Not Time To Be Dead, Yet!

A Reflection for the Fifth Sunday of Lent

Not Time to be Dead Yet

So many breaths to breathe

So many mornings to watch for

So much life to live and peace to seek

So much light to follow

Not time to be dead yet

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Ezekiel is standing in a valley of bones, and God asks him the most honest question in all of scripture: Mortal, can these bones live?

Notice that Ezekiel does not say yes. He has eyes. He can see what is in front of him — dry, scattered, the residue of a people who have concluded that their hope is lost and they are cut off entirely. So he answers the way a prophet answers when the situation is beyond argument: O Lord God, you know. It is not a dodge. It is the only faithful reply available to someone standing in a valley that should, by all appearances, have the last word.

But the valley does not get the last word. The breath does.

So many breaths to breathe. The poem does not arrive at its defiance gently — it arrives already insisting. Not resigned, not merely hopeful, but pushing back against the very premise of deadness with a list of reasons to be alive. Mornings to watch for. Life to live. Peace to seek. Light to follow. This is not the language of someone who has forgotten what the valley looks like. This is the language of someone who has looked straight at it and said: not yet. Not today.

Paul knows what it feels like to live in a body that keeps insisting it is more mortal than spirit. The mind set on the flesh, he says, is death — not because the body is bad, but because a life organized entirely around its own limits and appetites and fears is a kind of dying before the dying. But the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you. Present tense. Active. Already at work in the very bones of the thing. The same breath that moved over the valley of the dry is not a distant memory. It is a current address.

Mary falls at Jesus' feet and says what her sister already said — if you had been here. There is grief in it, and there is accusation, and there is love, and Jesus does not correct any of it. He weeps. He weeps because Lazarus is dead, and because the people he loves are in anguish, and because the valley is real and the loss is real and nothing about what is coming cancels out what has already been lost. But then he stands at the tomb and calls into it, and the man who was dead walks out still wrapped in his grave clothes, and the command that follows is the whole gospel in four words: unbind him and let him go.

The Psalmist cries out of the depths — not from solid ground, not from a position of strength, but from the bottom of it, watching for the morning the way a night watchman watches, staking everything on the certainty that morning is actually coming. It is defiant patience. It is the refusal to let the dark have the final say.

So much light to follow. Not time to be dead yet.

The breath is moving. The morning is coming. There is still so much life to live.

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The scriptures for this Sunday: Ezekiel 37:1–14 | Psalm 130 | Romans 8:6–11 | John 11:1–45