[LA EN] The liturgy of this Friday of the fourth week of Lent leads us to the historic Roman basilica of Saint Eusebius, celebrating the traditional Statio ad S. Eusebium. Saint Eusebius was a Roman priest of the 4th century who heroically defended the orthodox faith and the Nicene Creed against the Arian heresy, which denied the divinity of Christ. For his doctrinal firmness, Emperor Constantius had him locked in his own house, where he perished after months of starvation, receiving the crown of martyrdom. The choice of this Lenten station is not accidental; the Church, as it approaches the Time of the Passion, anchors itself in the testimony of a martyr who gave his life to attest that Jesus Christ is true God and true man. Today's commemoration invites the faithful to renew their profession of faith in the divinity of the Savior, uniting the Lenten sacrifices and fasts to the sufferings of the martyrs, preparing the soul to contemplate the mystery of the Cross with an unshakable conviction that the one who suffers on Calvary is the very Author of life.
📖 Introito (Sl 18, 15. 2)
Meditátio cordis mei in conspéctu tuo semper: Dómine, adjútor meus, et redémptor meus. Ps. ibid., 2. Cœli enárrant glóriam Dei: et ópera mánuum ejus annúntiat firmaméntum. ℣. Glória Patri.
The meditation of my heart be always in Your presence: Lord, my helper and my redeemer. Psalm: The heavens proclaim the glory of God, and the firmament announces the work of His hands. Glory to the Father.
📜 Epístola (3 Kings 17, 17-24)
In those days, the son of a woman, a mother of a family, fell ill, and his weakness was so great that there was no breath in him. She said therefore to Elijah: What have you to do with me, man of God? Have you come to me perhaps to remind me of my sins and to kill my son? And Elijah said to her: Give me your son. Taking him in his arms, he carried him to the room where he lived, laying him on his bed. And crying out to the Lord, he said: Lord, my God, why have You afflicted this widow who supports me, to the point of letting her son die? Then, stretching himself over the boy three times, he said to the Lord in prayer: Lord, my God, I beseech You, let the soul of this boy return to his body. And the Lord heard the voice of Elijah: the boy's soul returned to him and he revived. Taking the boy, Elijah came down from the upper room to the ground floor of the house and, handing him to his mother, said to her: Behold, your son lives. The woman answered Elijah: Now I recognize, by this action, that you are a man of God and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is true.
✝️ Evangelho (Jo 11, 1-45)
At that time, a man named Lazarus was sick in Bethany, the village of Mary and of her sister Martha. (Mary was the one who had anointed the Lord with ointment and wiped His feet with her hair, and whose brother Lazarus had fallen sick.) His sisters therefore sent word to Jesus, saying: Lord, he whom You love is sick. Upon hearing this, Jesus said to them: This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified by it. Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister Mary and Lazarus. Having heard that he was sick, He nevertheless remained two more days in the same place. Then He said to His disciples: Let us go into Judea again. The disciples said to Him: Master, the Jews were just trying to stone You, and You want to go back there? Jesus answered: Are there not twelve hours in the day? If anyone walks in the day, he does not stumble, because he sees the light of this world. But if he walks in the night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him. He said this, and after these words He told them: Lazarus, our friend, sleeps; but I am going to awaken him from sleep. The disciples therefore answered: Lord, if he sleeps, he will be safe. But Jesus had been speaking of his death, whereas they thought He was speaking of the repose of sleep. Then Jesus said to them plainly: Lazarus is dead, and I rejoice that I was not there, for your sake, that you may believe. But let us go to him. Then Thomas, called Didymus, said to his companions: Let us also go, that we may die with Him! Jesus arrived, and found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days. (Now Bethany was about fifteen stadia from Jerusalem—about three kilometers.) Many of the Jews had come to console Martha and Mary because of their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went to meet Him; but Mary remained at home, seated. Martha said to Jesus: Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that whatever You ask of God, God will give You. Jesus said to her: Your brother will rise again. Martha said to Him: I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day. Jesus said to her: I am the Resurrection and the Life; whoever believes in Me, even if he dies, will live; and whoever lives and believes in Me will never die. Do you believe this? She said: Yes, Lord, I believe that You are the Christ, the Son of the living God, who has come into this world. After these words, she went away and called her sister Mary secretly, saying: The Master is here and is calling you. When she heard this, Mary quickly rose and went to Him; for Jesus had not yet entered the village, but was still in the place where Martha had met Him. The Jews, however, who were with her in the house consoling her, seeing Mary rise quickly and go out, followed her, saying: She is going to the tomb to weep there. When Mary came to where Jesus was, seeing Him, she fell at His feet and said to Him: Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died. Jesus then, seeing her weeping and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, was deeply moved in spirit and troubled, and said: Where have you laid him? They said to Him: Lord, come and see. And Jesus wept. The Jews therefore said: See how He loved him! But some of them said: Could not He who opened the eyes of the man born blind have prevented Lazarus from dying? Jesus, deeply moved again within Himself, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone had been laid over it. Martha, the sister of the deceased, said to Him: Lord, by now there will be a stench, for he has been dead four days. Jesus said to her: Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God? They therefore removed the stone. And Jesus, lifting up His eyes to heaven, said: Father, I thank You that You have heard Me. I knew that You always hear Me, but I said this for the sake of the people standing around, that they may believe that You sent Me. When He had said this, He cried out with a loud voice: Lazarus, come out! And immediately the one who had been dead came out, his feet and hands bound with bandages, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them: Untie him and let him go. Many of the Jews who had come with Mary and Martha, and who had seen what Jesus did, believed in Him.
🌿 The Lord of life and the victory over death
The grand narrative of the resurrection of Lazarus manifests in an irrefutable way the mystery of Christ's divinity, a theme so arduously defended by Saint Eusebius in his martyrdom. Saint Augustine (Sermon 49 on John 11) teaches that Jesus' delay in intervening does not denote abandonment, but a sublime design so that the miracle, occurring after four days in the tomb, would eradicate any doubt about the real victory over death. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux deepens this mystery by identifying in the four days of death the four terrible wounds of the human fall: ignorance, concupiscence, weakness, and malice. By crying out "Lazarus, come out!", the voice of the Redeemer breaks the chains of the most inveterate sin. The Lord's tears attest to His true humanity, which has compassion for our miseries, while His sovereign command attests to the divine power that recreates everything. Saint Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica, Part III, Q. 53-56) recalls that, by declaring Himself "the Resurrection and the Life," Christ reveals Himself not only as the restorer of mortal life, but as the efficient and exemplary cause of our glorious resurrection at the end of times.
This life-giving power was already announced in the figures of the Old Covenant, as revealed in the reading about the prophet Elijah. The anguish of the widow, who sees in her son's death a punishment for her sins, reflects the despair of the human soul imprisoned by guilt, deprived of the breath of divine grace. Elijah's action, stretching himself three times over the boy, is an admirable prefiguration of the Trinitarian mystery and the three days that Christ would rest in the tomb before conquering death. The liturgy shows us that confident prayer and contact with God's envoy have the power to restore life to what has perished. In the economy of salvation, just as the widow recognized the truth in Elijah's mouth after the restoration of her son, we are invited, through Lenten penance and the example of confessors like Saint Eusebius, to recognize the Word of God operating in us, capable of resurrecting souls numbed by worldly passions and returning them to the communion of grace.
Both accounts converge toward the definitive promise that the dominion of death has been subdued by the direct intervention of the Lord. The figure of the widow's son returned to his mother and of Lazarus returned to his sisters point to the supreme restoration of wounded humanity, which will be returned to the bosom of God the Father. Today's liturgical exhortation is an imperative call to spiritual awakening: we must allow divine grace to remove the stone from our hardened heart and untie the bands of our earthly attachments. The incessant meditation of God's presence, requested in the Introit, is the antidote against the lethargy of sin. Strengthened by the unshakable faith that sustained the martyrs, we must hear the voice of Christ who calls us out of the tomb of our miseries, walking in the light of this world to reach, through Him who is the Resurrection and the Life, the blessed immortality.