We are one week from Holy Week, and the readings this Sunday are not subtle about where we are. Three of the four texts are steeped in death. Ezekiel speaks to graves. The psalmist cries from the depths. Mary and Martha are in mourning. Lazarus has been in the tomb for four days. The whole liturgy this Sunday smells like grief.
And yet. Into every one of these scenes, God speaks a word that reorders everything.
The Fifth Sunday of Lent is sometimes called Passion Sunday in older traditions, and it carries a weight that the earlier weeks do not. We are deep enough into Lent that the cross is no longer a far-off theological concept. It is close now. The world that killed Lazarus is the same world that will, within days, kill Jesus. And the readings invite us to ask: what does resurrection mean for us when the dying is real, the grief is real, and the tomb has been sealed for days?
That is not an abstract question in the United States in the spring of 2026.
Ezekiel 37:12-14: I Will Open Your Graves
Thus says the Lord God: Behold, I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people. And I will bring you into the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people. —Ezekiel 37:12-13 (ESV)
Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones is one of the most striking images in all of scripture. The prophet stands in a field of death and is asked: can these bones live? The honest, human answer is: I do not know. Only you know, Lord. And then the breath comes.
The context matters enormously. These are not strangers in the valley. These are the people of Israel in exile, a community that has been dispersed, defeated, separated from everything that gave them identity and belonging. They have begun to believe the lie that their situation is permanent. We are cut off, they say. Our bones are dried up. Our hope is lost.
The lie of permanence is one of the most effective tools of systems that want to maintain control. When communities are beaten down long enough, they begin to internalize the message that this is simply how things are. That resistance is futile. That hope is for people who have not yet learned better.
We are watching this play out in our own country. Immigrant communities that have lived here for decades are being told, systematically, that they do not belong here and never did. Poor communities that have been underserved for generations are being told that cuts to healthcare, housing, and education are inevitable and necessary. LGBTQIA+ people are watching rights that were hard-won over decades be stripped back, state by state. Marginalized communities are being told, in a hundred ways, to stop hoping.
Into that very message, God speaks through Ezekiel. I will open your graves. Not maybe. Not if you deserve it. Not eventually, when circumstances allow. I will. The verb is declarative and divine. The God who raised dry bones in a field of death is not done speaking resurrection into places where hope has been declared dead.
Psalm 130: Out of the Depths
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord! O Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy! —Psalm 130:1-2 (ESV)
Psalm 130 is one of the great De Profundis psalms, a cry from the very bottom. The psalmist does not pretend to be anywhere other than where they are. There is no spiritual bypass here, no reassurance that things are not really that bad. The depths are real. The cry is raw. And it is directed fully, completely, without filter, at God.
One of the gifts of the Psalms is that they model for us what honest prayer looks like. We live in a moment when there is enormous pressure, even inside the Church, to perform a kind of relentless optimism. To always lead with gratitude. To not linger in lament because it might seem like a lack of faith.
But lament is faith. Crying out from the depths is an act of trust that there is someone to hear you. The psalmist does not cry into an empty sky; they cry to the Lord who is attentive, who leans in, who listens for the voice of our pleas for mercy.
If you are carrying depths right now, this psalm is your permission to name them to God without dressing them up first. If you are ministering to others who are in the depths, this psalm is your reminder that accompanying someone in lament is not a failure of pastoral care. It is itself a form of resurrection work.
There is a waiting in this psalm too. The psalmist waits for the Lord more than the watchman waits for the morning. Anyone who has sat with a dying loved one, or held vigil through a long night of uncertainty, or waited for a phone call that would change everything, knows what that watching feels like. The Church is called to keep that vigil with people. To stay in the depth with those who cannot yet climb out.
Romans 8:8-11: The Spirit That Raised Jesus Dwells in You
If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you. —Romans 8:11 (ESV)
Paul’s letter to the Romans is doing something theologically bold here. He is not talking about resurrection as a future event that will happen to us after we die. He is saying that the same Spirit that raised Jesus is already living in you. Right now. In your mortal body. In the body that gets tired and sick and afraid.
That is a radical claim with radical implications. It means the resurrection power of God is not located somewhere else, held in reserve for another time. It is present. It is here. It is at work in the lives of ordinary people who have been filled with the Spirit of the living God.
In the face of everything that is bearing down on vulnerable communities in this country, that word is either delusional or it is the most important thing we can say. We do not choose to believe it because everything looks fine. We choose to believe it precisely because things do not look fine, and yet we have staked our lives on the claim that death does not get the final word.
That faith is not passive. The Spirit that dwells in us is not a quiet interior feeling. It is the same Spirit that animated the prophets, that drove Jesus to table fellowship with the excluded, that emboldened the early Church to share everything they had. When Paul says that Spirit lives in you, he is also saying: then live accordingly. Move accordingly. Speak accordingly. Love accordingly.
John 11: Lazarus, Come Out
When he had said these things, he cried out with a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out.’ The man who had died came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips, and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’ —John 11:43-44 (ESV)
The story of Lazarus is so familiar to many of us that we can skim past how strange and disorienting it actually is. Mary and Martha sent word to Jesus that their brother was dying. Jesus waited. By the time he arrived, Lazarus had been dead for four days. Martha meets him on the road and says, plainly, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. That is not a gentle greeting. That is grief with an edge of accusation.
Jesus does not rebuke her for it. He does not explain himself. He asks to be taken to the tomb, and when he sees Mary weeping and the community weeping with her, the text says something remarkable: Jesus wept. The shortest verse in the Bible is also one of the most theologically dense. The one who is about to undo death stops and cries. He does not rush past the grief to get to the miracle. He stands in it. He honors it. He weeps with those who weep.
Then he calls Lazarus out.
Notice the command carefully. Jesus does not say come back or return or be restored. He says come out. There is a directional quality to this word, a calling forward from death into something new, not a return to what was before. Lazarus emerges from the tomb still wrapped in burial cloths, still bound, and Jesus says to the community around him: unbind him, and let him go.
This detail is worth sitting with. The miracle of resurrection is not the end of the work. The community still has a role. Lazarus is alive, but he is still bound. The work of unbinding is given to the people standing there. That is not incidental. It is a direct commission.
We are a people who have been commissioned to unbind. We encounter people all around us who are alive, who have survived things that should have killed them, who are here and breathing and present, but who are still wrapped in the grave clothes of what has been done to them. The trauma of detention and deportation. The weight of poverty and housing insecurity. The binding of shame that the Church itself has placed on LGBTQIA+ people. The burial cloths of systemic racism and the lies we have told each other about who deserves to flourish.
Resurrection is not complete when someone survives. Resurrection is complete when the community does the work of unbinding.
A Pastoral Word for This Week
We stand one week before Holy Week begins. The path from here goes through betrayal and trial and execution before it reaches the empty tomb. Do not let anyone tell you that faith means skipping that part. The death is real. The grief is real. The weeping at the graveside is real.
And the voice that calls us out is real.
For those among us who are sitting with your own graves right now, your own dried bones, your own depths from which you are crying out: you are not beyond the reach of the God who raised Lazarus. Your hope is not foolish. Your waiting is not wasted.
For those among us who are standing near someone else’s tomb, who are in the position of Mary and Martha, watching someone we love wrapped in what feels like a permanent ending: Jesus asks to be brought to the place of grief. He does not wait at a comfortable distance. Bring him there. Stay there. Weep.
And then, when the voice comes that calls the bound and the buried into new life, let us be ready to do what the community at Bethany was told to do.
Unbind them. And let them go.
Pax et Bonum,
Bishop Greer
