Quick Reference
Date: 22 March 2026
Season: Fifth Sunday of Lent, Year A
Readings: Ezekiel 37:12–14 | Psalm 130 | Romans 8:8–11 | John 11:1–45
One-sentence theme: The God who knows the ending weeps anyway — and shouts into the sealed places we forgot we had.
Where Are We?
In the Liturgical Year
We are one Sunday from Holy Week. The purple of Lent deepens this week into something quieter and more weighted — not penitential exactly, but grave. The season has been building toward this: five Sundays of progressive unhiding, and now we arrive at the most extreme form of the pattern. Not someone hiding. Not someone veiled. Someone sealed in a tomb, four days gone, past the point where anyone is still watching for a sign of life returning.
Next Sunday the liturgical register shifts completely. Palm Sunday opens with triumph and ends with the Passion narrative — the longest and most demanding proclamation of the liturgical year. This Sunday is the last quiet one. Use it.
In the Biblical Narrative
John’s Gospel has been building toward this moment since the first sign at Cana. The raising of Lazarus is the seventh and final sign before the Passion — the culminating demonstration of who Jesus is, offered at the highest possible cost. After this, the Sanhedrin convenes. The decision is made. The arrest becomes inevitable.
We have been travelling with John throughout Lent Year A: the Samaritan woman at the well on the Third Sunday, the man born blind on the Fourth. Each encounter has deepened the question Jesus keeps asking through John’s gospel: who do you say that I am? Martha’s answer at the tomb door — I believe you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world — is the Gospel’s fullest answer yet, spoken by a woman, in grief, before any miracle has occurred.
In Salvation History
The thread running through today’s readings reaches back to the beginning. The ruah — the breath, the wind, the spirit — that hovered over the formless deep in Genesis 1, that God breathed into the first human’s nostrils in Genesis 2, that withdrew when the human yetzer — the forming, generative impulse (the imagination that motivates our creativity) — collapsed entirely inward in Genesis 6: that same breath is what Ezekiel promises to the exiles, what Paul says already dwells in mortal bodies, what moves at the tomb of Lazarus when Jesus raises his eyes and speaks.
The yetzer is not imagination in the sense of fantasy. It is the forming impulse — from yatsar, the potter’s shaping — the faculty that reaches toward what doesn’t yet exist and draws it toward being. The faculty that prays expecting an answer. The faculty that stands at a tomb and holds open the possibility that something could happen here.
When that faculty seals itself shut — not dramatically, not with despair, but with the quiet acceptance of something concluded — God’s breath withdraws. Not in punishment. But because breath needs an opening to move through.
This Sunday is about what happens when God arrives at the sealed yetzer and shouts.
The Spirit of This Sunday
Every reading today moves toward the same sealed place.
Ezekiel speaks to a nation that has given its verdict on itself: our bones are dry, our hope is gone, we are cut off. Not lamentation — conclusion. And God says: I will open your graves.
The Psalmist prays from sheol — in the theology of the ancient world, the place where the covenant did not reach, where even prayer was thought not to arrive. And sends the cry up anyway. My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning — the waiting of someone awake all night in the dark, not certain the dawn will come, watching regardless.
Paul says the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus already dwells in mortal bodies. Present tense. Not will dwell — dwells. The breath is already moving. The question is whether the forming impulse is open enough to receive it.
And John brings us to Bethany, to a cave with a stone across it, to Martha’s extraordinary confession of faith before any miracle has occurred, to Mary’s grief and the crowd’s grief and then —
Jesus wept.
The shortest sentence in the Gospel. Two words in Greek. And they carry more theology than most paragraphs.
He knew what he was about to do. He had told the disciples plainly: this illness is for the glory of God. He knew Lazarus would walk out of that tomb. And he wept anyway. Because knowledge does not override flesh. Because the body does not wait for the ending — it is here, now, in the shock of standing at a grave, in the wave that hits when death is real and the people you love are shattered by it.
The Greek behind deeply moved is ἐνεβριμήσατο — a word used for horses before battle, for visceral, seismic agitation. Jesus allowed himself to be troubled. He did not stand at a safe distance from grief and administer resurrection. He went to where the dead thing was, and he let it move him, and he wept.
This is what the Word becoming flesh actually means. Not the doctrine — the reality. God has a body that can be hit by grief. God knows what it costs to stand at a grave. God knows what it is to love someone and lose them and feel the full weight of what that does to the living.
And that changes everything about the prayer from the depths. The one receiving that cry has stood at the depths himself. Is not administering comfort from above. Weeps first. Shouts after.
The real unhiding of this Sunday is not Lazarus walking out of the tomb — that sign, like all signs in John, remains hidden to those unwilling to see it. What is permanently, irreversibly unhidden is God’s tears. Once you have seen that, you cannot unsee it.
Take away the stone. Come out. Unbind him and let him go.
Symbols and Themes for Worship
Stone and opening — the threshold between sealed and possible. Visual environments might hold this tension: something covered, something beginning to be uncovered. Not fully resolved. Not yet Easter.
Burial cloth and breath — the contrast between what binds and what animates. The Spirit moves; the cloth stills. Both are present this Sunday.
Depth and waiting — the de profundis register. Dark colours, low light, the quality of the last week before everything changes. This is not yet the Passion’s dramatic weight — it is the quiet before it.
Tears — not as weakness but as the fullest possible sign that the Word became flesh. If your community uses images in worship, the weeping Christ at Bethany carries more this Sunday than the miracle itself.
Community and hands — the unbinding is not solitary. Whatever visual or gestural elements your community uses, this Sunday invites something about the gathered body doing together what cannot be done alone.
Free Resources for This Sunday
The Sealed Place: Going Into the Text
For liturgy teams, homilists, and anyone who wants to know what’s actually happening in these readings
The yetzer — the forming impulse, the faculty that reaches toward what doesn’t yet exist — appears in Genesis 6 at the moment of its collapse, in Ezekiel 37 at the moment of its restoration, in Romans 8 as the phronema reoriented by the Spirit, and in John 11 as the thing Jesus shouts into at a sealed tomb. This post traces the arc through all four readings, with rabbinic commentary on sheol and the dry bones, and the Greek behind Jesus’ seismic agitation at the grave.
→ Read the Biblical Background
Come Out: A Stillness for the Last Sunday Before Holy Week
For presiders, liturgy coordinators, and anyone who leads prayer
Almost no words. A short image-stream, long silences, and the two sentences that carry everything. Structured for post-communion reflection or the penitential rite, with full pacing notes for ministers. This one asks the presider to be genuinely comfortable with silence — because the silence is the practice.
Untie Him and Let Him Go: Intercessions for the Tomb and Everyone in One
For presiders, readers, and liturgy teams
For the forgotten in care homes. For the imprisoned. For those who cannot stop grieving — people, dreams, versions of themselves. For the places in us where hope sealed itself shut so quietly we didn’t notice. For the Church, that she recover her nerve. And for the departed, prayed for from the depths, toward the God who hears from there. Complete with celebrant introduction and conclusion. Ready to use.
→ Read the Prayer of the Faithful
Looking Ahead: Palm Sunday, Year A — 29 March 2026
Next Sunday the season turns on its axis.
We will move from the quiet of a sealed tomb to the noise of a city gate — from come out to hosanna, from burial cloths to cloaks thrown on the road. Palm Sunday holds the whole arc of Holy Week in a single liturgy: the procession’s triumph and the Passion’s devastation, sometimes within the same hour. It is the most tonally complex Sunday of the year.
The readings will ask us to hold both — the crowd’s welcome and the crowd’s verdict, the king on a donkey and the man abandoned by everyone he loved. After five Sundays of progressive unhiding, Palm Sunday unhides something almost unbearable: that the same people, sometimes the same hearts, can shout hosanna and crucifixion within days of each other.
Resources for Palm Sunday Year A will be available here when ready.
A Note on This Work
These resources are free, and always will be. If they’ve been useful to your community, share them with someone who might need them.
If you’re looking for something more tailored — resources shaped to your community’s particular season, or accompaniment for your own Lenten journey — I’d be glad to talk. You can find me here.
