Homily March 22, 2026, Rev. Holly Cardone

Fifth Sunday of Lent

March 22, 2026

The Rev. Whitney Rice, Canon for Evangelism & Discipleship Development for the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri, points out something striking in this story: no one ever asks Lazarus if he wants to be resurrected. In fact, we never hear from Lazarus at all. And maybe, as she suggests, it’s because he has those two sisters who are always in front of Jesus and won’t stop talking.

What is asked of Jesus is that he return to Bethany to rescue Lazarus from death. Mary, Martha, and Lazarus are among Jesus’s closest friends. Their home is where Jesus rests, where he finds respite and care after long days of preaching, ministering, and healing. He loves them. He loves Lazarus. And yet—he delays. Even though we know what he is capable of, even though we have seen him restore sight to the man born blind, he does not rush off to save his friend.

How many times have we wanted to be rescued? How many times have we wanted God, or Jesus, or our mother, or a partner, or a sibling to swoop in and save us from the inevitable pain that comes with being human on this planet?

I have. I wanted all kinds of rescuing. I needed intervention from the pain of trauma, addiction, and self-loathing. But no one came, so I relied on the foxhole prayer: Please God, if you help me, if you get me out of this mess, I promise I will…—insert your favorite promise. I’ll never do this again. I’ll be nicer to my mother. I’ll empty the trash without being asked. You know the drill.

And it wasn’t just me. I wanted my children to be rescued too. I enabled them in ways that were not helpful for them to become healthy, responsible adults. I did a lot of good things—but I can see now how doing their homework for them undermined their sense of responsibility and accountability. And before you judge me, I’m part of a whole generation that way over-parented.

Every time we try to be rescued—or we try to rescue someone else—we are often just postponing the inevitable pain of going through whatever it is we are trying to avoid. And that pain, as much as we hate it, is the touchstone of growth.

But Jesus does not interfere with the death of Lazarus. That is hard for us to understand. Why didn’t he get there in time? Why didn’t he show up for his friends? Mary says to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

Lord, if you had been here, I wouldn’t have lost the house. The business wouldn’t have failed. Lord, if you had been here, my child wouldn’t have died. The marriage wouldn’t have fallen apart. The illness wouldn’t have come back.

And we don’t know if Lazarus even wanted to be resurrected. As Rev. Rice suggests, we can imagine him at peace, held in the fullness of God, immersed in a kind of love beyond anything we know. If you’ve read accounts of near-death experiences, people often say that when they realized they were not going to remain in that state of oneness with God, they were disappointed. They had encountered the deepest love imaginable, and then were asked to return—to squeeze their expansive souls back into bodies marked by limitation, pain, and suffering. Begrudgingly, they came back.

This is a story about grief and longing—about what it means to sit in deep emotional and spiritual pain. Of course we want to bypass the hard parts, just like Mary and Martha. We want a quick fix. We want relief. But it doesn’t come when we want it, or how we expect it.

Jesus arrives when mourning has already taken hold. The grief is real, embodied, communal. And he does not rush past it. He enters into it. He stands with them in their pain, and he weeps. God—the Savior of the world—weeps with us in our deepest despair and loss, pouring out love in the midst of it, not in avoidance of it.

Jesus feels their pain. We know this because the Gospels tell us, again and again, that he looks on people with compassion. He loves them. He cares for them. He wants more for them than the lives they are living. But he cannot force transformation. He can only show them what it looks like to suffer, to die, and to be raised—from hurt, from betrayal, from abandonment, from death itself.

And in this story, Jesus experiences something deeply human: he disappoints the people he loves. He didn’t show up in time. They are angry. They are grieving. This all could have been avoided—at least from their perspective—if he had just done what he has done for others.

But this time, the lesson is bigger. This time, the lesson is about going into the darkness—into grief, into loss, into the places we would rather avoid. Mary and Martha cannot yet see that there is another side to the pain they are feeling. All they know is that Jesus didn’t show up. And yet, even here, Jesus offers them a glimpse of what is possible. He knows what is coming—for Lazarus, for himself, and for us. And he calls Lazarus out of the tomb.

If we want the Alleluia of resurrection, we have to pass through the wailing of grief. This story shows us what becomes possible when we abandon ourselves to God and trust that something new can emerge on the other side—stronger, freer, more radiant than before.

When we are brave enough to submit to the pain—not physical death necessarily, though many of us know that grief—but the psychological death, the emotional unraveling, the spiritual reorientation that comes with letting go. Letting go of the ideas that keep us separate from God, from others, and from ourselves. Letting go of the illusion that we know best, that we are right, that we have the answers. It takes tremendous humility to say, “I don’t know,” without collapsing into shame. But that is where transformation begins.

We can avoid that work, of course. We can numb out. We can shop, eat, drink, help, gamble—whatever it takes to stay disconnected from what hurts. But if we do, we miss the best part. We miss resurrection. Because we cannot have the Alleluia of Easter without the pain of the cross.

So, we are left with a decision. As Rev. Whitney points out, we have about a week to decide. Are we going to go the whole way with Jesus? We have celebrated the healings, the miracles, the compassion, the mercy. We have bathed in his radical welcome and love. But now comes the harder part. Will we walk with him into betrayal, into fear, into humiliation, into suffering and death? Or will we choose comfort, distance, and denial?

To experience the fullness of God’s love is costly. It asks everything of us. It asks us to feel it all—the joy and the pain, the light and the darkness, the grief and the peace. And yes, the pain can feel overwhelming, even terrifying. But the joy, the light, and the peace on the other side are more radiant than we can imagine.

Because we cannot have the Alleluia of Easter without the wailing of the cross.