The Fifth Sunday in Lent (Passion Sunday), Year A
Abbot Kenneth D. Gillespie, OSC
St. George Anglican Parish | Fort Wainwright, Alaska
Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of this world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Ezekiel 37:1-14 | Psalm 130 | Romans 6:15-23 | John 11:(1-17)18-44
“Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.”
The Psalmist puts words to something most of us know but rarely say aloud. There are depths in human experience from which no amount of internal resourcefulness, resilience, or self-determination can lift us. This morning, all four of our appointed lessons speak to us from those depths and point us toward the only One who can call us out of them.
We stand on the threshold of Holy Week. One week from Palm Sunday. In the shadow of a Cross that has not yet fallen. And so the Church asks us a question this morning, not a comfortable one: Where are our eyes fixed? On God? On ourselves? On something else entirely? Everything our lessons proclaim today turns on that question. And the answer to it is not merely intellectual. It is a matter of life and death.
The Collect: Prayer as the Reorientation of the Will
Notice what the Collect does not ask God to do. It does not ask Him to change His mind, or to bend His will toward ours. It asks Him to change us: to bring into order our unruly wills and affections. This is the deep purpose of prayer. We do not pray to inform God of our needs, or to persuade Him. We pray because prayer is the act by which we choose Him.
It is how we reorient ourselves, turning our attention from whatever has captured it, and fixing it again on the One who is the true source of every joy. Saint Augustine understood this entirely when he wrote that our heart is restless until it rests in God. That restlessness is not a flaw to be managed. It is a compass. It tells us our hearts are not yet fixed where they belong.
The Collect names what we are all up against: our own unruly wills and disordered affections. That is not a polite description of minor moral untidiness. It is a precise diagnosis of the human condition apart from grace. And the petition is equally precise: grant us grace to love what you command and desire what you promise. Not simply to obey, but to love. Not simply to tolerate His promises, but to desire them. That is a transformation of the will itself, not merely the will’s behavior. That is what we are asking God to do in us, every time we pray this Collect.
Ezekiel 37: What God Is Not Bound By
In our first lesson this morning, Ezekiel is brought by the Spirit of God to a valley. A valley of bones. Dry bones. Scattered. Disconnected. Long since stripped of every sign of life. And God asks him: Son of man, can these bones live? It is a question designed to press against every human assumption about what is possible and what is finished. The honest human answer is no. Obviously not. These bones are not dormant. They are not simply resting. They are the remains of a defeat so complete that nothing recognizable is left.
But Ezekiel does not say no. He says: Lord God, you know. That is not evasion. That is faith. It is the answer of a man who understands that his own assessment of the situation is not the final word. And then God commands him to prophesy to the bones. Not to a living congregation. Not to people capable of responding. To bones.
The point is unmistakable: what appears to us as final, irreversible, beyond any hope of recovery, does not bind God. All things are possible with Him, including the things we have long since stopped praying or hoping for. The things we have written off as finished. The relationships we believe destroyed. The habits we believe unbreakable. The person we believe unreachable. Dry bones can live.
But notice the condition embedded in this passage: it requires trust and obedience. Ezekiel had to prophesy to the bones. He had to speak the word of the Lord into what appeared to be an absurd situation. Our trust in God is not just passive waiting for rescue. It is obedient participation in what He has called us to do, even when it seems impossible. Where are your eyes fixed when you stand in your own valley of dry bones? On what has been lost? Or on the God who is not bound by loss?
Psalm 130: The Discipline of Waiting
We opened this morning with the Psalmist’s cry from the depths. Suffering is the universal human reality. There is not one person in this room who does not know what it is to cry out from the depths. And Psalm 130 does not minimize that. It begins there, and it is honest about where there is. But the Psalm does not stay in verse one, and it does not encourage us to stay there either.
The movement of this Psalm is from depth to trust, and it passes through a word we often resist: wait. “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope.” “My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning.” That image is worth sitting with. A watchman does not create the dawn. He cannot hurry it. He cannot bargain with the night. He watches. He stays awake. He orients himself toward the direction from which the light will come. That is the posture the Psalmist is commending to us.
We live in a moment that has very little patience for waiting. We want resolution now. We want it on our terms. We want it in our timing. And when God does not deliver on our schedule, we are tempted to stop waiting on Him and start solving the problem ourselves. That is how unruly wills work. We trust ourselves more than we trust His promise. The Psalmist’s answer is not resignation. It is redirection. Not ‘there is no hope,’ but ‘with the Lord there is steadfast love, and with him is plentiful redemption.’ Fix your eyes there. Wait on His best, not your immediate.
Romans 6: Obedience Reveals Where the Heart Is Fixed
This idea continues through Saint Paul’s epistle, and he does not use soft language to describe it. He is using the language of slavery, deliberately, because it names a reality we prefer not to examine. You are slaves to the one whom you obey: either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness. There is no third option. The culture will tell you otherwise. It will tell you that the highest human achievement is self-determination: to decide for yourself what is right, to follow your own convictions, to define your own truth. Saint Paul calls that what it is. It is slavery to sin dressed up in the language of freedom. There is no neutral ground. To serve yourself as lord is already to have made a choice. And our obedience, or the lack of it, reveals exactly where our hearts are fixed.
Now here is the pastoral word this passage must carry, because Ezekiel has already set the table for it. Many of us feel genuinely lost to our own patterns. Lost to addiction. Lost to hopelessness. Lost to disordered affections that have become so familiar they feel like identity. We know the pattern is destroying us; we just do not know how to stop it. The Church’s word to you this morning is not more willpower. It is this: the same God who breathed life into a valley of dry bones can bring healing and restoration to you, mind, body, and spirit. You are not a lost cause. You are exactly the kind of cause God specializes in.
Saint Paul’s argument ends not in condemnation but with a gift: “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” The wages: what we have earned, what we deserve. The gift: what we did not earn, what we could not deserve. Grace is not permission to remain in the tomb. It is the power to come out of it.
John 11: The Resurrection and the Life
In our lesson from the Holy Gospel, before Jesus raises Lazarus, He declares something to Martha: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live.” And Martha responds with the confession that is the heart of the Fourth Gospel: “Yes, Lord; I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God.” This is not a preface to the miracle. It is the interpretive key.
Jesus does not merely restore a dead man to life. He reveals Himself as the One in whom death has no final claim. The raising of Lazarus is the seventh and climactic sign in Saint John’s Gospel, placed immediately before the Passion, because it is the sign that precipitates the arrest. The death that follows for Christ is not defeat. It is the means by which the last enemy is undone.
Saint Augustine reflects on this account by treating Lazarus as the type of every soul dead in habitual sin. The burial cloths, the sealed tomb, the stench of death: these belong not only to the man of Bethany, but to every soul that has long resided in its own spiritual deadness. The voice that calls Lazarus forth is the same voice that calls to each of us this morning. Augustine presses a question that demands a response: are we willing to hear it? Are we willing to allow the community of faith to unbind what death has wrapped around us?
This is the Lazarus moment the season of Lent has been preparing us for. Every day we have a choice: are we willing to die to sin, to our own false lordship? A choice to consecrate ourselves wholly, our wills, our affections, our hopes, every decision, to the Lordship of Christ. So that we might be called forth from the tomb: arisen in Christ, alive in Him and with Him and through Him. So where are your eyes fixed? On the tomb? Or on the One who stands outside it and calls your name?
The Eucharist: Receiving the Life We Cannot Give Ourselves
It is through unity with Christ alone that we receive this grace, this breath of life breathed into our dry bones. And He does not leave us to receive it abstractly. He gives us a means, a place, a moment: this altar, this morning. We receive Him, that we may be made one body with Him, that He may dwell in us and we in Him. As His one sacrifice, offered once for all upon the Cross, is made sacramentally present for us here today. His Body broken. His precious Blood poured out. For you and for me. In the Holy Eucharist, as He has promised.
Will you allow Him to breathe His breath of life into your dry bones? Will you humbly approach this altar, kneeling in submission to His Lordship, offering all of who you are in order to receive all of who He is? Will you lay down your unruly wills and disordered affections, all those things that draw you from God, and reorient your life to Him as true God, true Lord? Will you receive His love, His promise, His life, and allow that to fill you, to animate you, and then to pour forth from you as righteousness, as the very light of God, to this world?
Fix your eyes on Him. Wait on Him. Trust in Him. He is the resurrection and the life.
Let us pray,
Almighty and most merciful Father, we humble ourselves before You and ask for Your mercy upon us and upon our entire world. Fix our eyes upon You, that our unruly wills and our disordered affections may be reordered. Give us the grace to wait upon You in hope, trusting that Your word is sure and Your redemption is plentiful. Grant that we may die to self and rise in You, consecrating all that we are to Your Lordship, loving what You command and desiring what You promise. We ask this through Christ Jesus, Your Son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
