Those Who Witnessed the Raising of Lazarus from the Dead: Why Didn’t They ALL Believe?

(Fifth Sunday of Lent (A): This homily was given on March 26, 2023 at St. Pius X Church, Westerly, R.I., by Fr. Raymond Suriani.  Read Ezekiel 37:12-14; Psalm 130:1-8; Romans 8:8-11; John 11:1-45.)

[For the audio version of this homily, click here: Fifth Sunday of Lent 2023]

 

Not too many people have seen a dead man walk out of a tomb—especially a guy who’s been in the grave for the better part of a week!

But 2,000 years ago in Judea—in a little town called Bethany to be exact—a lot of people did.

And yet some of them still did not believe in Jesus, the God-man who had worked this incredible miracle!

A rather amazing fact, if you ask me.  It says at the end of the story (and here I quote): “Many of the Jews who had come to Mary and seen what he had done began to believe in him [i.e., in Jesus].”

But “many” is not ALL!

The fact that some still did not believe is clear from the very next line of the Bible, which reads: “Some others, however, went to the Pharisees and reported what Jesus had done.”

And together they made plans to orchestrate our Lord’s death.

So why—why didn’t they believe?  Or perhaps the better question is: Why didn’t they want to believe?

I say that’s the better question because all too often the evidence for something doesn’t matter to people.  They believe what they want to believe in spite of the evidence, not because of the evidence.  It’s like those who want to keep abortion available in our country.  You tell them to look at the clear and indisputable scientific evidence—the genetic fact about when human life begins—and they totally ignore it.  They simply don’t want to believe that abortion is wrong, so they completely ignore reality.

Why didn’t these enemies of Jesus want to believe that he was the Son of God and the Messiah?  Why didn’t they want to believe that he had the power to raise a man like Lazarus from the dead?

I think one reason was that it was easier for them not to believe!  After all, if you really make the conscious decision to put your faith in Jesus Christ, you have to be willing to change.  And change is hard—for all of us! 

According to St. Mark, the first command that Jesus gave during his earthly ministry consisted of one word: “Repent!”

To repent means not only to say you’re sorry; to repent also involves making concrete changes to your lifestyle, in order to become a better person.

And it’s much easier to stay as you are, sins and all.

Another reason they didn’t want to believe in Jesus might have had something to do with their pride.  I say that because no one in his right mind likes to admit that he’s been wrong about something—or about someone.  We all like to think we are perfect judges when it comes to the character of other human beings.  But if these men and women were ever going to say, “Yes, I now believe that Jesus is the anointed one of God,” they also had to be willing to say, in sincere humility, “I was dead wrong about him in the past, and I admit it.  I thought Jesus was a fake, a charlatan; for a while I even thought he was in league with the devil.  What a fool I was!”

And that also would have been hard for them to do.

Or perhaps it was peer pressure that kept them from wanting to put their faith in our Lord.  It says that some of them went immediately to the Pharisees after witnessing this miracle.  Was that because they were friendly with the Pharisees?  That’s a very real possibility.  Was it because they all hung out at the same synagogues and in the same marketplaces? 

If they socialized or fraternized with other people who had already condemned Jesus as a Jewish heretic and blasphemer (as the Pharisees had), chances are they would have felt a lot of pressure to think the same way, and to pronounce the same verdict on our Lord—in spite of what they saw that day when Lazarus walked out of the tomb!

Let’s face it, we all want our peers to like us, and to think that we’re really nice and really smart—and that can sometimes cause us to say that we don’t believe what we know we should believe.

And then there’s the persecution factor: “If Jesus has so many enemies, what will happen to me if I say I believe in him?  Will his enemies become my enemies?  Will the people who want to harm him, now want to harm me—and my family?”  That might have been a pressing issue for some of them.

Which leads to the last reason I’ll share as to why these men and women might have hesitated to believe in Jesus after the raising of Lazarus from the dead: the fear of earthly loss.  The Bible says that the love of money is the root of all evil.  It’s amazing how quickly people will say they believe something if there’s a material benefit attached to it.  It’s also amazing how quickly they’ll radically change their “belief” for fear of losing some material advantage.  Politicians do this all the time—especially during election years!

I’m sure most of you have heard the joke about the 3 men who went to interview for a job one day.  This makes the point quite well, I think.  The interviewer asked the first man, “What’s 2+2?”  He answered, “4.”  The interviewer asked the second man, “What’s 2+2?”  He answered, “4.”  Then the third man came in.  The interviewer said, “What’s 2+2?”  He responded, “It’s whatever the boss says it is.”

Sadly, according to the story, the third guy is the one who got the job!

Perhaps these people in Bethany thought that they’d lose their jobs if they said they now believed in Jesus.  If they were merchants, maybe they feared that some of their clients would take their business elsewhere.  Those are both very real possibilities. 

There’s an old saying: “The more things change, the more they remain the same.”  We live in a world that’s different in many respects from the world of first century Bethany, where this last miracle of Jesus took place.

But human nature is still the same. 

In spite of the evidence that Jesus is the Son of God and Savior of the world—which is even greater now than it was in the first century; in spite of all that, the pressures to disbelieve and to follow another path are exactly the same today as they were back then.  I hope this homily has made that clear.

May the grace of God help us all to overcome those pressures, and have a strong and unwavering faith in Jesus.

Our Personal Experience: God’s Classroom

(Second Sunday of Lent (A): This homily was given on March 5, 2023 at St. Pius X Church, Westerly, R.I., by Fr. Raymond Suriani.  Read Genesis 12:1-4; Psalm 33:4-22; 2 Timothy 1:8-10; Matthew 17:1-9.)

[For the audio version of this homily, click here: Second Sunday of Lent 2023]

A couple of years after I arrived at St. Pius, a young man came to see me whose heart was filled with fear and anxiety.  And understandably so.  He thought that he might have contracted an incurable disease in and through his own sinful behavior.  We spoke for a half-hour or so that day, and one of the things I told him was that this difficult situation provided him with a great opportunity: an opportunity to return to God, and to get his life back in order.  I also told him to pray very hard that the test results would come back negative from the doctor’s office—something he was no doubt already doing.  I promised him, of course, that I would do the same.

As I recall, I did see him at Mass the following Sunday, but I haven’t seen him here since—which means I haven’t seen him here in this building in 30 years!

Several months after our conversation I did happen to run into him in town.  I said to him, “How are you doing?”  He said, “Fine.”  I said, “That’s good.”  Now to be perfectly honest with you, because there were other people around at the time, I did not say to him what I really wanted to say to him.  When he indicated that he was doing fine I wanted to say, “Well, that’s what I figured.  God delivers you from a disease that would have plagued you for the rest of your life, and within two weeks you forget all about him.”

God, my brothers and sisters, is always trying to teach us things.  He’s always trying to teach us things that will make us better, stronger, healthier, holier people.  And one of the “classrooms” out of which the Lord teaches us most often is the classroom of our personal experience.  In other words, in and through the events and circumstances of our lives (both the good and the bad), God tries to teach us some important, valuable, foundational lessons.  The problem is that very often we either don’t recognize this when it’s happening, or in a given instance we simply make the choice to ignore the lesson completely!

Which usually opens us up to a lot of unnecessary pain and suffering.  Take, for example, the young man I just mentioned.  In the midst of his fear and his anxiety the Lord was saying to him, “My son, you need me.  You need to learn to put me at the center of your life.  You need to stop living by your own rules, and start living your life by mine.  You are now experiencing the consequences of trying to do things your way.  You’re suffering because of your sin. I give you my commandments because I love you and want you to have peace and order in your life.  So please listen to me and take this lesson to heart. Go to Mass faithfully, go to confession regularly, and start to practice your Catholic faith again.”

I pray that at some point in the last 30 years this young man (who is not so young anymore if he’s still here on earth with us!) has somehow finally learned that basic but very important spiritual lesson.

And then we have the example given to us in today’s gospel reading.  In this famous scene from Scripture, Jesus takes Peter, James and John to the top of Mt. Tabor, and gives them a little glimpse of his divinity.  He gives them a chance to see him in his glorified, heavenly state.

And why did the Lord do this?  Was it because he and his three apostles had nothing better to do that afternoon?  Did Jesus say to himself, “These guys look awfully bored.  I think I’ll take them up this mountain and give them a little light show!  That’ll wake them up!  That’ll get their attention!”

No!  He did it to teach them something.  Jesus knew that the time of his passion and death was fast approaching, and he wanted these apostles—who were the leaders of the apostolic group—to be as ready as they possibly could be to face the horrors of those days: Holy Thursday and Good Friday.  So he gave them this little glimpse of his glory on Mt. Tabor to strengthen them; to increase their trust; to teach them that he would still be in control even when everything seemed to be out of control.

Well, unfortunately, as we all know from reading the Bible, Peter, James and John did not learn the lesson very well.  When the heat got turned up in the Garden of Gethsemane at the arrest of our Lord, all three abandoned him.  They ran away as fast as they could.  Later that same night Peter denied three times that he even knew Jesus!  Afterward, when he realized what he had done, he experienced incredible remorse.  The Bible tells us that he went out and wept bitterly.  For Peter, that was unnecessary suffering.  I’m convinced that if he and his fellow apostles had taken more time to think and pray about the experience they had that day on Mt. Tabor, they would have handled themselves a lot differently during that first Holy Week.

From all that I’ve said today, I think it should be clear: Discovering what the Lord is trying to teach us in and through the experiences of our daily lives is extremely important.  So I will close my homily this morning by giving you a homework assignment.  The next time you sit down to pray, don’t just say prayers.  Do more than that.  Bring your entire life into your prayer!  That is to say, think of all the circumstances—the good and the bad—that you’re dealing with at the present time.  Then say, “Lord Jesus, help me to see what you are trying to teach me in the midst of all this.  Help me to recognize the lessons you want me to learn from these experiences.”

If you do this faithfully and often enough, I’m confident that the Lord will give you the insights that you’re seeking, the insights that you need.

Then, of course, take the final step.  This is the most difficult one, but it’s also the most rewarding one. It’s the one that will make the real difference in the quality of your life:

TAKE THE MESSAGE OF EACH LESSON TO HEART, AND THEN PUT THOSE MESSAGES INTO PRACTICE!