Arise! The spirit is alive in you! What are Jesus’s expectations of you during your lifetime? Like Lazarus and his family, getting out of a hopeless, desperate situation may be enough—to get some distance from the sorrow of death and separation. But is that enough for a disciple of Christ? When Christ is saying to you arise, then arise in the spirit of life-without-end. Your resurrection and redemption begins with listening for his voice.

Going to church is one thing. Believing what you profess there is another. You may know when to stand, speak, kneel, and come forward in the setting of the assembly, but do you know how and when to act in the many challenging situations of your life? Everyone in today's gospel gets a summons to do something when Jesus sets his redemptive action in motion. His disciples, for example, are incredulous that he wants to return to Judea, a place where he recently risked his life. Thomas rallies the group with the rather faint appeal that it's better to remain with Jesus if only to die with him. These are prophetic words, and poor Thomas has no idea how wisely he's spoken.

Martha said, “Master, if you’d been here, my brother wouldn’t have died. Even now, I know that whatever you ask God he will give you.”

HOPE IS the last thing that dies in a person, a 17th-century French writer once said, but he had a cynical take on this idea. He believed hope was a pleasant deception that made life tolerable. The story of Lazarus, however, shows that hope is much more than that. It doesn’t make life tolerable; it makes life possible.

Brothers and sisters, let us acknowledge our sins, and so prepare ourselves to celebrate the sacred mysteries.

Seek the Spirit. Scripture this week not only offers comforting words about the possibility of eternal life. This week’s readings, coming on the eve of Holy Week, are also about the spiritual death that is much more important than what happens to the body. As Saint Paul knew, what’s crucial is whether you live according to the flesh—shutting yourself off from God—or filled with God’s Spirit. The former is the way of death, the grave, the “depths”—sheol, a place of despair—and sin. Letting in God’s merciful and life-giving Spirit, however, opens up the possibilities of a new way of living and new persons and new people.

Martha, Mary, and their brother Lazarus were close friends of Jesus.

The Resurrection of Jesus is . . . a symbol of hope . . . . The theology of the cross is the theology of love in our real world. —Jon Sobrino