Monday of Holy Week - April 11, 2022

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Isaiah 42:1-7     John 12:1-11

I hadn’t much cared for the story of Lazarus the last couple of years. In fact, I didn’t much care for any of Jesus’s miracles or healing stories. These accounts begged the question tormenting me the most. In 2020, our young son Peter died. So, why was Lazarus saved and Peter not? Why are some people cured of blindness and others not? For that matter, why are people blind at all in a world with a loving God? Why do bad things happen to so many people?

My trusty tools—reason and logic—were not giving me answers. Peter’s death conflicted with how I thought the world worked. During my grief though, other experiences made me feel hopeful, held, and trusting amid this horrific suffering. These events too did not conform to my epistemology—I was trained to trust what I could prove and to discount what I could not. But, they happened. Life was not comporting with my ideological framework.

Today’s Gospel lays out a framework for a deeper faith. Some turned to Jesus’s message of love because they could not dismiss an experience they observed, despite obvious conflict with most people’s understanding—Lazarus was dead, and people don’t rise from the dead. Others, namely the High Priests, were unable or unwilling to trust the Lazarus experience and, thus, Jesus’s message. The lens through which they took in the world was so narrowed by bias in favor of power that it screened out Truth. They, as the poet WH Auden observes, may be among those who “would rather be ruined than changed.”

The Gospels and our lives are riddled with contradictions and challenges to our worldview.  Despite my son’s death, I somehow have more faith and trust now than I did when my life was what I had wished. This Gospel asks us to surrender our filters—biases which favor conforming to conventional beliefs, comfort, or power.  The Gospel invites us to observe our experiences and interactions and seek the salve that soothed while asking those unanswerable questions: the miracle of grace.

sean foley: Husband to Erin; Father to Eamon, Peter, and Conall; Assistant United States Attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice in Kansas City.

 

Q: How can I surrender my filters and biases and give up my doubts and suffering to God?


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