Quick Reference

Date: 22 March 2026
Season: Fifth Sunday of Lent, Year A
Readings:

• First Reading: Ezekiel 37:12–14
• Responsorial Psalm: Psalm 130:1–2, 3–4, 5–6, 7–8
• Second Reading: Romans 8:8–11
• Gospel: John 11:1–45

One-sentence theme: God’s forming breath moves toward exactly the places we sealed off and stopped expecting anything from.

Introduction to the Liturgy of the Word which you are welcome to use or adapt is placed toards the very end of this post.

The Readings in Context

First Reading: Ezekiel 37:12–14

Historical placing

Ezekiel prophesied in two distinct periods: before the fall of Jerusalem (593–587 BCE) and after it (587–571 BCE). This text belongs to the second phase — the exilic period, when the unthinkable had happened. The Temple had been destroyed. The city had fallen. The people were in Babylon.

The vision of the dry bones (37:1–14, of which our lectionary excerpt is the concluding divine address) was spoken to a community that had used up its grief and arrived somewhere worse: the flat, airless place beyond grief. Our bones are dried up, our hope is lost, we are cut off (37:11). Not lamentation — verdict. The nation had concluded that the story was over.

Ezekiel himself is worth pausing on. He received his prophetic commission in exile, by the river Chebar in Babylon, in a vision so strange and overwhelming that later Jewish tradition restricted its study to mature scholars. He performed enacted prophecies of almost unbearable symbolic weight — lying on his side for 390 days, shaving his head, eating bread baked over dung, being forbidden to mourn when his wife died. He was, by any measure, a man who had absorbed the full cost of what he was being asked to carry. And out of that place — not despite it but from within it — he kept speaking what was not yet visible.

What’s happening

The lectionary gives us the second half of the dry bones vision: not the famous valley scene but the divine promise that follows it. God addresses the exiles directly — O my people — with a series of first-person commitments: I will open your graves. I will have you rise. I will bring you back. I will put my spirit in you. I will settle you on your land. Six times: I will.

The language of graves and rising was not yet eschatological in the later Jewish sense. Ezekiel is speaking metaphorically about national restoration — the exile understood as death, the return as resurrection. But the metaphor runs deep. The image of God opening graves and breathing life into what has been sealed underground would become one of the central resources through which later Judaism and then Christianity thought about resurrection.

Key insight

The word translated spirit is ruah — breath, wind, spirit, the animating force of Genesis 1 that hovered over the formless deep. In Genesis 2, God forms (yatsar) the human from the earth and breathes (naphach) ruah into the nostrils — and the human becomes a living being. What Ezekiel promises is a second forming: the same breath, the same creative act, directed now at what has died and dried.

Rabbinic key

The Talmud (Sanhedrin 92b) records a debate about whether the dry bones of Ezekiel’s vision were actually resurrected or whether the vision was purely metaphorical. Rabbi Eliezer held it was metaphor; Rabbi Eliezer ben Jose said those bones genuinely rose. What’s notable is that the rabbis took both options seriously — the text was capacious enough to hold genuine physical resurrection and national restoration simultaneously. The vision refused to be entirely spiritualized.

Responsorial Psalm: Psalm 130

Historical placing

Psalm 130 is one of the fifteen Psalms of Ascent (120–134), sung by pilgrims climbing toward Jerusalem. It is also one of the seven traditional Penitential Psalms. Its dating is uncertain; its situation is universal.

What’s happening

Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD. The Hebrew is mimma’amaqqim — from the deep places, the abyssal depths. The same root appears in Genesis 1:2 (tehom, the formless deep) and in Jonah’s prayer from the belly of the fish. This is not ordinary distress. This is the place beneath places — in the ancient imagination, sheol, the realm of the shades, the silent country where the dead went.

And here is what matters for this Sunday: in the theology of the Psalms’ world, sheol was the place where relationship with God was severed. Not punishment — simply outside the covenant’s reach. Several psalms make this explicit: Do you work wonders for the dead? Do the shades rise up to praise you? Is your steadfast love declared in the grave? (Psalm 88:10–11). The standard understanding was that death ended the covenantal conversation. God was the God of the living.

Key insight

The psalmist is praying from exactly the place where prayer was not supposed to reach. This is not brave faith. It may be closer to desperation so complete that theological propriety has ceased to matter. The cry goes out from sheol — from the place where the tradition says God does not hear — addressed to the God the tradition says does not hear there.

This is the transgressive holiness of the De Profundis. It insists that the covenant extends even here. It has no proof. It sends the cry anyway. My soul waits for the Lord, more than watchmen wait for the morning — the waiting of someone who has been awake all night in the dark, not certain the morning will come, but watching anyway.

Second Reading: Romans 8:8–11

Historical placing

Romans was written around 57 CE, addressed to a community Paul had not yet visited, working out the theological implications of the resurrection with unusual care and density.

What’s happening

Paul sets up an opposition between phronema sarkos and phronema pneumatos — the mindset of the flesh and the mindset of the Spirit. The word phronema is not primarily about morality. It’s about orientation — what the mind is set toward, what it is organised around, what it keeps returning to as its reference point.

The mindset of the flesh is death — not because the body is evil but because when the forming, reaching, generative capacity of the human is entirely turned inward and backward, toward what is already closed, it has no opening for what the Spirit does.

Key insight

If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you — present tense. Not will dwell. Not dwelt once. Dwells. The same ruah that Ezekiel promised, the same breath that hovered over the formless deep — Paul locates it already present, already active, in mortal bodies. The resurrection is not only future. The breath is already moving in the dry places. The question is whether the phronema — the set of the mind, the orientation of the forming impulse — is open to what it is doing.

Gospel: John 11:1–45

Historical placing

John’s Gospel was written likely in the 90s CE, the last of the four Gospels, addressed to a community with a highly developed Christology. The raising of Lazarus appears only in John — the synoptics do not include it. In John’s structure, it is the seventh and culminating sign before the Passion narrative begins, and it directly triggers the decision to arrest and kill Jesus (11:45–53).

What’s happening

The narrative is precise in its details, and the details matter. Jesus receives word that Lazarus is ill. He waits two days. He arrives to find Lazarus four days dead — past the three-day threshold beyond which Jewish tradition held the soul could no longer return to the body. The situation is not merely difficult. It is concluded.

Martha meets Jesus on the road. Her words — Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died — are not accusation but grief, and beneath the grief is something extraordinary: she continues. But even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you. And when Jesus says your brother will rise, she gives the theologically correct answer about resurrection on the last day. Jesus then says: I am the resurrection and the life. And Martha responds with one of the most complete confessions in all four Gospels: I have come to believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world. This is Peter’s confession, from a woman, at a graveside, before any miracle has occurred.

Then Mary comes, and with her the crowd of mourners. And here the text gives us its shortest sentence:

Jesus wept. (11:35)

The Greek verb is ἐδάκρυσεν — he shed tears. But the word used two verses earlier (11:33) is more seismic: ἐνεβριμήσατο τῷ πνεύματι — a word used for horses snorting before battle, for profound visceral agitation. And ἐτάραξεν ἑαυτόν — he troubled himself, allowed himself to be disturbed. This is not decorous sorrow. This is a man whose body is being moved by something that does not resolve simply because he knows what comes next. Knowledge does not override flesh. He knew Lazarus would walk out in minutes. He wept anyway.

Then he goes to the tomb. The stone is removed over Martha’s protest — by now there will be a stench. The reality of four days of death (Jewish tradition held that the soul hovered near the body for three days, hoping to return. By the fourth day, it was considered definitively gone) is named and not bypassed. Jesus raises his eyes, speaks to the Father, and shouts into the tomb: Lazarus, come out.

The dead man comes out, still bound in burial cloths. And Jesus gives the final command not to Lazarus but to the community standing there: Unbind him and let him go.

Key insight

Three things to hold together: the sealed tomb (four days, stone across the entrance, burial bands and face cloth); the shout into it (Lazarus, come out — a voice that penetrates what has been concluded); and the unbinding that requires the community’s hands. Resurrection in John is never solitary. The one who comes out cannot unwrap himself. The bystanders — the mourners, the skeptical crowd, the ones who came to grieve and stayed to witness — they are the ones who finish the work.

Cross-reference

The tomb language in John 11 carefully prefigures Jesus’ own tomb in John 20: a cave sealed with a stone, burial bands, a face cloth — but there the cloths are left lying separately, and no one needs to give the command to unbind. The one who transcended the binding left the wrappings behind.

For the Season of Lent’s arc of hiding and unhiding: in previous weeks, what was hidden was gradually brought into the light — the woman at the well seen in full, the man born blind given sight. This Sunday, what is hidden is not a person but a capacity: the yetzer, the forming impulse, the imagination that motivates our creativity, the faculty that reaches toward what doesn’t yet exist. In the exile, in the grave, in the four-day tomb, in the wooden prayer — the generative force has sealed itself shut. The shout at the tomb is addressed to that.

The Common Thread

The Hebrew word yetzer — from yatsar, the potter’s forming — names the generative impulse, the faculty that reaches toward what is not yet and draws it toward being. It is not imagination in the sense of fantasy. It is the forming force: the capacity to hold open the possibility that something new can happen, that prayer does something, that the Spirit moves in this body, through this community, in this moment.

Genesis 6 names the catastrophe of its collapse: when every inclination of the yetzer orients only toward the closed and the impossible, God’s ruah withdraws — not in punishment but because breath needs an opening to move through. Ezekiel speaks to a nation whose yetzer has given up: our hope is cut off. The Psalmist prays from sheol — the place where the tradition says the covenant does not reach — because the yetzer is desperate enough to disregard theological propriety. Paul says the ruah that raised Jesus already dwells in mortal bodies, reorienting the forming impulse toward life. And John 11 enacts it at a sealed tomb, with a shout, and then hands the unbinding to the community standing there.

The sealed yetzer. The forming impulse that quietly, institutionally, gradually stopped expecting that God moves here, now, through this. Not with dramatic despair — that would be easier. With the flat acceptance of a tomb four days sealed. The stone long since rolled across. The grass beginning to grow over it.

Into that: take away the stone. Come out. Unbind him.

Introduction to the Liturgy of the Word

(For proclamation or adaptation)

We arrive today at the last Sunday before Holy Week, carrying everything Lent has shown us: the desert, the light on the mountain, the woman at the well, the man who was blind from birth. Today we stand at a tomb. What God does here, God does not do gently — it is done with a shout, and it asks something of us. Listen for what has been sealed. Listen for where the breath is trying to move.

Go into depth:

God Unhides His Tears: An in-depth introduction to the spirit of the Last Sunday Before Holy Week

The Tomb Door: A Stillness for the Last Sunday Before Holy Week
Almost no words. A short image-stream. And the silence that becomes the practice.

Untie Him and Let Him Go: Intercessions for the Tomb and Everyone in One
Prayer of the Faithful