Come Forth! Be Unbound!

 

Deacon Dave · Come Forth! Be Unbound!

Homily for the 5th Sunday of Lent, March 22, 2026. Gospel of John 11:1-45. Theme: Come Forth! Be Unbound! 

 When St. John’s Gospel tells us about Jesus’ miracles, such as today’s Raising of Lazarus from the dead, it's important to realize that the story carries two layers of meaning. The first is a recounting of an actual event in history. In other words, it’s passing on to us what Jesus said and did on a particular occasion. The second layer is the story’s deeper spiritual meaning. It has a lesson for us that is symbolized by the events of the story and verbalized by Jesus. The message it delivers is intended for all people everywhere, and so we believe that through the Holy Gospel Jesus is truly speaking to us today. And, by the way, this profound reverence we have for Christ’s word is why the Book of the Gospels is held up for all to venerate at Mass; it’s why we stand out of respect to hear Jesus speaking to us from it; and it’s why the Book of the Gospels is kissed upon finishing the proclamation. 

 And in today’s Gospel Jesus has a very encouraging two-part message for us. The first is that physical death is not an end to our existence. It is a kind of “sleep” from which our bodies will awaken in the resurrection of the dead and be reunited with our immortal souls to live a glorious eternal life as we profess every Sunday in the Creed. And the second is that He has the power to set us free to live a new life here and now, so that we can be reasonably happy in this life and then supremely happy forever in the next. He desires to raise us up from spiritual death; to call us out of our spiritual tombs and unbind us from whatever holds us back from living a truly free and happy life. 

 To understand what He is talking about, we need to remember that there is more to us than just our mortal bodies and our physical life. We also possess immortal souls that can experience illness and death but in a totally different way than that of the body. This spiritual disease can be a kind of “silent killer” in that we can look and feel great on the outside but be spiritually sick and dying on the inside. Without truly realizing it, we can walk this earth as part of the “living dead”, so to speak, as people who are enclosed in tombs, not made of stone like that of Lazarus, but built of our own making. We can be spiritually bound up like a mummy, consigned to a spiritual grave that we have dug for ourselves because of our addictions, or persistent grudges, rampant consumerism or many other avenues of spiritual destruction. 

 And Jesus is deeply distressed and weeps over our condition just as he did for Lazarus. He doesn’t want to leave us there so He speaks to us the same powerful words that He spoke in the Gospel today, “Come forth! Be unbound!” He calls us to come forth from the tomb of materialism and be unbound from the lies that tell us we’re only worth what we look like and what we possess. To come forth from the tomb of isolation and be unbound from loneliness. To come forth from the tomb of resentment and be unbound from broken relationships. To come forth from the tomb of anxiety and panic and be unbound from fear and worry. To come forth from the tomb of addiction and codependency and be unbound from chaos and self- destruction. And just as He had people roll back the stone from Lazarus’ burial site so that he could walk out a new man, so He will likewise send people into our lives who can help us remove whatever is preventing us from leaving our spiritual tombs behind. But we have to trust and believe. 

 Now, if we don’t think we have the faith it takes for us to come forth from our tombs and be unbound, then we can draw hope from the example of Lazarus’ sister, Martha. Did you notice that the Gospel tells us that she had to “come to believe” that Christ was Who He said He was? Those three words “come to believe '' should give us great encouragement! They tell us that, though Martha had some faith, she was still growing, open to Jesus and willing to trust Him, but yet not quite there. And I am sure the same can be said of us. Perhaps we too believe but are “not quite there.” Perhaps we too, have something more to absorb, something more to experience about Christ so that we can “come to believe” more fully as Martha did. But be that as it may, even if our faith is weak or little we can still come humbly before him as she did and tell Him what we need. I’m pretty sure her faith didn’t reach perfection until she was once again hugging her brother Lazarus in her arms! 

 Martha shows us that we can begin to trust in Jesus’ power even before understanding fully who He is; even before really grasping the extent of what He can and wishes to do for us. She demonstrates that our faith grows as our experience of Jesus grows. She shows us that our relationship with Christ, like all relationships, is a dynamic ever-deepening reality. And now through this Holy Gospel she invites each one of us to come to believe as well. She invites each one of us to reach out to Jesus and trust in Him. She invites each one of us to listen with confidence to Christ when he tells us to come forth from our tombs and be unbound. As Easter draws near, let’s ask the Lord to grant us the liberating grace of hearing His voice in our hearts. Let’s ask Him for the confidence and trust in Him that we need to take those all-important first steps out of our self-made tombs to step forward to receive a new lease on life!

We Are Each the Man Born Blind

 

Deacon Dave · We Are Each the Man Born Blind

Homily for the Fourth Sunday in Lent (Laetare Sunday), March 15, 2026. Gospel of St. John 9:1-41. Theme: We Are Each the Man Born Blind 

 Sometimes those of us who came to faith after having gone through a lot of bad “stuff” (to put it politely) wonder, “Why?” Why did we wait so long? Why did the light not begin to shine until after so many years of wandering and wondering? Or why didn’t I just accept the faith that my family tried to pass on to me which would have saved me so much grief? The disciples asked Jesus pretty much the same type of question when they first encountered the Man Born Blind in today’s Gospel. They were also asking, “Why?” And Jesus’ reply to them is pretty much the same that He would say to us about our lives, “...It’s so that the works of God might be made visible.” 

 This doesn’t mean that we were intentionally put into bad situations just so God could end up looking all great and powerful! What He means is that even the wrong turns and bad decisions that we made in our lives can be used by God to bring us out of the darkness and into the light. And you know, the Man Born Blind also had other dark issues to deal with besides lack of vision. For example, even though he was living on the street as a beggar we learn that he has local parents whom people knew. That's why the Pharisees were able to send for them. And then when we hear them speaking about their son they sound cold and detached from him. It seems as if there was no love lost there. Finally, there seems to be uncertainty about his age because the parents are called to come and testify in his place. Now in Judaism a boy was considered a man with legal rights around age 13 , so it seems that our Blind Man’s age was hard to tell by appearance. So he may very well have been but a young teenager. The poor guy! His own parents apparently kicked him out of the house, abandoning him to live on the streets! Talk about dealing with baggage and issues! And I’m sure that like the disciples and like us, he also asked God, “Why?” and wondered if good would ever come his way. 

 Back in the days before Jesus entered our lives, we were like the Man Born Blind. We were also afflicted with lack of vision, but it was of the spiritual sort and we wondered if good would ever come our way. And just as the man’s physical disability made him open to the hope that Jesus could help him, so also our personal forms of darkness made us reach out in hope for the healing touch of the Lord. Situations such as addiction with its repeated cycles of recovery and relapse, or the pain of failed relationships with its broken hearts, or the financial situations that made life a stomach-turning rollercoaster…or whatever stuff we were dealing with, became ways in which Jesus was able to walk into our lives and begin to light up our world. And then once we opened up and allowed Christ in, our spiritual vision started to come into focus. And then the more we experienced how much better our lives became because of Jesus, the more we wanted to know Him. It was as if the lyrics to the beloved hymn, "Amazing Grace” began to ring true in our lives, “I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see!” 

 Like the Man Born Blind, after we experienced the healing touch of Jesus our understanding of Him went through a deepening process, which is still happening in our lives today. The Gospel shows us that once the man was healed he went from Sight to Insight to Faith in his relationship with Christ. At first, when he was going just by Sight he described his Healer as “that man called Jesus”. His knowledge of the Lord was very surface-level and incomplete. This is probably where many of us were when we first met the Lord. Perhaps we knew the main highlights about His life from Bible stories, but was that pretty much it. Up to then in our lives we were looking at Christ only with ordinary Sight, much the same way that we would have looked at any admirable figure. 

 But then the man was brought into a situation where he had to think more deeply about who this Jesus was and what He had done for him. He begins to see that He was more than just “that man” and declares, “He is a prophet…God is with him!” The man is progressing from Sight to Insight, which means that the light is getting a bit brighter. I bet most of us also found ourselves in a similar situation. What I mean is, we were pretty sure that there was something more to this man named Jesus than met the eye, because our lives started getting better, but we weren’t exactly sure what that "something more" might be. There was something different about him that attracted us and so we began to learn more about Him. We were moving on from Sight to Insight as we started praying, started reading the Bible and started attending Mass again. 

 But it wasn't until the Man Born Blind stood up and boldly spoke out about Jesus that we went from Insight to Faith. The light of Christ then began shining so brilliantly within him that he exclaimed, “I do believe!” Then he bowed down and worshiped Jesus. So you see, all the “stuff”, all the bad news of his former way of life ended up becoming good news that brought him to this New Beginning and Fresh Start in life! And you know, it’s a very real possibility that if we had never gone through all our “bad news”, then we too might never have ended up finding the Good News of and about Jesus. So, are we now ready and willing to go follow the Man Born Blind further and go public in our relationship with Christ? Are we open to becoming intentional disciples who stand with Jesus no matter what the cost? Are we willing to embrace life as authentic Christians and be done with a half-baked, half-hearted approach to our faith? These are the kind of questions that the Gospel of St. John wants us to ask ourselves once we come to realize that we are each the Man Born Blind.

We Are the Woman at the Well

 

Deacon Dave · We Are the Woman at the Well

Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent, March 8. 2026. Gospel of St. John 4:5-42. Theme: We Are the Woman at the Well 

 Today’s Gospel presents us with the longest recorded one-on-one conversation that Christ had with another person during His public ministry. It opens with Jesus, tired and thirsty, stopping for a rest at a well in Samaria. He encounters a woman who intentionally comes to draw water at noon because she knows that her neighbors will not be there. The women of the village always carried out this laborious task in the cool of the morning or the breeze of the evening but never in the blazing noonday sun. So, why did this woman come at midday when she had good reason to believe none of her neighbors would be there? 

 Well, to find out we need to do a little bit of ancient detective work. We are told that she had gone through five husbands and we know that in her culture, women had no legal right to choose a spouse or to initiate divorce. So this meant that she was not the instigator of these multiple relationships but rather, was a victim of serial abuse, being repeatedly used and then discarded by a procession of men. Each had their way with her and then just left her behind. This chain of abusive treatment would not only corrupt her self-image, but would also give her a reputation in the village as being “damaged goods”. It surely placed upon her shoulders a burden of false shame and so it’s no wonder that she sought to evade her peers at the well. 

 But Jesus reaches out to this deeply wounded woman to bring her the good news that there is hope for a better life ahead. And in doing so it moves him to ignore three cultural taboos of Judaism. First, Jews did not have anything to do with Samaritans, who centuries before had broken rank with Israel and formed a new hybrid religion. They were considered traitors who were cursed by God. Second, Jewish men did not speak to strange women in public. Ever. And third, mingling with her was considered spiritual contamination, a kind of guilt by association. In doing these things, Christ was intentionally ignoring deeply embedded cultural prejudice and discrimination, but as we all know, that’s “vintage Jesus”. He was always reaching out to those who were social outcasts, no matter who they were, no matter where they came from, and no matter what they may have done. 

 As the story unfolds, the woman gradually opens up to Jesus and He, in turn, gradually reveals more of Himself to her. This dynamic interchange shows us that Jesus respects our freedom. He invites but He never forces. He meets us where we are and works with us there, gently encouraging us to go deeper, to have confidence in Him. Notice the various ways the woman addresses Jesus, which reveal that she is undergoing this process of deepening her understanding of who He is. Initially, she calls him “Sir’” as she would address any man. Next, she realizes that He is more than that. He is a devout teacher, perhaps a mystic, and so she calls him a “prophet”. Finally, a light clicks on inside of her as she senses something even more unique about this holy man and ponders if he might be “the Christ”' (which means “the Messiah” in Greek). 

 But the mystery about who He is deepens as Jesus offers her a ‘Gift of God’ that He calls ‘Living Water’. Now, in their desert culture, “living water” meant fresh running water as opposed to stagnant well water and so she is quite excited to hear about such a treasure! And she gets even more excited when Jesus tells us that she won’t have to labor for this Living Water day after day. She is thinking about earthly things, of course, but Jesus is elevating her thoughts towards heavenly things. He's using Living Water as a metaphor for the Holy Spirit, the Bearer of God’s grace, that He wants to pour into her heart. Just as springs of running water refresh and revive her physically, so the fountain of Living Water will heal and transform her from interiorly. Jesus knows that this is really what she has been thirsting for and truly needs. 

The Gospel wants us to see ourselves reflected in this spiritually wounded woman. Like her, we have all been broken by our sins and the sins of others. Like her, many of us may think of ourselves as “damaged goods” and carry on our shoulders a burden of false shame. And so Jesus invites us through this Gospel to come to Him and have our burning thirst for love and acceptance satisfied by the Living Water that He offers us. The story then reaches its conclusion by showing us how Christ’s Living Water has kicked into action. We now see her as a changed woman who races back to her village filled with excitement over the holy man whom she had met. She now runs back to the village precisely to seek out her neighbors instead of avoiding them. And once there she draws attention to herself by exclaiming, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have done. Could this be the Christ?” What a twist in the story! What a turn of events! What a change of heart! The Living Water of God’s grace has overcome her desire for isolation and begins to heal her social relationships. The once rejected and scorned woman has cast her false shame aside and has now become a bold messenger of God’s love to her peers! 

 But you know, today’s story isn’t just about this Samaritan Woman. It’s also about us. St. John was inspired by the Holy Spirit to record this event in his Gospel to remind us that we are each that woman at the well. We each need to follow her example by opening up our hearts and lives to Jesus. It’s encouraging us to be like her and not to hide anything about ourselves from Him out of fear of judgment because that’s not how He operates. Instead, when we honestly own up to Him about who we are and what we have done, He responds by giving us a greater outpouring of the Gift of God, the Holy Spirit. And then as He did for that woman, He will drench us with healing streams of Living Water, causing new life to spring up within us, from which will flow abundant faith, confident hope and life-changing love.