The Stink of Death

Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time–Third Scrutiny

    In my first four years as a priest, I worked very closely with our parish school in East Lansing.  I enjoyed interacting with the kids in the classroom, teaching them from time to time, playing on the playground with them, and rewarding them for paying attention during Mass with smarties, and hopefully they came to connect to Christ more closely through me.
    When the warmer temperatures started coming in May, the fifth grade class in particular became a little gamey, as some kids started to get more body odor, but hadn’t quite realized that they needed to start wearing deodorant yet.  God bless their teachers for having to firmly, yet gently, tell the kids that they needed to bathe or shower every day and needed to wear deodorant.  The effects were noticeable when put into practice.
    In the Gospel today for the third scrutiny, we hear about a stench.  The stench is from a man who had been dead in a tomb for four days, a smell even worse than 5th grade b.o.  While I’ve been around dead bodies in my work with the Michigan State Police, I haven’t had to go into a house that had a dead body discovered after a long time.  So I don’t have a personal experience with that particular odor.  But I know it’s not pleasant.
    When we think about what God wants to do with you, Skyler and Raegan, as your prepare for your baptism next week, some might think about it like throwing deodorant on.  Nothing changes, but you don’t smell it because you mask it with other scents.  In fact, Martin Luther, who separated himself and led to a great division from the Catholic Church, referred to humans and the process of justification as snow-covered dung.  We’re the dung; grace is the snow.  We’re still bad, but God covers us up so that you can only see the pure white of snow.

    But that’s not what God does with Lazarus, and that’s now what God says He will do through the prophet Ezekiel, and that’s not what St. Paul says that God has done for us thanks to the Resurrection of Christ.  Jesus does not spray perfume on Lazarus but leave him dead.  He gives Lazarus new life, calls him out of the tomb, and removes the stench of death from him.  God provides a new reality for Lazarus, not a slight upgrade on his current condition (which was dead).
    And that’s what God will do for you.  The call to follow Christ, especially as an adult, means a call to a new form of life, not just a modified way of your current life.  You stink (not physically)!!  You stink because you are dead in your sins!!  But Christ does not want you to be dead.  Christ wants you to be alive in Him through the working of the Holy Spirit, who, after you are baptized, will dwell within you as God dwelt in the Temple.  You cannot make yourself alive.  And no matter how much perfume you put on a dead body, it still remains dead and will stink.  But God will take away the stink and make you alive in Him so that your can flourish.  
    In this, God fulfills the word He spoke through the Prophet Ezekiel: “I will open our graves and have you rise from them…I will put my spirit within you that you may live…thus you shall know that I am the Lord.  I have promised, and I will do it, says the Lord.”  God will give you new life through Baptism, Confirmation, and the Eucharist so that you can live primarily for Him, even as you live your human life.  
    Yet, our temptation, and this is true for me and all those who are baptized here in the church, is to return to the tomb.  Even though God has freed us from the death that comes from sin, we foolishly seek to return to the tomb and return to the stench.  Sometimes we are like dogs who just had a bath, only to go outside and roll around in our own dung.  We forget just what a great gift we have received from God in our new life, and go back to stinking and death because it’s what we have known.  We’re so overwhelmed with death that we can be like Mary, who sits at home still mourning her brother’s passing, while Martha goes out to Jesus and makes her profession of faith that He is the Resurrection and the Life.  
    But only when we put our faith in Jesus can we see new life given to us.  Only when we realize that we cannot save ourselves can God raise us to new life so that we don’t stink.  In this scrutiny, we ask God one final time before your baptism to put away from you any works of death that will not allow you to receive His new life.  We one more time have these minor exorcisms where the Holy Spirit drives from you anything that does not help you prepare for the new life of Holy Baptism.  
    And in praying for you, we, the church assembled here, also remember that God does not call us to live in the tomb.  God does not want us to stink.  He wants to have us bathe so that we are truly clean, not snow covered dung, and rely on the graces that come from baptism, or receive the cleansing of the second baptism, the Sacrament of Penance (often called confession).
    God is about to do a great work in you, Skyler and Raegan.  He won’t just put deodorant or perfume on you.  He won’t even hit you with an Axe bomb like a middle schooler.  He will wash you clean, not only to smell with the odor of sanctity, but truly to give you new life, to transform you by the power of His grace.  May this last scrutiny help you prepare fully for the new life God will grant you next week, as He calls you out of the tomb, unbinds the bands of sin from your bodies, and makes you both a temple of the Holy Spirit.