Fifth Sunday of Lent – 22nd March 2026
Dear brothers and sisters,
Today’s Gospel brings us into a house filled with the silence of sorrow. Lazarus has died. Martha and Mary are weeping. Friends are there, but no one can change the reality. Death seems to have spoken the final word.
And Jesus delays. This detail troubles us. When he hears that Lazarus is sick, he does not leave immediately. He stays two more days. We know this feeling. When we pray and God seems to delay. When we wait for an answer, for healing, for a solution – and silence continues. Many times, we say in our hearts, like Martha: “Lord, if you had been here…”
When Jesus arrives, Lazarus has already been in the tomb for four days. Everything seems finished. Martha goes out to meet him. She is strong, but wounded. She says what she feels. And yet, in her pain, she makes an act of faith: “I know that whatever you ask of God, he will give you.” Her faith does not remove her tears, but it gives them light.
Jesus says to her, “Your brother will rise.” Martha believes in a resurrection at the end of time. But Jesus leads her further: “I am the resurrection and the life.” He does not only say that he will give life. He says that he is life. In the middle of death, in the middle of loss, in front of the tomb, Life is standing there and speaking.
Then the Gospel tells us something very touching: “Jesus wept.” The one who knows he will raise Lazarus still cries. God cries with us. He is not distant or cold. He enters our pain. He feels it. He is moved.
Maybe some of us carry tombs inside our hearts. Not only tombs of stone, but inner tombs: a broken relationship, a lost dream, an old guilt, a deep disappointment. Things we have closed up and covered with a heavy stone. And we say, “It is too late. It already smells.”