Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

Our Office Gospel this morning depicts a heartbreaking scene. Jesus arrives at the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus only to discover that Lazarus has died. And the anguished Martha, grief-stricken, mourning, tears running down her cheeks, makes a point of greeting Jesus as he arrives…but not with any ordinary greeting. She says, “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Her words are tearful, honest, vulnerable, real. She doesn’t mince words, she doesn’t hide her grief or gloss over her pain. She doesn’t spare him her feelings, nor let him off the hook for being absent in her (and Lazarus’) hour of need.

She is, in other words, a model of faithful prayer. Beloved, it often seems as if we labor under a mistaken notion that when we pray we’re supposed to tell God what we think God wants to hear. We put our best foot forward. We tidy up our thoughts and our language. We try as hard as we can to make sure that our prayer is pleasing to God in the hopes that God’ll deign to answer if we can manage to say the right things in the right way.

But Beloved, dear Beloved—we don’t have a best foot to put forward. Not only because we’re in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves, but also because: Jesus knows it all already. He knows us at our insufficient best and at our very terrible worst—indeed, he suffered our very worst on the cross. He knows precisely who we are: how frail, how afraid, how broken-hearted, how powerless, how confused, how death-infected. There’s no posturing that we can do that can convince Our Lord that we’re anything other than what we are, than what he knows us to be.

But do you know, my Friend, how Jesus chiefly knows us? He knows us as beloved! What amazing grace! And in his love for us, he has restored our humanity in himself through his life, death and resurrection, through his faithfulness and love, and he has made of our little human mortal lives a doorway to his own infinite and deathless divine life. His love for us not only restores us, it transforms us into the people we cannot be on our own: a people of faith, of hope, of love, a kingdom of priests to serve our God.

We can afford to be vulnerable before our God. Indeed, in some ways, that’s all we can afford to be. In our prayers, like Martha, we can bring to God the fullness of who we are, our griefs and woes, our aches and pains, our joys, our sorrows, our laughter, our tears, our fear, our anger, our sin, our failure…and we can be sure that in God’s loving, nail-pierced hands, all of it will be transfigured, transformed, pitched toward glory and returned to us as healing, renewal, life, love, grace upon grace upon grace. Jesus is humanity's best, he is the best we cannot offer but which he has offered on our behalf and which he offers us, by grace, as a marvelous possibility of our own becoming. And he knows us fully. And he loves us. “Lord, if you had been here….” There’s no aspect, feature or dimension of the human experience in which Our Lord has not been, in which he does not always already precede and meet us, from which he does not already compassionate us and yearn to dry our tears, calm our fears, forgive our sins, and exalt us to glories unimaginable…if we would but let him.

Martha follows up her reproach with, “But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” What incredible faith! “Here is my grief, O God,” she seems to say, “my bare, unadorned, and angry grief. Take it, it's all I have. And do with it what you will.”

Let us learn today from Martha how to faithfully, vulnerably, pray.

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+