of faith. Christian theology has long made a distinction between two equally valid and necessary types of faith, faith-as-belief and faith-as-trust. Faith-as-belief entails intellectual assent to the teachings that the Church proposes to us as true. But faith-as-trust is more relational, implying a personal relationship with the God we believe in.

 

British theologian Alister McGrath distinguishes two additional types of faith: faith-as-commitment and faith-as-obedience. All these images of faith – belief, trust, commitment, and obedience – help us to understand the fullness of what faith really involves. But as I reflect on the story of Abram, what comes to my mind is a fifth image, namely, faith as adventure.

 

In the Book of Genesis, Abram’s life unfolds as a series of adventures that begin with his response to God’s call. An adventure, after all, is a journey into the unknown: evoking excitement and exhilaration, on one hand; fear and trembling, on the other.

 

It’s long seemed to me that an essential aspect of Christian faith, of following Jesus, is precisely this sense of adventure—of being called out on a journey into an unknown future in which we let go of the pretense of being in control of our lives and entrust ourselves to the care of a God who leads us literally God knows where.

 

In today’s Gospel, Nicodemus is called to a similar adventure of faith. This Pharisee and ruler of the people approaches Jesus under the cover of darkness for a bit of discreet theological dialogue. His opening address seems sincerely polite and respectful: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.”

 

But those words represent an attempt to pigeonhole Jesus, to fit him into the ready-made categories and definitions of Nicodemus’s pre-existing worldview. In response, Jesus takes Nicodemus on a roller coaster ride of startling new ideas and images: new birth, the Spirit blowing where it wills, a serpent lifted up in the wilderness.

 

Nicodemus is left dizzy, befuddled, bemused, and confused. He’s a teacher of Israel and yet he does not understand these things. He began by acknowledging Jesus as a teacher come from God; but Jesus ends by describing himself as so much more than Nicodemus ever imagined: the Son of God sent into the world to bestow eternal life on all who believe in him.

 

Nicodemus is thus called to leave behind the settled pattern of assumptions, beliefs, and values that has given his life order and meaning. The evidence in the rest of John’s Gospel indicates that Nicodemus did in fact become a disciple. And so, perhaps, in that nighttime encounter, Nicodemus takes the first steps on his journey into the unknown, into his own adventure of faith.

 

I remember my own first sense of being summoned to this adventure. In my early twenties, when I was a graduate student in Washington DC, a friend invited me to the local Episcopal Church, and I went. Having grown up as an agnostic in a non-churchgoing family, I hadn’t been to a Sunday church service in years. And, against all expectations, I found myself profoundly moved by the liturgy, though I couldn’t really say why. 

 

Later that afternoon, as I was remembering my experience that morning, I felt a strong desire to return to that church the following week. Combined with this powerful sense of attraction was an equally clear feeling of trepidation born of the intuition that I’d brushed into contact with a reality over which I had no control, but which certainly had the power to change my life and take it in directions I didn’t know and might not want. (Little did I know!) Despite these misgivings, I did return the following Sunday, and so began a journey that continues to this day.

 

We make a mistake if we think that faith is all the comfort of settled convictions and established certainties in a well-ordered and predictable universe. Yes, faith does involve assent to the truths that God has revealed in Scripture and entrusted to the teaching of his Church. But it’s also a journey that is exciting, fascinating, unsettling, risky, and sometimes downright scary – yet always rewarding and totally worthwhile. And in today’s readings, Abram and Nicodemus offer us two glimpses of this quality of faith as adventure.