Sacred Heart of Jesus Parish

FR MICHAEL BIBLICAL IMAGERY

(Fr Michael Boakye Yeboah: Vice Rector of St Gregory Seminary, Kumasi-Ghana)

 “THE GOD OF EZEKIEL”

            COVID-19 is not close to the worse enemy of humanity’s existence; historians are not short sighted: they recall havoc of the black plague (that reduce the world’s population to half at the time) and the Spanish flu. Coronavirus and her sister pandemics have really created fear and panic in the history of our earthly existence. At every moment of these pandemic, our faith in God has made us rise above them and lived on; because Jesus, our savior, holds the power even over death, so what is COVID-19? Our faith will see us through this pandemic also because our God is the God of Ezekiel who gives life to dry bones.

            In the midst of this COVID-19 pandemic, I find the opening sentence of today’s first reading very consoling. The prophet says: “Thus says the Lord God, O my people, I will open your graves and have you rise from them, and bring you back to the land of Israel.” I trust our scientists in their efforts to find a vaccine but I believe strongly that the battle is the Lord’s. With this background let us now go through today’s readings step by step.

            As we come closer to the Passion of Jesus, Lent raises the penitent sinner’s hope to unmeasurable levels. Even if one is spiritually dead because of his guilt, the living God is greater than death and his power is mightier than any earthly decay. Nowhere in the Old Covenant is this expressed more completely than in the first reading. Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones scattered in a field that are clothed with flesh and rise again to form a powerful army. Wisdom says that God “does not rejoice in the destruction of the living, for he fashioned all things that they might have being” (Wisdom 1:13-14). By turning away from the living God, Israel has hurled itself into death, but God’s vitality is stronger and can give life and strength back to dead bones.

            The “I will raise you up from your graves’” prophecy given by the prophet Ezekiel was given many years before Christ appeared in the scene. In today’s Gospel Jesus demonstrates that he is the one who holds the power to raise people from their graves. Jesus told Martha, “I am the resurrection. If anyone believes in me, even though he dies he will live, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.” Jesus then went ahead to raise Lazarus back to life physically. But that could not have been what he meant. He could not have meant that anyone who believed in him would not die physically, since, obviously, countless believers in Jesus have died physically since he made that statement. Even if Jesus did not raise Lazarus back to life physically, what he said would still have been valid.

            What Jesus meant was the same thing that the Apostle Paul would later confess in his first letter to the Corinthians: “We will not all die, but we will all be changed… For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality” (1 Cor 15:51, 53). Those who believe in Jesus do not die, they are transformed. They close their eyes to this world only to open them to eternity. That is what people nowadays refer to more and more as “Transition”. For us believers, death is but a transition from one form of life to a superior, everlasting form of life.

            The raising of Lazarus from the dead is Jesus’ last miracle before his Passion, and it becomes the immediate pretext for his arrest (John 11:47-56). The One who is making his way toward death wishes to stare death in the face in advance. That is why he deliberately lets Lazarus die despite the pleas of his friends. He wants to stand at the stone-sealed tomb of his friend and weep, “troubled, crestfallen, enraged” (however one decides to translate the word) at the fearful might of this “last enemy” (1 Cor 15:26), an enemy which can only be conquered utterly inwardly. Without these tears at the tomb Jesus would not be the man that he is. Then everything happens in rapid succession. First, the command to take away the stone, despite all protest. Then the prayer to the Father, for the Son still begs heaven for each of his miracles – they are never done by magic but by power granted him. Then the command: “Lazarus, come out!” His power over death is part of his mission, but it only becomes “authorization” for us if he himself dies, breathing out the Holy Spirit to God and to the Church. Death will no longer be the fate of the children of Adam, but becomes the revelation of God’s ultimate devotion to humanity in Christ. Only because he dies this death of obedient love can he call himself the “Resurrection and Life”, and utter the death-surpassing words about himself: “Whoever believes in me shall come to life, even though he should die. Let us keep faith with the “God of Ezekiel”, for he alone restores hope in the midst of hopeless situations. May God save our world.