Eventide & Altar

Jeremiah's wound feels incurable and God's answer is not a healing. It is a promise: I will make you a solid wall of brass. They will fight you and not prevail. I am with you to deliver and rescue you. The wound is real and God does not dispute it. What he promises is to be in it with you, and that it will not have the final word.

Martha runs out to meet Jesus while Mary sits at home. Two sisters, same grief, different response. Neither is wrong. Martha's response is the one the Gospel records in full: Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. The grievance and the faith, in the same sentence. Even now I know you can do something. She does not have to resolve the contradiction between her trust and her grief before she speaks. She brings both.

Jesus does not answer the grievance first. He makes the claim: I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live. And then the question, standing at the tomb: do you believe this?

Martha's yes has been said by Christians across twenty centuries at the bedsides of the dying, at the gravesides of the beloved. You have probably said it at more than one tomb by now. Not because everything made sense or the grief was resolved. The yes said from next to a tomb is the faith that Scripture honors above almost any other.

The Glorious Mysteries. Begin with the Resurrection - the event Martha's yes was about before she could see it. Pray them for whoever in your life is at their own tomb, waiting for the stone to roll.

• In gratitude for every yes said from next to a tomb - for the faith that held through grief and held anyway - we pray to the Lord.
• For those standing at a tomb today - a death, a diagnosis, an ending - that the I AM would be more real than the stone in front of them, we pray to the Lord.
• On the feast of Saints Martha, Mary, and Lazarus, for the households we have loved and the households that have loved us, that we would receive Jesus the way that family received him, we pray to the Lord.

Name the tomb you have stood at in your life - not hypothetically, but the specific one. The death that still has a shape in memory, the loss that has not fully resolved. Hold it before the risen Lord today. Not to resolve it - to place it in his hands. I am the resurrection and the life. Let that claim land on the specific thing you are holding.