Today, we mark the 5th Sunday of Lent. We are getting closer to the end of our Lenten journey. In just a week, we will hear the Passion of our Lord on Palm Sunday, as we enter into Holy Week, one of the most profound experiences we Christians have in our entire liturgical year.
Today, in our Gospel, we come face to face with Lazarus, a beloved friend of Jesus. Lazarus has been sealed away in the tomb for 4 days when Jesus arrives in Bethany. At Jesus’ command, “Come out, Lazarus!”, Lazarus comes out of the tomb, with his hands and feet all tied up with strips of material, with a cloth covering his face. “Unbind him, let him go free!” Jesus commands.
We have been searching for God in all things during our Lenten journey. In one of his books, No Man Is an Island, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton had this to say about seeking God: “In all His acts God orders all things, whether good or evil, for the good of those who know Him and seek Him and who strive to bring their own freedom under obedience to His divine purpose. All that is done by the will of God in secret is done for His glory and for the good of those whom He has chosen to share in His glory.” So if God orders all things for the good of those who seek him, as we strive to be obedient to him, how do we approach this when we feel that we are bound up like Lazarus in our lives? Sometimes, the things that bind us are tied to the circumstances of our lives, while other times the things that bind us up are things of our own choosing.
I remember talking to a prison inmate who had been battling a terrible drug addiction for many years, whose life revolved around getting his next fix of heroin or methamphetamines. He told me that his life was dark and ugly all the time. Even though he had a really good job in the tech industry, his addictions were always dragging him down. He tried to break free from this horrible life again and again, but he always returned to the drugs, even if he was clean for a while. In the midst of that darkness, he said that he would pass by a Catholic church on his way to work. Even though he was not Catholic, he said that in the midst of his ugly, ugly life, he would stop in at the church to pray, one of the few signs showing him that God was still there in all that was wrong and broken in his life. Although he definitely did not want to be in prison, he did not want to be bound and constrained by the time he served in a correctional institution, he admitted that being sent to prison was a wake-up call that probably saved his lives. I told this inmate like I have told countless other inmates that there are worse prisons we can put ourselves into compared to serving times as a prisoner behind the bars in one of the state’s correctional institutions.
When I was a missionary I worked with a missionary model called liberation theology. Through the reading of the Exodus story in the Old Testament, the poor whom I worked with in the jungles of South America identified with the people of Israel who were enslaved in Egypt. God led the Israelites out of slavery and liberated them, bringing them to the promised land and to a covenant with him. God liberated these slaves on many different levels: on spiritual, economic, political, psychological, social, and religious levels just to name a few. As a missionary, we studied Scripture with the villagers whom I served, we all shared our stories, our reality, and our dreams, and then we discerned where God was calling our community to action. Agricultural projects, a rice milling machine, a distance learning high school, a carpentry workshop and a sewing workshop – these were some of the projects we started with in these communities in the jungle to give them hope and to help them earn a living, to gain confidence in themselves and to grow on their journey of faith.
We can bound up in a lot of different ways. Sometimes we can physically break through those boundaries, and in other ways, we can break free on other levels. As a missionary, I had to overcome a lot of adversity and struggle, not the least was sickness and violence. Yet, through my missionary work and through all I had to endure, on many levels, God liberated me as well. How are we bound up – and how is God leading us in the situation we are in right now? How do we search for God and find him in those things that tie us down?
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