Fifth Sunday of Lent (Third Scrutiny)

Jesus wept. It is the shortest verse in the Bible, and it may be the most important thing a man can learn from the Gospels.

The Son of God stood at the tomb of his friend and cried. Not privately, not with clenched jaw and dry eyes. He wept in front of everyone. The crowd saw it and said: see how he loved him. Others said: could not the one who opened the eyes of the blind have prevented this?

Brother, you have been taught that strong men do not weep. That grief is weakness. That the correct response to loss is to push through, power up, and move on. But Jesus - the strongest man who ever lived, the one who was about to raise the dead in thirty seconds - wept first.

Weeping is not weakness. It is the response of a man who loves deeply and has lost something that matters. If you cannot weep, you cannot love fully. And if you cannot love fully, you cannot lead anyone anywhere worth going. The man who cannot cry at the tomb cannot command the dead to rise.

Then Jesus acts. He does not stay in the grief. He prays, and then he calls out with a loud voice: Lazarus, come out! And the dead man walks.

Here is the question for you: what is dead in you? What relationship have you buried? What dream have you given up for lost? What part of your faith have you sealed in a tomb and rolled a stone over? Jesus is standing at that tomb right now, and he is not whispering. He is shouting your name the way he shouted Lazarus's.

The last line matters most: untie him and let him go. Lazarus came out still wrapped in burial cloths. Jesus did not untie him himself - he told the community to do it. Resurrection requires community. You cannot untie yourself. You need brothers who will pull the grave clothes off you, and that means you need to let them see what you have been carrying.

Name one dead thing. Say it out loud this week - to God, to a brother, to a confessor. Do not keep it sealed. And then let someone help you with the burial cloths. That is what brothers are for. That is what Confession is for. That is what this community exists to do. Come out. It is time.

Lord, I have buried some things. I have rolled stones over them and walked away. Stand at my tomb today. Weep over what I have lost - you are not too strong to cry, and neither am I. Then call me out. Send brothers to untie me. Amen.