Compassion and Strength: A Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent

 Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, on 22 March, 2026, the Fifth Sunday of Lent.  Readings for this Sunday:  Ezekiel 37:1-14; Psalm 130; Romans 8:6-11; John 11:1-45

43 When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” 44 The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

One of the abiding memories I have of my hospital training before my ordination was of visiting a couple after their child was stillborn.   I will never forget the scene.  The father was a large bear of a man, and he as holding a little wrapped bundle and sobbing uncontrollably.    The mother on the other hand was surprisingly serene.  She had her arm around the man and was gently comforting him.   I have never before or since witnessed such raw grief and such compassion.   

Compassion is the only human answer to grief, I think, but compassion can be hard.  One of the greatest tests of love and friendship is to come alongside someone in their moments of deep grief.   It can take courage, because death and grief are terribly, shatteringly real.  It’s harder when the person grieving is also angry.    We wonder what we can say, or how we can explain tragedy.     Real compassion refuses trite words like “This is all part of God’s plan”.   Real compassion just holds your hand, sits with you, and makes the coffee, because that’s about all that we can do in the face of grief.

Today’s gospel fully acknowledges the reality of death.   Lazarus, Jesus’ friend, is dead.  He is entombed in a cave, the entrance sealed by a stone.   Decay has settled in.  The body stinks.  Furthermore, death lurks round about as menacing potential.  Jesus has already attracted much negative attention from the authorities, and Bethany is near Jerusalem, the seat of power.   The disciples warn Jesus that he could be killed if he gpes to Lazarus, and when Jesus does go, they seem to accept that they may be killed with him.  So we need to acknowledge the reality of death in this story, as Jesus does.

Jesus in the story experiences both compassion and grief.  He makes the decision to go be with his friends, even though he knows the risks involved (we’ll leave aside for the moment why he delays the trip).  He goes because “[he] loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus” (11.5).   He faces their grief, but he also faces their anger, for when they both say “Lord, if you had been here, our brother would not have died” (11.21, 32).  What both sister’s mean, clearly, is “but you weren’t here”.  Sometimes being with the grieving means bearing the brunt of their anger. So Jesus does what a compassionate friend would do, but he is also grieving himself.

It’s sometimes quoted humoursly that the shortest verse in all of scripture is “Jesus wept” (Jn 11.35) but we need to dig past our complacency to really appreciate those two words.   John has already twice told us that Jesus loved Lazarus, and many of those watching take this as a sign of love.   And just before this, when Jesus sees Mary and others weeping for Lazarus, Jogn tells us that “he was greatly disturbed in spirit (KJV uses the word “groaning”) and deeply moved” (Jn 11.33).  

How do we imagine Jesus’ tears?   Do you see him dabbing a few drops from his eyes?  Do you see him with his face in his hands, struggling for composure?  Do you see him having what we call an “ugly cry”, face contorted, wracking groans from his throat, eyes and nose streaming?  I cried like that once in my life, the day my wife Kay was cremated, and part of me wants to think that Jesus had a ugly cry, because it means I can connect my God with my experience.   Can we dare to say that Jesus’ tears were for the whole human condition?

I know I would want to say that, because, otherwise, what was the point of his trip to Bethany?  We can get hung up on Jesus’ decision to delay this trip until Lazarus is dead, so that the miracle is greater (“so that the Son of God may be glorified through it” 11.4),, but that’s part of John’s focus on Jesus performing a series of signs to show his identity and God’s glory.  Surely the point of the story is that Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, and that he does so, not as a theological display, but out of sympathy and love.  And of course, this story, situated just before Jesus enters Jerusalem for the last time in John’s gospel, and situated in time for us just two weeks before Easter, is to show that Jesus has, and will, overcome death for our sakes.

So this is a story about Jesus’ compassion, but it’s also about his power.  I said early on that death in this story is real, and surely that is the  point.  Death is real, and it’s the enemy in this story, as it’s the enemy of our human condition.   And Jesus brings more than compassion, be brings power, the power that brought creation into being and he brings the glory of the Father.   This is a fight that Jesus accepts, and it’s a fight that he wins for all of us.   Because when Lazarus shuffles out of the tomb, and Jesus says “unbind him”, I think he’s unbinding all of us, freeing us from all the things that oppress us.

Last week I talked with a man who said he had had a good life but he had recently been diagnosed with a very aggressive type of cancer and his prognosis was bleak.    He told me that he was willing to talk to God, maybe even ask for help, but he didn’t want to commit to any particular idea of God, and he didn’t think he could accept the Jesus of the Nicene Creed, and he didn’t believe in the physical resurrection of Jesus.  I didn’t try to correct him or tell him that he was wrong, but I did ask him, since you know that your cancer is real, wouldn’t you want a God who is just as real?

Personally, I love Jesus as a teacher, but what seals the deal for me is that Jesus can fight death and win.   I’m not really interested unless that part of his story is true, and I think that’s the point of the Lazarus story.  I want a Jesus who can call us all to come out of our tombs.  I want a Jesus who can bring the stillborn to life, like the one I saw all those years ago, or the one lost at birth last week to parents I know.  

I want a Jesus who can stir the ashes, who can knit the bones together and give all the dead breath and life.   So I put my faith in the Jesus who raised Lazarus, the Jesus who has the compassion to stand with us in our times of sorrow, who has the power to raise us and unbind us.   And, since the Lazarus story continues in John’s gospel with a party, I put my faith in the Jesus who will sit with us and laugh with us, because he is, after all, our loving friend.

Sighted By The Shepherd: A Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent (A)

Preached at all Saints, Collingwood, on Sunday, 15 March, 2026.  Readings for this Sunday, the Fourth in Lent (A):  1 Samuel 16:1-13; Psalm 23; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-4

Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. (Jn 9.32)

If you’ve been coming regularly through Lent this year, you will remember that we’ve heard a series of long readings from John’s gospel.  Today’s, about the man born blind, may be the longest of these readings.  Indeed, I felt for Father Gordon as he read it, and thought that if there was ever the church equivalent of the military fitness tests that he and I once did, then reading this gospel would probably be part of that test.

At the heart of today’s gospel is a story of healing which serves as a sign of Jesus’ identity as the son of God.  Healing has been much on my mind lately, because as some of you know, healing was the focus of this winter’s Après Ski series, which ended last night.  Every Saturday from mid January to last night, we heard healing stories and prayers from both the Old Testament and New Testaments.   We learned that healing miracles were a particular focus of Jesus’ ministry, and that Jesus and the Holy Spirit give power to the disciples and apostles to heal in God’s name.

At each of the Après Ski services we heard meditations from members of the regional clergy team as well as laypeople, and so today, I’d like to draw on some of those meditations to help us understand our gospel reading and what it might mean to us who in are turn are looking for all kinds of healing.

So let’s begin the elephant in the room, skepticism.  We are blessed with more medical resources than any generation in human history,.  These resources are there to mend us and cure us, but we should not put our faith solely in MRI machines, or in drugs or an excessive concern with wellness.   As Sharon Goldsworthy noted in her talk last night, it’s good and right to believe that God can work through the skill of medical practitioners, but from time cures and recoveries happen that can’t be explained.  Our skepticsm shouldn’t overcome our belief that God can and does heal in answer to prayer.  In our gospel story today, the Pharisees refuse to believe that Jesus has acted to heal the man born blind, despite his testimony.

Second, tesimony and belief are important.  The climax of the story is not the curing of the man born blind, because you don’t put the climax of the story at the beginning.  Rather, the climax of the story is when the man says “Lord I believe” and worships Jesus.  Scripture reminds us consistently that healing begins with belief.   Belief can take many forms.  In her meditation, Rev Sharon pointed to the nameless Hebrew slave girl who encourages her master, the Syrian general Naaman, to seek healing from theSo Jewish prophet. Elisha (2 Kings 5: 8-14).   Even though she is enslaved and far from home, this girl trusts that her God is still merciful and good, even to her captor.    

And in one of her meditations, Rev Amy reminded us that sometimes healing is about taking the hand that Jesus offers us, as when Jesus asks two other blind men, “Do you believe that I am able to do this?”   So faith that Jesus wishes to be with us and to help us is part of healing.   It’s noteworthy that at the end of today’s gospel, Jesus calls the Pharisees blind, in a spiritual sense, but also signifying that they do not want what Jesus has to offer.

In today’s gospel reading, physical healing is in this case the restoration of sight, but as Rev Amy and others noted in their Apres Ski meditations, healing can take many forms.  Sometimes it can be an afflcition like being mute, or lame, or paralyzed, and sometimes it can be freedom from demonic influence.  In all the gospels, healing begins with Jesus seeing and caring for the burdens that we carry.   These burdens can be various.   Rev Amy noted that healing can be more than physical - it can come when we are feeling hopeless, or as she noted in a passage from Matthew, when we are “helpless and harassed”.    In our gospel reading today, the man is harassed and oppressed by the religious authorities when he refuses to deny that Jesus has done a good thing by healing him.

Sometimes, healing is about Jesus bringing people out of isolation.   Rev Gordon and others noted that often in the gospels, healing returns people to their families and comunities.   The healing of lepers in is one example.   In today’s gospel, the man born blind pays the price for speaking up for Jesus because he is expelled (literally thrown out, ekballo) from his synagoge community (this is a common Johannine theme, tensions between Jews who decide to follow Jesus and those, the majority, who don’t recognize Jesus as Messiah).   So what I think is the most important line in the entire gospel comes at verse 35:  “Jesus heard that they had driven him out, and when he found him he said”.  This is Jesus acting out his mission as the Good Shepherd (see Jn 10), who has come to bring the lost back to the fold,

Being “helpless and harassed” can be because of  physical or mental illness, or depression, or poverty, or addiction, or being unhoused.    In such situations, our situation is inevitably worse when we are isolated.   We feel that no one cares, that no one can help us, and we give way to despair.   Healing begins when Jesus searches for us as a shepherd searches for a lost sheep.   

Likewise healing begins when the church as a community of disciples joins in that search, makes room for the lost sheep, and sees them as a valued member of the community.   On Thursday night, the Rev. Maggie Helwig gave a talk on her book about an unhoused community, Encampment.   She said that the church’s mission includes firmly believing and acting on the principle that all people are created equally by God, that all people bear the divine image, and that all people are worthy of love.

To summarize, healing is about God’s desire that we flourish in our lives.   In our gospel reading, healing is about sight, but as we’ve seen throughout our Après Ski series, healing can take many forms.   Perhaps the best way to understand healing is not necessarily health, as in an end to a disease or a disability, but wholeness, meaning inner peace and trust that we are loved and upheld by Godard by their community.

I would say too that our prayers for healing should not just be for ourselves, but for God’s work in bringing the created world to a better place, to be the world that God always intended it to be.  When Jesus spits on the earth and turns it into mud, that is surely an echo of God’s act of creation in forming Adam from the clay.  When we pray for healing, we are praying to God the Creator, trusting that God is not finished creating good things. In a world where so much energy is devoted to hate and destruction, our prayers for healing align us to God’s good creative purposes, and our prayers express the hope that God’s good work is not yet finished.   When we pray for healing, we are joining our thoughts, energies, hopes and actions to those of God, the same God who loved the world into being, and who will not stop until that world is healed.

Hope Is Better Than Resilience: A Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent

Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, and Good Shepherd, Stayner, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, on 8 March, 2026, the Third Sunday In Lent.   Readings for this Sunday: Exodus 17:1-7; Psalm 95; Romans 5:1-11; John 4:5-42

“…we also boast in our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,” (Romans 5:4-5)

One of the modern virtues, it seems to me, is resilience.  When people speak of someone’s resilience, they usually mean it as a compliment.   To be resilient means things like being unflappable, quickly bouncing back from a crisis, or, as Shakespeare put it, suffering “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”.   Resilience is sometimes equated with the lyrics from that Kelly Clarkson song, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”.   

The problem with resilience is duration.  For how long can a person be resilient?   If we’re talking about a load-bearing wall, say, then we expect that wall to be resilient 24/7, every day.   But people aren’t designed to be reslient for ever.   We need a break.   If you think of that old David Bowie/Queen song, “Under Pressure”, there’s only so much pressure we can take.  And the problem with the “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” mentality is that it only works if you’re not killed, but the odds are against you.  You won’t grow infinitely stronger.  At some point you’ll be killed.   

St Paul didn’t know the word “reslience” but he did understand the idea of pressure.  Indeed. the Greek word he uses in Romans for “afflictions” (“we also boast in our afflictions”) is thipsis, which literally means “pressure” or “pressing together” though he also uses it in the sense of “affliction” or “suffering”.  

The idea of anyone “boasting in their afflictions or suffering”, as Paul puts it, seems on the face of it absurd.  There are monsters, like Pete Hegseth and his master, who boast in the sufferings of others, thus revealing their morally deficient character.  But the many people suffering under bombs and missiles as I write this, whose homes have been leveled and who are living under tents or tarps, what can good can they say about their stuation?   What can they boast of?  

Paul goes on to say that “endurance produces character”, which is true, in that there are always some brave and good souls who run towards the explosions so they can dig out and help the trapped and injured.    Such people surely display good character.    And while Paul goes on to say that “character produces hope”, hope can seem illusive in the face of great suffering.    When there are more explosions than there are helpers, it’s hard to see hope lasting for long.  So again, resilience only gets us so far, and after would lie cynicism and nihilism if it wasn’t for our faith.

Here’s something that a Christian and a cynic/nihilist would agree on, that suffering is meaningless.   The Christian writer and monk Thomas Merton once write that “Suffering has no value and no power of its own”, which means that there is no reason to be proud of our resilience.  Suffering, Merton wrote, only has value accidentally, because it brings us to the mercy of God in Christ.

On the cross, Jesus accepted suffering and death because of love for us.  As Paul says in our second lesson, “God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us” (Rom 5.8).   Lent brings us closer week by week to the cross, the place where we know that we are saved because Christ takes all suffering, ours and his and gives them into the infinite love of God, which destroys all evil and all death.

This brings us back to what Paul says about how “character produces hope”.  The lesson of the cross, therefore, is hope.  The character or trait of the Christian is to put one’s hope and faith and love in the love of God shown in the cross.  If we resist God’s love, and only love ourselves, then suffering will always seem evil because it only threatens to destroy us, and so there no resilience, no hope.  But if we love God and love others as God leads us to love them, then our suffering ultimately does not matter.   But as Merton says, the Christian knows that suffering will only destroy that which in us does not matter,  because what truly matters is the love of God which saves us.

Last Sunday in John’s gospel we heard John’s famous line, “for God so loved the world”.   Let this be our hope, then, that only the love of God in Christ and in us can save a world that seems so full of suffering.