“Lazarus! Come out!” So Jesus calls to his friend who has died, over whom he has wept, and who has been four days in the tomb. St. Cyril of Jerusalem points out, “One day had passed, and a second, and a third: his sinews were decayed, and corruption was preying already upon his body.” And yet Lazarus does come out, still wearing his grave clothes, but as alive and well as you or me.

When the One Who, in the beginning, speaks life into being tells one of us, his creatures, to live, though we lie in a tomb, we will live. Whether we have been dead four days, like Lazarus, or four thousand years, we will heed this command of our master. When the one who made us out of dust tells us to arise, though our bodies have turned to dust, they will arise. Dust cannot resist the divine word at resurrection time.

The resurrection of Lazarus was yesterday and the resurrection of Jesus is next Sunday. Between these two resurrections is today and Holy Week. Today, Palm Sunday, is inextricably linked to yesterday, Lazarus Saturday. Liturgically, they form a unit all their own, between the Great Fast and Holy Week. So, though we rightly call today Palm Sunday in commemoration of Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem as King and Messiah, let’s not forget the place of Lazarus in all of this, who appears at the beginning, the middle, and the end of today’s gospel.

The gospel begins with Lazarus, who had been dead, eating supper with Jesus and his disciples. This is one of the signs of the resurrection of the body. Only a truly embodied person eats food. Jesus will repeat this sign after his own resurrection, when he will eat broiled fish with his disciples in Jerusalem (Luke 24:42). By this sign, we know that Lazarus and Jesus are truly risen in the body and not merely ghosts or visions.

And then, in the middle of the gospel, we learn of a further connection between Jesus and Lazarus. Not only are the chief priests now plotting to put Jesus to death, but also Lazarus, “because, on account of him many of the Jews were going away and believing in Jesus.”

According to tradition, Lazarus, unlike Jesus, escapes their plot. He lives on another thirty years. When he dies a second time, they lay him in a sarcophagus on which they write, “Lazarus of the four days and the friend of Christ.” For four days, Lazarus knew death, which no one else among the living has ever known. The Synaxarion says he never spoke of it and some say he never laughed again until he saw a man stealing a clay pot. And then he laughed, saying, “One earth steals another.”

And then at the end of today’s gospel, after Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem, we learn why the great crowd is so exultant and why they hail Jesus as their king: because he has raised Lazarus. This miracle more than all the others convinces multitudes that Jesus is the Christ. By raising Lazarus, Jesus shows that he can raise us all and that he will save us – even from the last enemy, even from death. This divine triumph even over death is the sign that brought so many to belief in Jesus.

And this belief of the people is what motivates the Pharisees and chief priests to take action against Jesus. They see that, due to this great sign, many are believing in Jesus and they fear that this will provoke the Romans to come and destroy them. The high priest Caiaphas, though motivated by cowardice, unintentionally prophesies, saying, “It is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation should not perish” (John 11:50). And so, (in the gospel according to John), they plot to put Jesus to death as a direct result of his resurrection of Lazarus.

Jesus’ resurrection of Lazarus leads today to his triumphant entry into Jerusalem – but it will soon lead also to his death. Quite directly, Jesus lays down his own life in exchange for giving life to his friend Lazarus. There is no greater love. Ultimately, Jesus lays down his life to give life to us all. It is good to be a friend of Christ Jesus. Even though you die, he will give you life.

Today, we sing again the Troparion of Lazarus from yesterday:

Christ our God, before your passion you confirmed our common resurrection when you raised Lazarus from the dead. Therefore, like the children, we carry the symbols of victory and cry out to you, the Victor over death: Hosanna in the highest! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

I believe that, through Lazarus, Jesus has something to teach us about death. (Now the remembrance of death is being put daily before our eyes, even by the media. As Christians, we should always remember that we are going to die). When Lazarus dies, Jesus weeps. And then, he raises Lazarus from the dead. This is our perfect model for how to approach death.

First, death is an occasion for weeping. It is a sorrowful thing. It is a terrible thing. It is an unnatural thing. It is the last enemy. It is not a natural part of life. It is not “going to a better place.” It is a thing to be lamented. It is a thing to put an end to.

Nevertheless, for each of us there is a time to die (Eccl. 3). For Lazarus, there are two times to die. And for Jesus, there is a time to die. The death of Jesus is like no other, because he alone is Life. And so death cannot keep him in his clutches. When life enters into death, it is death that dies at last.

Loretta Lynn sings, “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.” And that’s mostly right, and for good reason. Jesus did not want to die. And he wept again when his time for death drew near to him in Gethsemane. “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard for his godly fear.” (Heb 5:7).

So in the face of death, first we weep, as Jesus weeps, and then, after our weeping, we accept death, and then, on the other side of that gaping chasm of Hades, there is hope, because Jesus, the way and the life, has gone there first. In him, there will be a restoration of all things to right. After death, there comes a better life with the resurrection. It is not better for us to be dead. It is not better for our souls to be “freed” from our bodies. It is better for us to rise in Christ and live again in bodies freed from mortality. So, yes, we grieve in the face of death, but we do

not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep…. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first… and so we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words (1Th 4:13-18).

God knows we need comfort in these days.

Today, and again on Wednesday, as it so happens, we remember our venerable mother Mary of Egypt.

Before her repentance, she was, as Simon the Pharisee observed today about the woman of the city, “a sinner” (Luke 7:39) Though she is often thought of as a prostitute, her sin was not so much prostitution as fornication. Saint Sophronios says that she would not charge her many sexual partners, but survived instead by begging and spinning flax. She was, like so many of us in this hypersexualized culture, consumed and driven “by an insatiable and an irrepressible passion” of lust.

She went to Jerusalem among the pilgrims, but her reason for going was not pilgrimage. Rather, she went in a large group for the purpose of seducing many partners. Some might question how such a sinner could even think to enter the holy city and its holy places.

But remember the woman of the city in Simon’s house today. She goes right up to Jesus himself and, weeping, wets his feet with her tears and wipes them with her hair and kisses his feet and anoints them (Luke 7:37-38). Though she is a sinner, she touches Jesus. And Jesus, who is more than a prophet, knows that she is a sinner, yet allows her to touch him.

On the other hand, when Mary of Egypt, who is also a sinner, tries to enter the house of Jesus – that is his Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the Church of the Anastasis – of the Resurrection – she is prevented by an invisible spiritual force from entering the church.

Why? What’s the difference between these two sinful women? Why does Jesus allow one to touch him while the other is prevented from even entering his house? There is only one difference between them – repentance. The woman of the city in the Pharisee’s house was penitent. She was weeping. And she was loving. She did not cease to kiss Jesus’s feet. So all her many sins were forgiven because she loved much.

Meanwhile, Mary of Egypt tries to enter the holy place of the Lord while yet impenitent. She goes to that holy tomb not seeking to anoint the body of the Lord, but rather seeking more partners for her lust. The invisible blockade that she experiences is in fact a strong medicine. It’s not meant, I don’t think, simply to keep the holy separated from the unholy – the clean from the unclean, but it is meant, I think, to reveal her situation to her and to bring her to repentance.

And, gracefully, it has this effect. Seeing outside the church an icon of another Mary – that is, of the most pure Theotokos – she does repent. She weeps and laments, like the woman of the city in the Pharisee’s house. And she learns that true love for the Lord surpasses any self-satisfaction gained by indulging in the passion of lust. Trying again, in her new state of penitence, to enter the Church of the Resurrection, she finds no force keeping her out. And she does enter and there she kisses the Holy Cross, just as the woman of the city kissed the feet of Jesus. She who is forgiven much loves much.

Now what might her fellow pilgrims have thought of her at this moment? Seeing this woman who they knew to be among their number expressly for the seduction of their members, now entering the Holy Sepulchre weeping and kissing the Holy Cross, what might they have thought? When Simon saw the sinful woman enter his house and kiss the feet of Jesus, he thought, “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner” (Luke 7:39). If Mary’s fellow pilgrims were true followers of Christ, then they rejoiced at her repentance. But if they were like some of us, then they probably had thoughts rather similar to Simon’s. They may have thought “Who is this woman to kiss the Holy Cross? She has not embraced the cross by her dissolute living.” They may have judged her and thought her presence among them in this place at this time inappropriate.

I hope not. But if they did, the only true judge knew their thoughts. And if we have thoughts like this about others, he knows this as well, and we will hear about it. Let’s rather keep our thoughts on our own sins rather than on the sins of those around us.

For things are often not what they seem. A person who seems to us to be a great sinner may, in fact, be awash in the holy grace of forgiveness through repentance.

This was the case with Mary of Egypt. She seemed to be still a great sinner, but in truth, her glorification by grace, by the life of God, had already begun. She went immediately after her eyes were opened to the holy mystery of repentance, was absolved of her sins, and received holy communion. This is the proper, ordinary, and churchly way to begin again the life in Christ after we have sinned. When we fall, we get up again. When we sin, we repent and enter again into the communion with the Lord through the mysteries of the Church.

But then Mary did something less ordinary, less usual, and even less churchly by some standards. The next morning, she crossed the river Jordan and then lived the rest of her life – 47 years – in the desert as a hermit.

I say this is a less churchly way of life because, for one thing, it is extremely peculiar for a person to be called directly into the life of a hermit – without first having lived a long time in community. (Though, there are other examples of this – particularly in early monasticism – such as St. Antony the Great.) And then, even among hermits, it is peculiar to live most of life deprived of the holy mysteries, especially the Eucharist. Yet this is what Saint Mary of Egypt did. After that first holy repentance and communion, she went into the desert and never communed again, until the day that she died many years later.

We who are now deprived of church services because of the coronavirus are experiencing a relatively brief taste of the life that St. Mary lived for 47 years. If we use this time like she did – for repentance – we will come out on the other side of it not deprived of grace but still more illumined by grace.

A year before St. Mary died, St. Zosima, a priest, came upon her in the desert. Her hair was so long and she was so rough from her many years of ascetic practice, that from a distance he did not at first know for sure whether she was human. She told him her life story and she asked him to bring her holy communion the following year on Holy Thursday, which he did, on the banks of the Jordan – the same place she had received communion the last time. When she came to receive communion from him, for the second and last time of her life, she walked on the water of the Jordan to meet him.

Seeing this miracle, Zosimus began to prostrate himself, but she cried out to him and stopped him, “What are you doing Abba! You are carrying the divine Gifts!” Behold her reverence for the Eucharist, despite her forty-seven years of abstinence from it. When we carry the Divine Gifts – our Lord’s own body and blood, we do not kneel or prostrate, as if to make the Lord bow before his creatures. We do not kneel after holy communion, while we carry our Lord within our very bodies. To make a gesture of penance while communing with the Lord expresses – falsely – that the holy communion has failed in its purpose, which is to unite us to the Lord, in whom death has been vanquished. We stand for communion in expression of this resurrectional faith. Resurrection, anastasis, means “to stand again.” St. Mary understood this.

St Mary of Egypt understood much, despite the fact that she never went to church again after her illumination. When she did receive the Eucharist that second and last time, it was brought to her by the priest. She did not go to church. This might astound us. We humans have a rule book and a script that we think must be followed in order to grow in union with God. But God doesn’t follow the script. He who can raise up children of Abraham out of the stones can make us saints even if we are distanced from the liturgy. And St Mary knew how to worship the Lord in the Eucharist better than the priest who brought him to her! This woman who didn’t go to church for 47 years understood the Eucharist better than the priest! Frequent communion is a good thing, but it is not the only way to holiness.

Here is a woman who defies all of our expectations. Living apart from church services, even apart from frequent reception of holy communion, and yet living a life filled with grace and faith. Mary demonstrates that God can and does act as he will. He is not confined by us or by our expectations. We do not limit his grace.