Bp Miller Musings: Fifth Sunday of Lent

To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the spirit is life and peace. (Romans 8:6)

When I read the story of the death and raising of Lazarus, my first thoughts go to the grief that Mary and Martha must have felt at their brother’s death, and then to the great joy upon his return to them. But I struggle to connect this reading with our life, our human condition.

Not one person in my life has had the experience of having a loved one return from death, although all have experienced death and loss in their lives. And so, I look to metaphor and attempt to spiritualize this story. I think about other losses in life—financial loss, damaged reputation, and the loss of relationship. These kinds of losses leave open the possibility of a kind of resurrection—recovery from bankruptcy, restoration of one’s good name, a relationship restored—and they provide helpful metaphors for the restoration experienced by Mary and Martha at the resurrection of their brother.

In a similar way, I might consider someone who has drifted from faith as having died. Resurrection then becomes a renewed faith, perhaps even a faith made stronger by the experience of distance from God. This, perhaps, comes closer to the message of this gospel.

Consider the prophecy of Ezekiel to the dry bones. These bones represent the house of Israel who say, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost, we are cut off completely.” It seems the exiled people have come to despair of their relationship with God and have given up faith. Ezekiel’s task becomes one of calling them back to God through a promise of a restored and renewed relationship: God will “give my spirit in you and you shall live.”

Israel’s sin is not so much in their despair as it is in what lies behind it. Living away from the “promised land,” they come to believe that they are separated from their God as well: “How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” (Psalm 137:4) Exile brings a discomfort and strangeness into their lives as they experience what it is to be an outsider in someone else’s land. Unfamiliar customs, different flavors, another language, odd styles of clothing, all contributed to their sense of loss and were interpreted as God’s abandonment.

Yet the experience of these exiled people, says Ezekiel, has been misinterpreted. God has not abandoned them. God is not first and foremost in the outward experience of comfort and ease they had in their homeland. In fact, God has always shown the most favor to them when they suffered.

Jesus similarly reminds Mary and Martha in their despair— “if you had been here our brother would not have died”—that the experience of loss and death is not abandonment. Indeed, his coming into the world is precisely to bring an awareness of God’s presence, even in death— “I am the resurrection and the life.”

Thus, when Paul state that “to set the mind on the flesh is death,” he reminds the Roman church that God’s presence, which is life, is not in the things that make us comfortable. God’s goodness (blessing) cannot be equated with wealth, health, status, or worldly power, but is made manifest in the promise, “I am with you always.”

The pain and agonies of this world make us long for a remembered past in which we were comfortable and at ease. Yet we are called to see God in the very things that cause uncertainty and challenge our sense of safety and security—to set our minds on the spirit.

O God, who tempts no one, we pray please preserve and keep us, so that the devil, the world, and our flesh may not deceive or mislead us into false belief, despair, and other great and shameful sins, and that, although we may be so attacked by them, we may finally prevail and gain the victory. (Luther’s Small Catechism, adapted in Chris L. Halverson, Read, Reflect, Pray: A Lutheran Prayer Book (Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2013), 96)