Lent 5 (Third Sunday in Corona Time)

Readings: Ezekiel 37:12-14; Romans 8:8-11; John 11:1-45

As we continue our great national experiment
in “social distancing” and “self-quarantining,”
some of us might be feeling
as if we know just a little
what it meant for Lazarus
to be confined in his tomb.
It not simply that we are entombed
within the walls of our homes
for most of the day;
it is the loss of the moments,
casual or calculated,
of embodied human contact
with which our days were formerly filled:
handshakes or hugs of greeting,
lunches with friends or colleagues,
friends visiting in our homes,
dinners out in crowded restaurants,
even face-to-face meetings to conduct business.
And for Christians, of course, there is the loss
of gathering for worship as a visible body,
shoulder to shoulder,
offering praise to the holy Trinity
and receiving into our bodies
the living flesh and blood of the Lord Jesus.

The tragedy of death is not simply
the cessation of biological functioning.
It is also the fracturing of human community,
the loss of bodily connection among people.
The poignancy of the loss of Lazarus
is conveyed in John’s Gospel
not by his dead body,
which lies hidden from sight,
but by the grief of his sisters,
who display for us the raw wound
of human connection torn apart by death.
We see it even in Jesus himself,
who weeps at Lazarus’s tomb
in witness to the devastation that death wreaks
upon the bonds of human love.
Even for those who believe,
as the Church’s liturgy for the dead proclaims,
that for Christ’s faithful “life is changed not ended,”
who believe that we are still united in love
with those who have entered into death’s mystery,
there is still the loss of that day-to-day contact
that lies at the heart of grief.
The resurrection that will restore to us
the embodied presence of the other
lives in us as hope, not as possession.

And so too during this time of pandemic:
even as we know that the lives of our friends and families
continue while we are separated from them,
even as we know that we can still communicate at a distance
and that this time of separation will one day end,
there is for now the loss of that ordinary embodied presence
in which our lives had once been immersed.
In some small way,
in this time of enclosure
we are tasting the loss that death brings,
the confinement and constriction of life,
the absence of embodied presence to others.

This past week the Church celebrated
the feast of the Annunciation,
which draws our attention
to another kind of enclosure
and another kind of embodied presence:
the Son of God coming to dwell
for nine months within Mary’s womb.
Unlike the tomb,
which cuts us off from bodily presence,
the womb is a place of most intimate presence
as the child develops within the mother’s body;
because of this intimacy
the womb is a place of life and growth,
not of death and decay.
And we might say that—
by way of anticipation in the raising of Lazarus,
and supremely and for all time
in his own rising from the dead—
Jesus transforms the tomb into a womb,
a place of death into the place
from which life springs forth.
What we celebrate at Easter,
and anticipate this Sunday in the story of Lazarus,
is precisely this transformation.

I suppose it might be a nice bit of symbolism
if we could, as some have suggested,
choose Easter as the date on which
we would end this experiment in confinement.
It would be nice if Easter Sunday could be the day
on which we emerged from our exile
to be restored to bodily presence with each other.
But to do this would not only be to foolishly ignore
the realities of this global pandemic,
it would also be to deny the ways in which
the risen Lord is already transforming
our time of confinement from tomb into womb.
To limit our contact with others for their sake
and the sake of the common good
is already to embody life in the midst of death.

I have been amazed at the level of concern and creativity
that people have shown in responding to this crisis,
from formerly technologically inept pastors
streaming messages of hope to their flocks
to people sewing protective masks at home
to support depleted hospital stores.
For the love of God poured into our hearts
cannot be confined by walls or held at a distance.
The grace of God can transform this time of confinement
through the same power by which Jesus called Lazarus forth.
Let grace grow in us as Christ grew within Mary’s womb
and let us be reborn by the power of Easter
to lives of greater faith, greater hope, and greater love.
And may God have mercy on us all.

Lent 4 (Second Sunday in Corona Time)

Readings: 1 Samuel 16:1b, 6-7, 10-13a; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41

It is typical of the irony
that pervades John’s Gospel
that it is not the man born blind
who cannot see,
but rather the other people in the story.
They cannot see Jesus for who he really is:
the power of God made flesh.
The blind man, however, sees divine power
at work in his healing.
Just as God, in the beginning,
scooped up the clay of the earth
and formed Adam and breathed life into him,
so too Jesus takes clay
and rubs it into the blind man’s eyes
to heal and restore him to fulness of life.
The bystanders, however, cannot see this;
they are blind to the presence in their midst
of the life-giving God.

But they are not simply blind
to the divine reality before them;
they are equally blind
to the human reality of the man Jesus heals.
One of the odd details in John’s telling of the story
is the confusion, after Jesus has healed the man,
over whether this is in fact the same person
who had begged for alms in their streets,
or someone else entirely.
Perhaps they had never really seen the man.
Perhaps they had seen simply a blind beggar—
not a person
but a category of people:
“the unfortunate” or “the disabled”
or maybe “the annoying” or “the threatening.”
The language used by the people in the story
is revealing: “His neighbors
and those who had seen him earlier as a beggar
said, ‘Isn’t this the one who used to sit and beg?’”
Notice that they do not identify him
as a particular person who is known and named,
but as a faceless member of some collective group:
the beggars or the blind.
Having seen him before simply as a blind beggar,
they cannot now recognize him
when he is no longer blind and begging.

Jesus, however, can truly see the man,
for he sees with divine vision.
As we are told in the first book of Samuel,
“Not as man sees does God see,
because man sees the appearance
but the LORD looks into the heart.”
Jesus’s love and compassion for the man
is not a generic love for those that suffer;
it is the LORD’S highly particular love
for this man and his unique story of suffering
and it is this love that heals.

We who are Christians are called to have
what Saint Paul calls the “mind” of Christ;
to see with what we might call the eyes of Christ.
We are called to see the unique story of each person,
to have compassion on the unique suffering of each person,
to love with a love that is not vague and generic
but concrete and specific.
This is, of course, a challenge.
One of the ways in which our hearts
keep the world’s horrors at bay
is not to focus too clearly on the details,
to keep the pain of the physical suffering
and social marginality of others
confined in large categories:
the disabled, the poor,
the unemployed, the dispossessed.
But everyone in those categories
suffers the horrors of the world
in their own particular way,
a way that cries out
for our recognition
and our compassion.

The difficulty of hearing and answering those cries
has been driven home in the past week,
as we have seen the unfolding
of the corona virus pandemic
around the world.
Over three-thousand deaths in China,
nearly five-thousand deaths in Italy,
over fifteen-hundred deaths in Iran.
These numbers will grow larger,
and may grow much larger,
and in order to manage our anxiety
we can be tempted to turn those deaths
into abstractions,
faceless numbers to feed into
some calculation of risk and benefit.
Some of us even speak
of acceptable levels of death
that we should tolerate to ensure
that life can continue as usual
and our economy remain healthy.
This is a view, I think, that requires us
to blind ourselves to the truth
that each person lost has a story
and the loss of each
is an immense tragedy.
One of the ways we seek to manage our fear
is to let our vision of this horror lose focus,
to make ourselves blind to the fact
that behind these numbers
are real people who suffered:
someone’s mother or father,
brother or sister,
son or daughter,
friend,
co-worker,
teacher,
student.

The human mind simply cannot take it in,
and we can perhaps be forgiven
for retreating into abstractions.
But not as man sees does God see,
for the LORD looks into the heart.
God knows the story of each one who has died,
just as Jesus knew the story of the blind man.
And to believe your story known by God
is to hope for a share in God’s eternity.
And we who bear the name Christian
are called to see as Christ sees
is some small measure;
we are called to not let the world’s pain
go out of focus,
but to confront that pain
by concrete acts of compassion
by which those who suffer
can know themselves as seen.
We do not have God’s capacity
to look into the heart of each and every person,
but we must still resist the impulse
to let their deaths become abstractions.
Look at the numbers and remember:
each is a person.
We are called to mourn the loss
of each one who has died,
and to hope for each one that greatest of hopes—
that God will breathe once more
the breath of life eternal into lifeless clay
and open their eyes to see God’s face.
And may God have mercy on us all.

Lent 3 (First Sunday in Corona Time)

Readings: Exodus 17:3-7; Romans 5:1-2, 5-8; John 4:5-42

Among the many new things that the coronavirus
has brought into our lives
is the phrase “social distancing.”
This is the term for one of the key prescriptions
for slowing the spread of the coronavirus
to the point where cases of Covid-19
do not overwhelm our medical facilities.
The idea is that you literally “keep your distance”
from other people to reduce the chance
of being infected or infecting others.

In today’s Gospel, which tells of Jesus’ encounter
with the Samaritan woman at the well,
we hear of a different kind of social distancing.
The woman is surprised
to have Jesus ask her for a drink
because, we are told,
“Jews use nothing in common with Samaritans.”
Jews and Samaritans viewed each other as heretics
who practiced deviant forms of the religion of Israel.
But more than that, Jews considered Samaritans
to be in a sense “unclean,”
sources of a kind of religious contagion.
For the Jews, social contact with a Samaritan
was a risk to one’s religious purity.
This is why the Samaritan woman is so shocked
to have Jesus ask her for water;
it is as if you asked to drink from the water bottle
of someone with a deadly disease.
This sort of social distancing sees the other,
at best, as one beyond my sphere of moral concern
and, at worst, as a threat to be contained or eliminated.
It is a phenomenon that is still with us today,
manifest in divisions of race and economic class,
of nations and generations.
We see it when people act as if
the pain and struggle of those who are different
must be kept at a distance,
lest they infect us.

What do these two kinds of social distancing
have to do with each other?
The first sort is a necessary and life-saving measure
to slow the progress of this disease.
But the second sort of social distancing,
the kind that separated Jews and Samaritans,
the kind that separates races and classes in our own day,
rather than being a life-saving measure,
is a death-dealing way of life.
It is death-dealing to those we keep at a distance
because it seeks to make us immune to their struggles
and deaf to their cries of suffering.
It is death-dealing to us as well,
because it requires us to harden our hearts,
to deny any natural compassion for
and solidarity with our fellow human beings.
It makes us less human,
less fully alive with the love that is God.

Jesus breaks through
this death-dealing social distancing
by the simple act of asking
the Samaritan woman for a drink of water.
Jesus bridges the social distance
between Jew and Samaritan,
breaking down the dividing wall
that separated them,
so that he can offer her the water of eternal life.
He does this not only for the Samaritan woman
but for all of us who were far from God through sin,
our hearts hardened to both God and neighbor.
Paul writes in today’s second reading,
“while we were still sinners Christ died for us.”
In Jesus Christ, God has opened his heart to us
and crossed the distance separating us,
and he calls us to do the same.

So we can distinguish between
the social distancing that we must undertake
in these extraordinary circumstances
and the social distancing that we must overcome
by throwing caution to the wind
and stepping across the dividing lines
of race and class and age and nationality.
Lent is a time to examine our consciences
and return to the Lord;
this public health crisis also calls for us
to examine our consciences.
I may be confident that I am healthy enough
to carry on my life as usual
and run the risk of getting sick with Covid-19,
but do I spare a thought for the elderly
or the physically frail person
with whom I come in contact
and whom I might infect?
I may feel a sense of relief
at the closing my children’s school
as a measure to protect them from infection,
but do I spare a thought for
the single working parent who will be left
without childcare if the schools close?
I may not worry about my ability
to receive excellent medical care
should I fall ill,
but do I spare a thought for the uninsured
or for those in medically underserved areas?
The death-dealing social distancing
that runs throughout our society
makes it easy to think only of ourselves
and to make ourselves blind and deaf
to those who are most vulnerable.

Our Catholic tradition calls us to care
not only for our individual well-being,
but for the common good of all people.
Now is the acceptable time to embrace that tradition.
It is not only prudent that we adopt practices
of physical social distancing in order to slow
the spread of a potentially deadly disease,
but it is something that love demands.
And it is imperative that we
who are followers of Jesus
reject the social distancing that blinds us
to the needs of those most vulnerable.
Moses struck the rock in the desert
with his wooded staff
and life-giving water flowed forth.
In this season of Lent,
in this time of crisis,
may the wood of the cross
strike our stony hearts
so that the life-giving water of God’s love
may flow forth from us
to quench the thirst
of those most in need.
And may God have mercy on us all.