Dear Parishioners,

As we draw closer to Palm Sunday and Holy Week today’s readings invite us to reflect on God’s power to restore and renew, even when hope feels buried and faith feels just a little  bit fragile.  Taken together the Gospels record but three specific instances of Jesus bringing people back to life:  Jairus’ daughter (recorded in all three synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke),  the widow’s son at Nain (only in Luke) and the recalling to life of Lazarus, here only in John.  This is a story which remains one of the most moving narratives in the entire gospel corpus.

But it is the prophet Ezekiel who provides the foundational metaphor of new life in the face of death.  Ezekiel is speaking to a community ravaged by exile in a foreign land (Babylon, modern day Iraq) some time in the sixth century BC.  Jerusalem is destroyed , the Temple is gone and the people feel abandoned, without hope and cut off from God.  They describe themselves as ‘dry bones’, lifeless and without a future.  And in this dark moment God speaks of promise and restoration.  This restoration of which Ezekiel speaks is not about individual bodily resurrection but the resurrection of a community.  And this community is, in time, brought back to the land from which it was removed.   What seems dead and impossible is never beyond the reach of God’s power.

Life in the face of death will often constitute a unique challenge to faith and it matters not whether such death is sudden, or whether the journey to its door is hard, painful and slow.  In these last days of Lent we are conscious that many of us experience moments of dryness in our lives, either through spiritual fatigue, disappointment, buried under the weight of fear or failure.   This reading in particular reminds us that God is a God of new beginnings,  it invites us to trust that God can breathe new life into our own lives, into what may feel dead within us. And in so doing, prepares us for the Resurrection of Christ at Easter.

Deacon Alex