Fifth Sunday of Lent 2026: The Raising of Lazarus and the Power of Faith
Readings and Virtual Homily for March 22, 2026, Fifth Sunday of Lent; Six Years Ago Today; We're Having a Heat Wave
Readings for Mass this Sunday:
Ezekiel 37:12-14
Psalm 130:1-8
Romans 8:8-11
John 11:1-45
Dear Friends and Family,
The raising of Lazarus is today's Gospel passage. The first reading from Ezekiel presages it with its description of God opening the graves of his people and bringing them back to life (vs. 12). The psalm confidently attests to God's redemptive power, to God's desire to save us from sin and death. And the second reading details the dynamic of resurrection itself, the triumph of faith and life in the Spirit over the weaknesses of the flesh.
Today's passage from John details Jesus' greatest miracle. Indeed, John himself tells us that, with the raising of Lazarus, Jesus effectively signed his own death warrant. The miracle was so great, so widely witnessed and so thoroughly believed, that the leaders were beside themselves; determined to find a way to bring about Jesus' execution (vss. 46-53, just beyond today's passage). John places the miracle shortly before his description of the events of the Passion; it is likely that Jesus raised Lazarus just weeks before he was crucified.
And it is worth noting that the raising of Lazarus occurs only in John's Gospel. Scripture scholars assert with some confidence that John's was likely the last Gospel written. It seems reasonable to conclude that John knew the contents of the other three Gospels and deliberately wrote his account so as to include things Matthew, Mark and Luke left out. Beyond the raising of Lazarus, the encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well, the healing of the young man born blind and the wedding feast at Cana are also reported only in John.
In any event, we have the greatest of Jesus' miracles as today's Gospel passage. The raising of Lazarus is the greatest of Jesus' miracles because, although he had raised others from the dead --Jairus' daughter, the son of the widow of Nain -- they had been dead just a few minutes and just one day, respectively. Lazarus, according to Martha, had been dead four days (vs. 39).
The Jews did not embalm and so Lazarus' body would have begun to decay. I won't go into detail, but among other things we may be certain that Martha was right when, after Jesus ordered that the stone be rolled away, she warned that "there will be a stench" (vs. 39). To ask Jesus to bring her brother back, at this stage, was, well, it was an amazing testament to Martha's faith.
Martha is -- in my view -- given short shrift by many Biblical commentators, in terms of her faith. Mary, whom these same commentators credit as being the sister with the greater, the deeper faith, evidently did not have the faith to ask Jesus for this miracle. And I can hardly blame her. I would not have had it, either. But Martha did. "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died," Martha says to Jesus, when she meets him on the road, having heard that he was coming. "But even now," she says, "I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you" (vss. 21-22).
If Jesus needed any reassurance regarding his plan to raise Lazarus despite his having been dead four days, he got it in no uncertain terms, from Martha.
The raising of Lazarus, in any event, reminds us at once of several realities worth our consideration. One, the physical creation is good, and Jesus has rescued it, just as he rescued Lazarus. Two, the general resurrection at the end of time tells us that heaven is a physical place. Three, faith like Martha's proves that, as Gabriel assured Mary, at the Annunciation, "with God, all things are possible" (Luke 1:37).
Just a few considerations as we contemplate in today's Gospel passage, the raising of Lazarus; Jesus' greatest miracle.
I have been acutely aware this week that we have re-traced the exact dates of the initial pandemic shutdowns. I mean by this that in 2020, the dates and the days were the same as they are in 2026. Friday, March 13, the day we shut down the O'Dowd campus, in 2020, was mirrored this past Friday, which was also March 13. Monday, March 16, 2020, the day we faculty and staff met on campus to take a crash course in remote learning, was echoed this past Monday, which was also the 16...
One of the things that stays with me six years later was what I can only call national naivete -- we were going to shut down for five or six weeks to "flatten the curve" of the contagion and be back in business a week or two after Easter. We were still working on that -- getting back to business as usual -- a week or two and more after Easter, 2021.
In any event, it was Sunday, March 22, 2020, that I started these e-mailed homilies, realizing that if I could not actually be physically with my people in church on Sundays, I could at least get them the readings and a homily. Based on all that we were being told, in media accounts, I imagined that I was going to be sending an e-mailed homily for maybe six weeks.
Six years later, this unplanned aspect of my priestly ministry has come to feel normal, joyous and absolutely necessary. I feel, six years into it, that these virtual homilies are part of my ongoing priestly assignment -- the Spirit expects this of me. And there is a real irony in it in that for all the years before March 22, 2020, I never once in my life wrote out a homily. Never as a priest; never even as a seminarian in my homiletics classes at St. Patrick's. I read the readings, took notes, maybe prepared a few bullet points on a sheet of paper Saturday afternoon before the Vigil Mass and...
Blessed myself as I rose to go to the ambo to read the Gospel and said silently to the Spirit, "I am going to open my mouth. You decide what comes out of it." In fact, I still approach my spoken homilies in this manner. But they have a lot more heft behind them, the last six years, owing to the fact that they have been given written form ahead of time.
So how about the weather, the past week? I remember a few occasional March heat waves. It is not, in fact, absolutely unprecedented that we experienced highs in the high eighties to low nineties, here in the East Bay, this past week. I remember a couple of March heat waves to rival this one, but just to put it in perspective, one of them was in 2004.
Normally a fan of dry, sunny, warm weather, I am concerned for the snowpack. It was massively re-built with last month's storms, and now, with Tahoe showing highs in the low seventies, it is melting at a pace too rapid for optimal water storage. There is going to be less run-off in May and June because there is so much snowmelt happening right now. And because we have actually had a normal year, in terms of precipitation, thanks to the deluges last fall and last month, most of the reservoirs are at capacity, which means that a whole lot of the snowmelt the next several weeks is just going to...wind up in the Pacific.
And with continued dry weather forecast beyond Holy Week, I think it unlikely that we are going to receive anymore significant precipitation. This winter -- that is, this wet season -- appears to be over. Despite the deluges, this has not been an optimal year for water in California. The long-range forecasts are calling for a "super El Nino" starting next fall. El Nino years are typically wet. Given the heavy precipitation last fall and last month, I think we will get through this summer well enough. I only hope El Nino starts showing its stuff by November.
I thank God all the time for the fact that I live in California. But our blessings, especially those related to weather, are dependent on forces way beyond our control.
And on that note, I'll close.
Take good care. God bless.
Love,
Fr. Brawn