Lent 4

Readings: 1 Sm 16:1b, 6-7, 10-13a; Eph 5:8-14; Jn 9:1-41

VIDEO

In today’s Gospel we have two sorts of blindness.

There is the blindness that Jesus heals
and the kind that, at least in the story, remains unhealed.
The kind that Jesus heals is that of the man born blind—
physical blindness healed with spittle and mud,
an affliction that becomes the occasion 
for God’s power to be displayed in the work in Jesus.

We’re not told what sort of blindness afflicts this man,
and “blindness” can mean a lot of things.
There is the relatively rare condition of total blindness, 
which prevents one from perceiving 
any light whatsoever.
There is the more common condition
of partial blindness or low vision,
in which one can see some light and shapes,
but one’s activities are extremely restricted
by a lack of sight.
There are also cases of legal blindness:
extreme near- or far-sightedness
that diminishes the capacity to see to the point
where one’s daily activities might be impeded.
We also talk about color-blindness,
which is typically more an inconvenience
than it is a true affliction,
but does reduce one’s capacity
to take in visual information.

Then there is the other sort of blindness
depicted in the story,
the spiritual blindness that cannot be healed 
with mud and spittle.
This spiritual blindness is what keeps the Pharisees
from seeing that Jesus is one sent by God.
It is also what makes the disciples presume
that the affliction of the blind man 
must be a punishment for sin. 
We see it in our first reading as well,
in the inability to see in David the shepherd boy
God’s chosen leader of his people.

Just like physical blindness,
there are different kinds and degrees
of spiritual blindness.
There is total spiritual blindness,
in which one is totally cut off 
from any sense of transcendence,
any sense that there might be something more
than the brute material forces of the universe.
I suspect that, like total physical blindness,
this sort of spiritual blindness is comparatively rare,
found mainly in atheists on the internet
who are running as fast as they can
from the religious belief they were raised with.

More common is something analogous
to partial blindness or low vision:
those who sense that there is some larger reality
but cannot identify what it is,
who might call themselves agnostics,
because they are not sure 
what it is they are perceiving,
and so cannot commit to calling it God.

Then there are those who have the spiritual equivalent
of extreme near- or far-sightedness,
those who feel sure of the reality of God
but who cannot quite bring it into focus,
those whose spiritual lives are shapeless,
who might call themselves 
“spiritual but not religious.”

Finally, there are those whose spiritual vision
is perfect in terms of its clarity and definition,
but it lacks a sense of color and vibrancy,
those whose sense of God does not bring them
the joy that it might if they could perceive
the full spectrum of God’s love for the world. 
I suspect that this might describe many of us:
we can recite the creed without crossing our fingers,
but our faith can feel faded and drab,
we feel like we’re missing something.

“Not as man sees does God see.”
God sees the full spectrum:
the power of the weak,
the wisdom of the foolish,
the blessedness of those who are hungry,
who are poor and meek, 
mourning and persecuted.
We might see more or less clearly,
more or less of the spiritual spectrum,
but even those of us who see best 
by the natural light of reason
are blind by comparison with God.
As Thomas Aquinas puts it, 
what our own ability to see shows us
is something perceived only by a few, 
and after much time and effort, 
and still mixed with many errors.

But thanks be to God Jesus has come
to share with us the light of grace and glory,
God’s own light that 
can take away our blindness,
can shows us a world that we, on our own,
can only imagine and hope for.
Washed in the waters of baptism,
filled with the Spirit,
fed at Christ’s banquet,
we have hope to see as God sees,
to see as the saints see:
a clarity that pierces through the fog of sin
to reveal a world saturated with the colors of grace.
“You were once darkness, 
but now you are light in the Lord.
Live as children of light.”

This is what our catechumens are seeking:
to live a children of the light.
Today, as they go through the rite of Scrutiny,
we pray that they may pass from darkness to light,
that they may be safe from error, doubt, and unbelief,
and that they may come one day to see God face to face.
And as we pray for them,
we ought also to pray for ourselves,
for we too are blind to all that grace can show us,
we too can find our faith grown drab and dull,
we too can lose hope to see God in the light of glory.

As we continue our Lenten pilgrimage
let us pray that God would shed his light upon us all
and that God, who is merciful, might have mercy on us all.

Lent 4

Readings: 1 Samuel 16:1b, 6-7, 10-13a; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41

VIDEO

In our Gospel today there seem to be 
a lot of people who just do not get 
what is really going on.
The disciples ask a question about sin
that appears to be completely off-track;
the blindman’s neighbors get into a debate
about whether it is really the same person 
who was blind but now can see;
and the Pharisees ignore the healing 
so they can accuse Jesus of breaking the Sabbath.
All of those who think that they can see
seem to be unable to figure out 
what is happening before their eyes.
They see a blindman, 
and ask the wrong question;
they see a healed man, 
and launch into a pointless debate;
they see the Word of God at work, 
and accuse him of sin.
They think they can see, 
but the light of the world
is darkness to them.

All of this is only to be expected
in the world of John’s Gospel.
John tells story after story 
about people being clueless,
not getting the point,
misunderstanding Jesus.
Nicodemus doesn’t understand 
what Jesus means by being “born from above”;
the woman at the well doesn’t understand
what Jesus means by “living water”;
the crowd doesn’t understand
what Jesus means by “bread from heaven.”
At every turn, Jesus is misunderstood.

But John warns us about this from the outset.
He writes in his very first chapter,
in the opening verses of his Gospel:
“the light shines in the darkness, 
and the darkness… auto ou katelaben.”
Now, this Greek phrase might be translated,
as our lectionary does,
“has not overcome it,”
and this is quite correct,
both linguistically and theologically:
the darkness does not overcome the light
that shines forth in Christ.
But the phrase can also be translated
as “has not comprehended it”
or maybe “has not grasped it,”
and this too is quite correct,
both linguistically and theologically:
the darkness does not grasp the light,
the darkness does not get it.
In his typically ironic fashion,
John is saying two things at once:
the light cannot be overcome by darkness
because darkness cannot comprehend the light.

Those who fail to understand Jesus
show themselves to be in darkness.
And to grasp fully who Jesus is, 
and the truth of what he says and does,
is to pass, like the man born blind,
from darkness to light.
It is to seek to see, 
not as human beings do,
judging by appearance,
but as God sees,
looking into the heart.
It is to live as a child of light,
producing “every kind of goodness
and righteousness and truth.”

But there can be a temptation for us here.
We can be tempted to think 
that the world divides up neatly
into light and darkness.
We can be tempted to think that we 
who have been marked with the waters of baptism,
who profess Jesus as the world’s Lord and light,
and who come faithfully to church on Sunday,
must surely be standing fully on the side of light, 
must surely be seeing as God sees,
must surely be living as children of light.
Surely we must be the ones who comprehend the light,
the ones who get what is really going on.

The season of Lent, however, 
tells us something different,
for Lent reminds us of our own blindness.
The annual return 
of this season of repentance and conversion
tells us that, in this life, we never grasp fully
the light that has come into the world.
Our lives are punctuated each year
by the call to turn away from sin 
and believe in the Gospel.
Our lives are punctuated each week
by our confession that we have sinned
through our own deliberate fault.
Our lives are punctuated each day
by our prayer that God 
would forgive us our trespasses.
Lent reminds us 
that the line between darkness and light
lies not outside us but within us,
that even we who have truly 
become light in the Lord
must hear again the call:
“Awake, O sleeper,
and arise from the dead,
and Christ will give you light.”

“I came into this world for judgment,
so that those who do not see might see,
and those who do see might become blind.”
Jesus comes as the light of the world
to illuminate the dark corners of our hearts,
so that the truth might be manifest,
and all our masks and pretenses be stripped away.
To see this light is both 
to be dazzled by its brilliance
and to comprehend our own blindness.
It is to see that we ourselves are often
those who just don’t get what is really going on:
who ask the wrong questions,
who engage in pointless debates,
who accuse others of sin.
But it is also to see the possibility of joy,
for it is to see that our darkness 
cannot overcome that light—
that even if we cannot grasp it,
it has grasped us,
and it will not let us go
until the last dark corner of our soul
is flooded with the light of glory.
May these remaining days of Lent
be for us ones of light and joy in the Lord
and may God have mercy on us all.

 

Lent 4 (Second Sunday in Corona Time)

Readings: 1 Samuel 16:1b, 6-7, 10-13a; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41

It is typical of the irony
that pervades John’s Gospel
that it is not the man born blind
who cannot see,
but rather the other people in the story.
They cannot see Jesus for who he really is:
the power of God made flesh.
The blind man, however, sees divine power
at work in his healing.
Just as God, in the beginning,
scooped up the clay of the earth
and formed Adam and breathed life into him,
so too Jesus takes clay
and rubs it into the blind man’s eyes
to heal and restore him to fulness of life.
The bystanders, however, cannot see this;
they are blind to the presence in their midst
of the life-giving God.

But they are not simply blind
to the divine reality before them;
they are equally blind
to the human reality of the man Jesus heals.
One of the odd details in John’s telling of the story
is the confusion, after Jesus has healed the man,
over whether this is in fact the same person
who had begged for alms in their streets,
or someone else entirely.
Perhaps they had never really seen the man.
Perhaps they had seen simply a blind beggar—
not a person
but a category of people:
“the unfortunate” or “the disabled”
or maybe “the annoying” or “the threatening.”
The language used by the people in the story
is revealing: “His neighbors
and those who had seen him earlier as a beggar
said, ‘Isn’t this the one who used to sit and beg?’”
Notice that they do not identify him
as a particular person who is known and named,
but as a faceless member of some collective group:
the beggars or the blind.
Having seen him before simply as a blind beggar,
they cannot now recognize him
when he is no longer blind and begging.

Jesus, however, can truly see the man,
for he sees with divine vision.
As we are told in the first book of Samuel,
“Not as man sees does God see,
because man sees the appearance
but the LORD looks into the heart.”
Jesus’s love and compassion for the man
is not a generic love for those that suffer;
it is the LORD’S highly particular love
for this man and his unique story of suffering
and it is this love that heals.

We who are Christians are called to have
what Saint Paul calls the “mind” of Christ;
to see with what we might call the eyes of Christ.
We are called to see the unique story of each person,
to have compassion on the unique suffering of each person,
to love with a love that is not vague and generic
but concrete and specific.
This is, of course, a challenge.
One of the ways in which our hearts
keep the world’s horrors at bay
is not to focus too clearly on the details,
to keep the pain of the physical suffering
and social marginality of others
confined in large categories:
the disabled, the poor,
the unemployed, the dispossessed.
But everyone in those categories
suffers the horrors of the world
in their own particular way,
a way that cries out
for our recognition
and our compassion.

The difficulty of hearing and answering those cries
has been driven home in the past week,
as we have seen the unfolding
of the corona virus pandemic
around the world.
Over three-thousand deaths in China,
nearly five-thousand deaths in Italy,
over fifteen-hundred deaths in Iran.
These numbers will grow larger,
and may grow much larger,
and in order to manage our anxiety
we can be tempted to turn those deaths
into abstractions,
faceless numbers to feed into
some calculation of risk and benefit.
Some of us even speak
of acceptable levels of death
that we should tolerate to ensure
that life can continue as usual
and our economy remain healthy.
This is a view, I think, that requires us
to blind ourselves to the truth
that each person lost has a story
and the loss of each
is an immense tragedy.
One of the ways we seek to manage our fear
is to let our vision of this horror lose focus,
to make ourselves blind to the fact
that behind these numbers
are real people who suffered:
someone’s mother or father,
brother or sister,
son or daughter,
friend,
co-worker,
teacher,
student.

The human mind simply cannot take it in,
and we can perhaps be forgiven
for retreating into abstractions.
But not as man sees does God see,
for the LORD looks into the heart.
God knows the story of each one who has died,
just as Jesus knew the story of the blind man.
And to believe your story known by God
is to hope for a share in God’s eternity.
And we who bear the name Christian
are called to see as Christ sees
is some small measure;
we are called to not let the world’s pain
go out of focus,
but to confront that pain
by concrete acts of compassion
by which those who suffer
can know themselves as seen.
We do not have God’s capacity
to look into the heart of each and every person,
but we must still resist the impulse
to let their deaths become abstractions.
Look at the numbers and remember:
each is a person.
We are called to mourn the loss
of each one who has died,
and to hope for each one that greatest of hopes—
that God will breathe once more
the breath of life eternal into lifeless clay
and open their eyes to see God’s face.
And may God have mercy on us all.

Lent 4

Readings: 1 Samuel 16:1b, 6-7, 10-13a; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9

Confronted with a man who was born blind,

Jesus’ disciples ask,

“who sinned, this man or his parents?”

A devastating earthquake hits the island of Haiti

and American televangelist (and sometime politician) Pat Robertson

asks whether this might be because of a pact

the Haitians had made centuries ago with the devil.

Who sinned, the Haitians or their parents?

An even stronger earthquake

and the resultant tsunami

pushes Japan to the brink of a nuclear crisis

and the governor of Tokyo asks

whether this might not be divine punishment.

Who sinned, the Japanese or their parents?

We might think that faced with such misery

we would never raise such questions

but it is a natural human response to misfortune

to ask why such things happen,

to ask who is to blame,

to seek some past action on someone’s part

that would justify the pain and suffering

that has occurred.

We desire to find order in the world;

for if we can figure out how misfortune and disaster

are connected to someone’s past action

then the perplexity that accompanies such events

might be dissipated,

and we can restore our belief

that the world really is, despite all appearances,

a reasonable, just and orderly place.

But Jesus approaches the misery and misfortune

of the man born blind

in a different way:

in response to his disciples’ question

he says that, “Neither he nor his parents sinned;

it is so that the works of God

might be made visible through him.”

Jesus then spits on the ground, makes a muddy paste

and, rubbing it in the man’s eyes,

heals him and restores his sight.

I don’t think Jesus is saying

that God blinded this man from birth

just so that Jesus could come along, decades later,

and heal him.

Rather, he is indicating to his disciples that,

when confronted with human suffering,

they are asking the wrong sort of question.

They are seeking an explanation

of where misfortune comes from:

Why was this man born blind?

Why must the suffering of the poverty-stricken people of Haiti

be magnified by a terrible earthquake?

What did the people of Japan do

to deserve a catastrophic tsunami?

But these sorts of questions are unanswerable,

or at least whatever answers God has to them

are probably not the kind of thing

we mere mortals might understand.

Instead, Jesus redirects the attention of his disciples

from asking about the reason for suffering

to the ministry of alleviating suffering.

The source of the misery and misfortune of the man born blind

remains hidden.

What is visible is the healing, saving, enlightening power of Jesus.

What is visible is the ministry of Jesus, the light of the world.

Into the darkness of the man born blind, Jesus brings his light

both to heal the man’s physical blindness

and to give to him the eyes of faith,

so that he might recognize the power of God

in the one who has healed him.

Having been enlightened by Jesus,

the man becomes himself a source of light,

bearing witness to Jesus

before those who would oppose him.

This remarkable transformation from darkness to light

is echoed in our second reading,

from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians:

“Brothers and sisters:

You were once darkness,

but now you are light in the Lord.”

Notice that Paul says to the Ephesians

not simply that they have received light in their darkness,

but that they have become light.

The light that they have received

they are now to share with others.

In other words,

now that they have received Christ’s light

they are called to share in Jesus’ ministry

of healing, saving, and enlightening.

Notice that in today’s Gospel Jesus says to his disciples,

“We have to do the works of the one who sent me while it is day.”

Not I, but we –

the disciples are called to share

in Jesus’ ministry of light in darkness.

Faced with human misery and misfortune,

whether that of the man born blind

or the disasters of our own day,

true followers of Christ

must not let the inevitable questions about “why”

keep them from answering Jesus’ call

to join in his ministry of light:

“Awake, O sleeper,

and arise from the dead,

and Christ will give you light.”

Through the light of Christ,

we become light.

And, transformed into light,

we can respond to the call

that he gave to the disciples

who witnessed his transfigured glory:

“Rise, and do not be afraid.”

Rise, and join me in being light

in the darkest places of human misery and misfortune.