Commentary on the Gospel of
"Jesus, friend, resurrection and life "
We are called to remove the stones of everything that tastes like death: for example, the hypocrisy with which we live our faith in death, destructive criticism of others is death; offence and slander are death; the marginalisation of the poor is death; the Lord asks us to remove these stones from our hearts, and life will flourish around us again. Christ lives, and whoever welcomes Him and adheres to Him comes into contact with life. Without Christ or outside of Christ there is not only no life, but also death.
While Jesus was in Galilee, someone from Bethany came to him and passed on a message from Martha and Mary: "The one you love is sick. Let us go to Bethany, enter the sisters' house and try to find out how they lived that trial of faith. Lazarus was ill, his illness got worse and they thought of Jesus: "He will come and heal him, because he loves him". They sent the message, certain that the Master, knowing that their friend was ill, would come quickly. But Jesus stayed two days longer, where he was. Lazarus died and they buried him. Can you imagine what must have happened in the hearts of those sisters? What happens when you pray and there is no answer? When Jesus finally came, after three days in the grave, Martha said: "I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God who was to come into the world", and raised Lazarus from the dead.
In the Gospel page, we do not know what to admire about Jesus: his human feelings or his divine power, the Jesus who weeps or the Jesus who proclaims himself to be Resurrection and Life. On the one hand it reveals his humanity and on the other hand his divinity. In Jesus we have to see the God who is a friend, who is always at the side of those who suffer. Jesus is the friend of all, especially of the Lazarus and the sick, of all times. We do not think in the past but in the present, because Christ is at our side as he was with Lazarus, Martha and Mary. "If he had been here, my brother would not have died", Martha said to Jesus, but Jesus never abandons us, because he is our friend, because he is "God, God of the living, because he is the resurrection and the life".
Let us put all our trust in the risen Christ and accept the words of Jesus: "I am the resurrection and the life, he who believes in me, though he died, yet shall he live" (Jn.11,25). Therefore the faith of the believer in the "afterlife" is a faith in Jesus, the Son of God, who was born, lived, died and rose again. If, like Martha, we believe in the resurrection, we will be on the way of life, because death will not be the end of the road, as the song says.
"HAPPY SUNDAY TO ALL".
