Our Lady of the Body Bag Sunday

I had a question from a reader:
I walked into Mass this morning (the 5th Sunday of Lent) and all the statues, candles, pictures and crucifixes were covered with violet cloth. It gave me the eeriest feeling of the world without God. Tonight, at a different parish, nothing is covered. What's up with this? Someone told me this is Passion Sunday. That's new to me as well.

My response:

This custom tacitly references the parable (if it is a parable) that Jesus tells of Lazarus and the Rich Man. The Rich Man dies and goes basically to hell (gehenna) and can see over into what the text refers to as 'Abraham's bosom' but can't get there. He can see Lazarus in paradise (the same poor beggar he walked by for years and never helped while he was alive) but he can't get to Abraham's bosom because he's permanently separated from God. He has to stand in the shadows and peer across the chasm, but can't cross over into the light.

I preface that story from the Gospel of Luke by saying "if it's a parable." It's one of the great stories we take for granted like the Prodigal Son or the Good Samaritan that are only found in Luke and no other gospel. One would think bangers like that would be in all the Gospels, or at least the synoptic gospels. If we didn't have Luke, we would have none of those stories.

There has been theological debate over the centuries as to whether this story of the Rich Man and Lazarus is, in fact, a allegorical parable like most of all the other parables that Jesus tells or it was actually an actual event that Jesus, speaking as the 2nd person of the Trinity, is recounting. You can read it either way, but this story is unique in the Jesus' teachings because he uses a proper name: Lazarus. In no other regular parable, does he give the characters actual proper names. It's always the parable of the unjust steward or the parable of the sower or the grieved widow or whatever. The people are never given names, except for this one instance in Luke. There are some other markers in this story as well that I won't go into here, but everything about the story of Lazarus and the Rich Man is a complete enigma to the way Jesus usually tells stories when he's teaching.

The custom of veiling statues on the 5th Sunday of Lent is actually designed to be eerie, as you say. I somewhat sacrilgiously refer to this Sunday as "Our Lady of the Body bag Sunday" because Mary and the Saints who are veiled look exactly like a body in a morgue, zipped up in a body bag. This custom symbolizes what life would be like without the grace of Christ to bring us into full Communion with the Father. What is we were the rich man looking across from the darkness of damnation into Abraham's bosom. We can see the light. We can see the form of Mary and the Saints in light, but we can't cross the veil. We can see it but not embrace it. What if we had to remain in the shadows of sin and death forever? It is eerie, and designed to be jarring. In a way, it's like what death would be like if we were eternally separated from the Father and the Church in the Saints.

We do this custom to set the stage for the greatest story ever told: from Palm Sunday to the Passion of Holy Week to ultimately, Christ's Resurrection that rips the veil, both of the Temple in the Holy of Holies but also frees us from the shadows of sin and the grave to see the Church and the Saints in their fullness.

It allows us on Easter to hear the words of Saint Paul in 1st Corinthians:

‘Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?’
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.
But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.