The Fifth Sunday in Lent, March 22, 2026

The Gospel readings for the Second through the Fourth Sundays in Lent are taken from the Gospel of John. In John, Jesus is frequently shown teaching by means of word-play. That is, Jesus uses a word or phrase that can be understood in more than one way. The person Jesus is speaking with takes the word in the easy and obvious sense; but then Jesus comes back with the other, more unexpected sense. The conceptual gap between those two senses creates what in process thought is called a “proposition”: a novel combination of experiential elements, a “tale that might perhaps be told,” a “lure for feeling.” The proposition invites the learner to make a leap of imagination between meanings – and in that creative act of imagination, the Spirit can join to co-create in the learner a new wisdom, a new consciousness, a direct experience of God’s presence and God’s gift. In these Lenten Gospel readings, Jesus interacts with four different characters, in each case using a word-play to bring them into a deeper, more life-giving relationship with himself.

The key teaching element in this story of the raising of Lazarus comes when Jesus proposes to Martha radically expanded meanings of the words “resurrection” and “life.”

Textual scholarship by Elizabeth Schader has called into question whether it is “Martha” who speaks to Jesus here, or whether the text originally said “Maria.” For our purposes here, it is more important to look at how Jesus plays on the meanings of the two key words than to know with whom exactly he is speaking. I will call her “Martha” throughout, in keeping with the received text and the lectionary translation.

Martha’s brother Lazarus has fallen ill, and she and her sister Mary (as the received text says) send word to Jesus, believing that Jesus will be able to heal their brother. But Jesus doesn’t come right away. In fact, Jesus delays for several days, so that by the time he does arrive, Lazarus has already died, and has been dead for four days.

That number of days is a key element in the story: in common belief of that time, it was held that the soul of a dead person would linger near the body for three days, but after three days the soul would begin to dissolve away, like a cloud dissipating. The fact that Lazarus had been dead for four days means that his soul is gone and there is no longer any hope for him at all.

It is into this situation of hopelessness that Jesus finally arrives. It is this feeling of hopelessness that Martha gives voice to when she comes to speak to Jesus. When Martha hears that Jesus has come, she doesn’t even wait until he arrives at the house, but she runs out to meet him at the edge of town. “Lord,” she says to him, “if you had been here my brother would not have died.”

There are so many emotions packed into those words! Martha is feeling sadness at her brother’s death. Martha is feeling anger at Jesus for not coming earlier and preventing her loss. Martha is feeling confusion over how Lazarus’s death can be part of God’s will. But above all I think Martha is feeling hopelessness, a kind of blank despair that cannot see any way forward and so dwells in the past, an emptiness of the heart that cannot get beyond what might have been in order to begin to work on what yet might be. “If only you’d been here,” Martha says. “If only things had been different. If only you hadn’t let me down. If only there was some hope for something more.”

Jesus hears the hopelessness in Martha, her dwelling in the past – and Jesus loves Martha too much to leave her there. Instead, Jesus points her toward the future: “Your brother will rise again,” he says to her. And she accepts that: “Yes, Lord,” she says, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.”

Martha is giving voice here to what was a fairly common Jewish belief in Jesus’ time. While the Sadducees and some of the upper-class priests denied it, the Pharisees and most of the Jewish “regular folk” believed in the general resurrection described in the prophet Daniel – when, at the end of the world, the graves would be opened, and the Book of Life would be unsealed, and the righteous would shine like stars in the firmament of heaven (Daniel 12:1-4). Christians sometimes think that belief in a resurrection is something that began with Jesus, but it was there already in the Jewish thought-world that Jesus lived in.

And Martha believes in it: “Yes, Lord,” she agrees, “my brother will rise again.” But “the last day” seems like such a long time away: the resurrection at the end of the world is so far in the future, it is such a remote possibility, such an abstract potential, that it feels like it has no real bearing on what she has to deal with in the here-and-now. The resurrection is a great promise of God, to be sure; but it is such a distant hope that it feels like no hope at all. “My brother will rise in the resurrection of the just,” Martha says, “but how does that help me now?”

And in response to that Jesus says something new, something that goes beyond the general belief of the day: “I am the resurrection and the life,” Jesus says. “Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”

Jesus proposes to Martha a radical shift in the definition of “resurrection”: he invites her to see it not so much as “life after death” but as “life in relationship with Jesus.”

Life itself is relationship, as we would say in process thought. Life is not an essence or a substance but a pattern of relationship: molecules relate to each other in patterns that give rise to biological processes; cells and tissues and organs relate to each other in patterns that constitute bodies; bodies relate to each other, and to bodies of differing species, and to inorganic surroundings, in patterns that make biomes and ecosystems. There is no such thing as an isolated life; all living things exist by interacting in relationship to other entities.

And all entities, organic and inorganic alike, relate to God in receiving initial aims from God, enacting and embodying those aims to the best of their ability, and offering up their actions to be felt as new influences by God and by subsequent entities. Relationship with God is the fundamental matrix in which all entities, including all living creatures, become.

Jesus also exists and lives by means of his receiving aims from God, embodying them in his activities, and offering the results of those activities as new influences for God and the world. Jesus practices this fundamental receiving and offering in complete freedom and total generosity, such that his human life can be totally identified with the divine aims of love. It is in this sense that we say he is the “Incarnation of the Word” of God.

When Jesus says to Martha “I am the resurrection and the life,” he is inviting her to understand that his way of living, his practice of receiving and offering freely and graciously, is a life-giving relationship with God that can be experienced both now and forever.

This “life” is more than just something that “belongs” to the body, that is shut up within the body and, if released, can be subject to dissipation and dissolution in three days. This “life” is communion with God grounded in God’s enduring generosity and love, not in any human accomplishment, and is therefore promised faithfully for much more than just the span of this bodily existence. “Rising up” into this life is not simply a hope for a distant future, but is a believing and a devotion and a practice of Love that can begin even now.

By “believing” in Jesus – by trusting in his presence, and by following him in his practice of receiving and offering, and by committing to interact with God and the world in freedom and gratitude as he does – Martha can begin to experience a new quality of living in her present circumstances, and can expand into that way of living beyond the present conditions of this world.

Martha tells Jesus that she believes his redefinition of “resurrection” and “life”; and she is soon called to act on her belief. Jesus comes to the cave where they have buried Lazarus; and, moved with pity for the sorrow of his friends, and grieving his own loss of his friend Lazarus, Jesus weeps. And then he orders them to take away the stone.

Now, Martha knows that four days of death have left no hope for Lazarus in the conventional sense; but she has also come to believe that Jesus can bring live-giving relationship beyond any conventional hope. So although she’s afraid of what may be in the tomb, she gives her permission – and the stone is rolled away, and Jesus calls, and Lazarus comes out.

The miracle of restored physical life given to Lazarus serves as a kind of underline or emphasis or case-in-point of the redefinition of spiritual life explained to Martha. The real point of the story is not just the resuscitation of one man, but the reorientation, the expansion of meaning, of “resurrection” and “life” as deeper relationship with Jesus and the God who sent Jesus. The real point of the story is the invitation into life-giving communion with Jesus now that will not cease growing into God forever.

I write this in the days following the shooting and killing of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent, while she was legally observing an attempted immigration arrest in Minneapolis. Her death while defending a neighbor throws into sharp relief the difference between those who think life comes from power and those who find life in mutually supportive relationship. Her death evokes the feeling of senseless loss, the anger and hopelessness expressed by Martha at the beginning of the story; but it also invites us to believe with Martha that God will take up even this wreckage and make from it the possibility of justice and right-relationship.

By the time this reflection is posted and read, the news will have moved on to some other incident, some other provocation, some other outrage. But the question will remain: Will we choose the delusion that “to live” means to exert our wills, to violently assert our strength, to act out the charade of imperialism whether personal or political? Or will we wake up to the truth that life is in relationship, that physical and psychological and communal life comes only from receiving and offering with each other and with Creation all around us, and that Jesus’ Way of receiving and offering freely and graciously offers to all a pattern of action that gives life now and always?

Can we make a Lenten discipline of life-giving relationship that will blossom out into an Easter way of living?

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The Rev. Dr. Paul Nancarrow is an Episcopal priest, whose theological work has focused on process-relational interpretations of religion and science, spirituality and liturgy, and especially on the co-acting of divine action and human action and natural action in sacramental work and worship. He is a co-author of The Call of the Spirit: Process Spirituality in a Relational World, and contributed essays to Preaching the Uncontrolling Love of God and Renewing Faith: Reigniting Faith and Ministry Through Process and Open & Relational Theologies. Other reflections and sermons can be found at paulsnancarrow.wordpress.com. He can often be found contemplating the Adventure of the Universe as One from the saddle of his bicycle on back roads and rail-trails in the Midwest.