I Am the Resurrection Calling You Forth to New Life
Are you ready to spend some time with the Lord? If you are new to mental prayer, we invite you to visit our guide on how to pray to learn more.
We begin Week 5 of our Sunday Lenten Challenge with this opening prayer:
Trust And Believe
Lord,
I believe you want to give me the grace to go deeper in prayer this Lent. Help me to be present to you so that I’ll intimately pray these next 15 minutes with my heart fully open and willing to receive that grace. Please help me open my heart and pray with more intensity. I want to be able to visualize myself with you so I can feel your presence more intimately in my life this Lent. Lord, give me the grace I need as I strive to complete these 6 days of Sunday Lenten meditations. I am choosing to take up my cross and humbly follow you all the way to Calvary and I want to do it with my whole heart.
AMEN.
Calling Me Forth to New Life
Let’s contemplate the promises of God this Lent. Do you sense God calling you forth to new life? Have you been praying to do God’s will? Let’s meditate on these things in the presence of Christ and offer ourselves to Him in prayer.
Prayer to the Holy Spirit
Holy Spirit,
I believe you are truly here and present to me right now. I desire to be present to you.
Thank you for giving me life and a divine purpose; I am grateful for your loving guidance in my life. Help me confidently follow your will and live out my heavenly purpose so that I can glorify you with my life.
You are faithful to me, let me also be faithful to you. Please help me live every day with the purpose you intend. Help me remember the price Jesus has paid for my soul.
I am grateful to you for helping me make choices and for guiding me on my path in my life. I recognize your hand on me and I cannot imagine life outside of your grace.
Breathe on me as I spend these next 15 minutes fixated on today’s Mass readings. Holy Spirit, help me pray with humility, honesty, love and affection. I want to grow in virtue and holiness.
Thank you, Holy Spirit, for every consolation, desolation, time of silence, difficult trial, and temptation of the evil one. I understand that you love me and that everything in my life happens by God’s holy will, whether it be divine providence or God’s permissive will due to my sin and negligence.
Please humble me as I walk with Jesus toward Jerusalem. Help me answer the call to a new life in Christ every single day so that I can be present to others and share your grace with charity.
AMEN.
Say Nothing Just Take Him In
Spend 1-3 minutes in silence gazing at the Lord with love and gratitude, in a prayer of silent contemplation.
Make a Movie in Your Mind
Now we will contemplate the first reading. Years have passed since the Temple burned, and Babylon has become, in its own terrible way, ordinary. You live now along an irrigation canal cut off the Chebar river, one of many such settlements where the exiles have been resettled — not slaves exactly, but not free, not home. Ezekiel lives among you, a priest with no altar to serve at, and you’ve watched something happen to him over the years: long silences, strange visions, days he cannot speak at all. The despair here runs deep and is spoken openly, almost as a proverb among your people: “our bones are dried up, our hope is lost, we are cut off.” You’ve said it yourself, more than once, in the dark. Then one day Ezekiel returns from wherever the Spirit takes him, and there is something different in his face — not comfort exactly, but conviction, as he begins to speak of graves opening, and breath returning to bones that have long since stopped hoping for anything at all…
Called Forth to New Life
Ezek 37:12-14
Therefore, prophesy and say to them: Thus says the Lord GOD: Look! I am going to open your graves; I will make you come up out of your graves, my people, and bring you back to the land of Israel. You shall know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves and make you come up out of them, my people! I will put my spirit in you that you may come to life, and I will settle you in your land. Then you shall know that I am the LORD. I have spoken; I will do it—oracle of the LORD.
Being in exile, the people felt dead and hopeless. This passage symbolizes two things: the coming restoration of Israel and their release from Babylonian captivity, and the future promise of a resurrection and spiritual renewal through the New Covenant in Jesus Christ. God promises to transform hopelessness into new life by placing His Spirit within us.
Be Completely Real
It’s hard to trust in God’s promises when you are in the middle of a seemingly hopeless situation, but when you surrender it to him, he always does make a way for you to be at peace and possess the right amount of grace to see it through.
Where are you right now in your spiritual life? Are you in a season of perceived hopelessness, or are you feeling blessed by God’s grace?
Let us continue our mental prayer with today’s Gospel:
Visualize Christ
Bethany is quiet in the way a house in mourning is quiet — hushed voices, neighbors gathered, the smell of nothing else but dust and grief in the air. Four days now since Lazarus died, and you can see it in Martha’s face when she meets Jesus on the road outside the village, the disappointment she can’t quite hide. You follow them both to the tomb, a cave cut into the hillside with a stone rolled across its mouth. Someone murmurs about the smell after four days. Jesus stands before the stone, and you watch his face — not calm, not distant, but visibly, humanly moved, tears actually forming in his eyes…
Being Brought Forth to New Life
John 11:1-45
Now a man was ill, Lazarus from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who had anointed the Lord with perfumed oil and dried his feet with her hair; it was her brother Lazarus who was ill.
So the sisters sent word to him, saying, “Master, the one you love is ill.”
When Jesus heard this he said, “This illness is not to end in death, but is for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”
Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when he heard that he was ill, he remained for two days in the place where he was. Then after this he said to his disciples, “Let us go back to Judea.”
The disciples said to him, “Rabbi, the Jews were just trying to stone you, and you want to go back there?”
Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours in a day? If one walks during the day, he does not stumble, because he sees the light of this world. But if one walks at night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him.”
He said this, and then told them, “Our friend Lazarus is asleep, but I am going to awaken him.”
So the disciples said to him, “Master, if he is asleep, he will be saved.”
But Jesus was talking about his death, while they thought that he meant ordinary sleep. So then Jesus said to them clearly, “Lazarus has died. And I am glad for you that I was not there, that you may believe. Let us go to him.”
So Thomas, called Didymus, said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go to die with him.”
When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days. Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, only about two miles away. And many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to comfort them about their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went to meet him; but Mary sat at home. Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. Even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you.”
Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise.”
Martha said to him, “I know he will rise, in the resurrection on the last day.”
Jesus told her, “I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”
She said to him, “Yes, Lord. I have come to believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world.”
When she had said this, she went and called her sister Mary secretly, saying, “The teacher is here and is asking for you.”
As soon as she heard this, she rose quickly and went to him. For Jesus had not yet come into the village, but was still where Martha had met him. So when the Jews who were with her in the house comforting her saw Mary get up quickly and go out, they followed her, presuming that she was going to the tomb to weep there.
When Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who had come with her weeping, he became perturbed and deeply troubled, and said, “Where have you laid him?”
They said to him, “Sir, come and see.”
And Jesus wept. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him.”
But some of them said, “Could not the one who opened the eyes of the blind man have done something so that this man would not have died?”
So Jesus, perturbed again, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone lay across it. Jesus said, “Take away the stone.”
Martha, the dead man’s sister, said to him, “Lord, by now there will be a stench; he has been dead for four days.”
Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believe you will see the glory of God?”
So they took away the stone. And Jesus raised his eyes and said, “Father, thank you for hearing me. I know that you always hear me; but because of the crowd here I have said this, that they may believe that you sent me.”
And when he had said this, he cried out in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!”
The dead man came out, tied hand and foot with burial bands, and his face was wrapped in a cloth. So Jesus said to them, “Untie him and let him go.”
Now many of the Jews who had come to Mary and seen what he had done began to believe in him.
You will rise up one day like Lazarus. It has always struck me that despite knowing this, Our Lord Jesus wept when he came to the tomb of his beloved friend Lazarus.
Whatever is dead inside of you, whatever makes you numb or sad, when you give it to Jesus, imagine him weeping over you in the same way he cried over Lazarus. Then surrender it all to him.
Paul writes that the same Spirit “who raised Christ from the dead” dwells in us, and “will give life to your mortal bodies” — the exact promise Jesus is about to make good on at Lazarus’s tomb. What happens visibly to Lazarus, Paul says, is already happening invisibly in every believer.
Are You Listening?
Sometimes we think God is far from us when in reality he is closer than we realize, there, ready to resurrect us and bring us back to life.
Paul reminds us that this same power is already at work in you: “The one who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also, through his Spirit dwelling in you” (Romans 8:11). Whatever feels dead in you right now — a habit you can’t seem to break, a relationship you’ve given up on, a hope you buried a long time ago — that same Spirit is not finished with it yet.
Imagine Jesus, for a moment, turning toward you, and calling you by name, asking you to come out. Close your eyes for a few minutes and imagine him calling you out of the grave and into the light of grace.
Jesus, thank you for calling me by name, even into the places I thought were beyond hope. Untie me from whatever still binds me, and let me walk free into the new life you’re calling me toward.
AMEN.