Even Now...

One of the readings at Mass after Easter Week was the episode of Jesus’ raising of Lazarus, which is a story that I heard many times before. In previous readings of this text, my mind would recycle the familiar trope of this being a precursor to Jesus’ own resurrection.

This year was different, however. This year, I came to the readings with the resonances of Easter Triduum still fresh in my mind, in which I felt the thrilling and terrifying call to step out into the “red seas” of my life, where the waters of death threaten to surround me.

For this reason, when the Gospel was read, my mind this year focused, not on the resurrected Lazarus, but on the mourning Martha who. Upon seeing Jesus, Martha said the following:

Lord…if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But I know that even now God will grant whatever you ask of Him (Jn 11:21-22).

“Even now…”

These two words, previously ignored, now stood out as the most significant fragment for me.

I mentioned before that the call to step out into the tombs and red seas of my life was terrifying, and part of the reason was my tendency to catastrophise. With this tendency comes the fear that, should I take that first step into the tomb, God would leave me sealed in. By my own reckoning, I have only my fear that I would be left alone to face the stranglehold of one undeniable fact: the certainty of the world’s unalterable terminus of death.

The Lazarus narrative stands as a bulwark against human certainty. In this narrative, Jesus breaks the closed circuit of death, leaving in the midst of its impenetrable inevitability one small and tantalizing pinprick of redemptive doubt. It is the same kind of doubt that the prophet Joel uttered when, against the seeming certainty of the downfall of Judah, he asks:

Who knows? He may turn and relent and leave a blessing behind Him (Joel 2:14)

This week, my heart felt called to hold onto these two divinely-inspired expressions of redemptive doubt, for upon this doubt lies my entry into life, even when it appears all but certain that I am making my first steps into oblivion. These seeds of divine doubt planted by the Lord prise open the sealed tomb of human inevitability, creating an opening, however small, for the little resurrections that take place everyday, and which pave the way for the final resurrection which we profess in the Creeds, to thread its way into the tapestry of our experience.

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