Death! Where is your victory
5th Sun of Lent A
Cobh
22 March 2026
My friends,
We have an increasingly unsure relationship with death – though it is the one certainty in life that we die eventually. One of the indicators of that uncertain relationship is that we increasingly refer to people as having passed rather than died. It reflects some unease with the finality of our earthly journey and the question of the nature of life beyond the grave.
The Readings today are linked with the thread of the experience of death – but in different expressions. For those in exile in Babylon the experience robbed them of life in all its richness, it was like a death. The responsorial psalm is the eloquent cry of prayer to God for consolation in their grief – ‘De Profundis.’
“Out of the depths I cry to you O Lord
Lord, hear my voice
O let your ears be attentive to the
to the voice of my pleading.”
St. Paul writing to the Romans, spoke of sin as a form of death which is only overwhelmed by the life given through the Spirit of the Risen Christ. The raising of Lazarus is again a long conversation by Jesus with many immediately touched by Lazarus’ illness and death but also with many religious people who had ‘issues’ with the healing ministry of Jesus.
From our perspective today there are two essential elements to take from this amazing situation. Firstly, his raising of Lazarus was a miraculous resuscitation of Lazarus – in which we witness both Jesus’ power over death along with his fragility and loss in the face of the death of Lazarus his friend and his empathy for Martha and Mary. In that sense it is an affirmation of the authenticity of the Incarnation.
Secondly, the other layer of meaning emerges in the dialogue with Martha, when she conveyed her disappointment with Jesus’ late arrival – she trusted in the prayer of Jesus to the Father.
“Your brother said Jesus ‘will rise again’
I am the resurrection and the life.”
Lazarus was raised by Jesus and restored to his family but was destined to die in due course, then and only then would the fullness of Jesus’ declaration be realised – He is the resurrection and the life.
The gateway to embracing this vision and understanding of life comes to us by way of our faith – a faith that places our trust in the promise that our person and identity, our soul endures beyond the physicality of the death of our mortal bodies to a fullness of life with the God who called us into life.
To say that we pass rather than die is an understandable desire to take the sharpness from the experience and loss. It has led to various efforts to “celebrate” the life of the deceased. The increasing challenge for priest celebrants is to guard our funeral liturgy from being used inappropriately because of a diminished faith in Christ Jesus, who is the resurrection and the life.
