The Lenten Cure of our Spiritual Blindness, Laetare Sunday, March 30, 2014

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Bernadette Parish, Fall River, MA
Fourth Sunday of Lent, Year A
March 30, 2014
1Sam16:1.6-7.10-13, Ps 23, Eph 5:8-14, Jn 9:1-41

To listen to an audio recording of today’s Gospel and homily, please click below: 

This was the text that guided the homily: 

The double-healing of the Man Born Blind

In today’s Gospel, something very different happens than in all the other miracles in which Jesus cured those who had no sight. First, unlike in all of the other cases, the blind man doesn’t cry out for help. He’s just there, along the road, and becomes the subject of a theological question from the disciples about the cause of his blindness. Jesus states that the reason that man was blind from birth was to allow God’s works to show through him; his whole life in darkness until that point was so that he could encounter the saving power of Jesus and from that moment onward to be a tremendously conspicuous example of God’s own light shining ever more brightly through him. That truth influences the way Jesus performs this miracle, because Jesus had two healings in mind — first a physical one for him and then a spiritual one for him and for us all.

The Lord spits on the ground, makes mud with his saliva, and then goes up unbidden to the blind man and smears his eyes with mud. What must the blind man have been thinking? What would your reaction be, for example, if you were praying here in Church with your eyes closed and someone else suddenly came up to you from behind and put muddy saliva on your eyelids? The blind man in the Gospel could have easily thought that someone was making fun of him or abusing him, as probably happened often. But the Lord is not done. Jesus then tells him to go to wash in the pool of Siloam. The blind man easily could have thought, “What a stupid and pointless hassle! Make me dirty and then send me, who can’t see, to wash in a pool, where I could easily fall in and drown.” Jesus, however, must have given that command in a way that inspired trust. By his willingness to carry out this simple imperative Jesus gives him, the man embarks, without knowing it, on the great adventure of faith, on the exciting journey from darkness into light. Jesus allows this man, unlike the other blind men he cured — and this is the second difference from the other cures Jesus worked — to participate actively in his own healing, so that through the process, he might receive not just the ability to see the physical light of the world but also a much deeper light, the light of faith in Jesus, the true light of the world.

The Healing of Our Spiritual Blindness in Lent

Three-and-a-half weeks ago, Jesus did something to us similar to what he did to the man born blind in today’s Gospel. We went up to someone acting in His Name, who smudged our foreheads not with muddy saliva but moistened ashes, and gave us a two-part command, the very same directive with which Jesus began His whole public ministry, “Repent and believe in the Good News!” This was Jesus’ pathway for us to participate in our own healing during this blessed time of Lent, in our own coming from the darkness into the light of Christ, in our own exodus from sin to love, in our own Passover from death to life. We might have been tempted to consider this more or less an empty rite, something merely symbolic — especially if we are blind to our own sinfulness! —  but Jesus wanted to work in us during this time a true miracle of healing, through our participation and trust in this two-part therapeutic process.

Repenting

The pathway for the cure of our blindness begins with repenting, which means turning away from the life of sin that blinds us. As the Catechism and human experience teach so clearly, sin darkens the intellect and distorts the will so that often we can no longer even see the good clearly or easily choose it when we do see it. The repentance that is part of our cure means recognizing that sin has left us partially or totally sightless, that we’re blind and that we need the Lord’s help to see. This conversion means becoming aware, as St. Paul helped the Ephesians to see in today’s second reading, that we have taken part in “vain deeds done in darkness,” and are called to “condemn them.” God allows us to be smudged with ashes and sent on a spiritual journey to wash ourselves in the “second baptism” of the Sacrament of Penance that begins the healing process, and in which we condemn ourselves for those vain, dark needs. At the end of that beautiful sacrament, God says to us, like he said through the St. Paul said in the second reading, “Awake, O Sleeper, arise from the dead and Christ will give you light.” We arise from the spiritual death and blindness of sin into the new light and life of Christ.

Pope Francis talked about our need to be cured of spiritual blindness and raised from spiritual death in his Angelus Meditation this morning in St. Peter’s Square.

“While the blind man gradually comes to the light,” he said, “the doctors of the law on the other hand sink more deeply into their interior blindness. Closed within their presumption, they believe they already have the light and consequently do not open themselves to the truth of Jesus. They do everything they can to deny the evidence of the miracle. They first cast doubt on the identity of the healed man. Then they deny the action of God in the healing, offering as a justification that God somehow doesn’t and wouldn’t work on the Sabbath. They even begin to deny that the man was born blind. Their closing themselves to the light becomes aggressive and leads them to expel the healed man from the temple.”

Pope Francis then draws a conclusion for all of us. “This passage from the Gospel makes plain the drama of the interior blindness of so many people, including ourselves, since sometimes we have moments on interior blindness. … Sometimes unfortunately our life is a little like that of the doctors of the law: from the height of our pride, we judge others and judge even the Lord! Today we are invited to open ourselves to the light of Christ, … to eliminate behaviors that are not Christian. … We are all Christians but all of us — all of us — have some non-Christian behaviors, behaviors that are sins. We must repent of these and eliminate these behaviors to walk firmly on the way of holiness.” He finished with a series of questions, talking about the “eyes” of our heart: “Let us ask ourselves how is our heart? Do I have an open or a closed heart? An open or a closed heart toward God? An open or a closed heart toward my neighbor?”

And obviously when Pope Francis is calling us to repent of the interior blindness, the closed eyelids of our hearts that all of us can sometimes have toward God and toward others because of our own pride and sinfulness, he is calling us to act on that repentance and go to the same Jesus to heal us who healed the blind man. For us that miracle happens in the Sacrament of Penance. On Friday night, during a Penance Service at St. Peter’s Basilica in which he and dozens of priests were hearing confessions of the Catholics of Rome, Pope Francis, before entering his own confessional, surprised every one by going to a priest in a confessional close by, kneeling down and receiving the Sacrament of Penance himself. Even though he goes to confession every two weeks, it was he first time he or any Pope was ever videotaped going to confession. He did this so that he himself could be healed by the Lord of any interior blindness and any non-Christian behaviors he himself had engaged in. But he also obviously did this as an example to Catholics throughout the world. Throughout Lent, he has been calling us with his words and now with his witness likewise to go to receive the same healing. The question he’d want to say to each of us this morning is, “Have you yet gone to be healed of your spiritual blindness and forgiven for your non-Christian behaviors by a good confession this Lent?” That’s the first part of our Lenten healing, repenting and going to receive the Lord’s forgiveness.

Believing in Jesus, the Good News Incarnate

The second stage in our cure, Jesus told us on Ash Wednesday, is believing in the Good News. Jesus says today to the man in the Gospel, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” The physical cure of the man — a miracle that caused a tremendous stir among the people in Jerusalem and allowed God’s works to shine in him — was merely a prelude to the spiritual cure of the man that would involve not just leaving darkness, but living in the Light of Christ. “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” The man responds with a faithful willingness, as well as a humble recognition that he needs help. “Who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?” “You have seen him,” Jesus replies, “and he is speaking to you now.”

In the healing Jesus wants to carry out in us this Lent, he asks us the same question, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” Jesus is the Gospel incarnate, and “ believing in the Good News” means believing in Him. With similar humility to the man healed by Jesus in the Gospel we’re called to say, “Show me, Lord, that I may believe!” With that docility, the Lord can then show us, in new and deeper ways, “You have seen him and he’s speaking to you now.”

To come to see Jesus anew, to hear him speak to us “now” in every moment of our lives, to come to look on all things with the Light of Christ — that is the whole point of the Lenten adventure of faith. These forty days are a gift from God to help us to leave the darkness caused by sin and see Jesus and all things as they really are, as he himself sees them. So often we can think we see Jesus, we can think we hear his voice, but we’re really blind and deaf to the true meaning of his presence. The Pharisees, after all, saw Jesus physically, but they never really saw who he was. They watched him perform many miracles, they heard his beautiful teachings and powerful responses to every attempt to trip him up, but still, when they looked at him, they were blind to the reality of his true identity. They thought they had him figured out, they thought they had all the answers, but they were blind. So often we can behave like they did, thinking we have Jesus all figured out, boxing him into an unimposing closet of our lives, categorizing him and his teachings in the way that will least challenge us to true conversion.

Seeing according to human perspectives rather than in God’s light can happen even to great saints, as we see in today’s first reading. The Prophet Samuel, one of the greatest men of God in the Old Testament, was sent to Bethlehem to anoint the son of Jesse whom God would indicate to be the King of Israel after Saul. When he arrived, he was convinced upon seeing Eliab that he was the one the Lord wanted anointed. But the Lord said to Samuel, “Don’t look on his appearance, for the Lord does not see as mortals see.” The Lord would have him go through all of Jesse’s sons until he would meet the youngest and ruddiest son, David who would become the great king and ancestor of the Lord Jesus according to the flesh. Even if we’re close to the Lord, we, like Samuel, can see things too much by human categories rather than God’s.

And if we’re not really close to the Lord, there’s the greater risk that we will go through life perceiving reality according to our darkness rather than according to God’s Light. Rather than seeing things properly in faith, we can look at others, at events, and issues in the same way people without faith would. And then instead of walking and living as children of the light, we can so often behave indistinguishably from all those who are walking and living in darkness, what Pope Francis calls “non-Christian behaviors.” Each Lent Jesus helps us to recognize, again, that our sins number us among the blind, but that he wants to cure us, to have us walk together with him in the light of life, to help us to see all things in and together with Him who is the Light of the World.

How the Lord wants to heal our spiritual blindness

At a practical level, how is our vision supposed to change this Lent? What does it mean to be cured by Christ of our spiritual blindness and to see things in his own light? In order for us to appreciate the miracle Christ wants to work in us this Lent, I’d ask you first to think what it would have been like for that man born blind returning from the pool of Siloam. He had never seen anything, and now he could see everything. He could see colors. He could see the splendor of the temple. He could see where he was going. For the first time, he could see himself reflected in the pool. He could see the faces of those who were talking to him. He could see the face of Jesus. His whole life would have changed! A similar change is meant to happen to us when Christ heals our sight and helps us to see things with his light, to looking at everything through the lenses of faith, to see things as God sees them, and, therefore, to see all things accurately. Practically speaking, it means hearing Jesus say in the various events and people we encounter through the day, “You have seen him and he is speaking to you now.”

One of my favorite prayers, which God always seems to answer, is “Lord, give me your eyes.” If we see things as Christ sees them, then obviously we would be seeing things with the light of faith. I beg the Lord to cure my blindness and give me his vision when I’m conversing with someone, so that I can see that person as He sees them. This is especially helpful , for example, when I encounter someone who tries my patience. Rather than seeing only the person’s defects (or what I think are defects), the Lord helps me to see what He finds so lovable in that person, what would lead Him to trade his own life for that person all over again if he had to. I’ve tried to pass on that prayer to thousands of people in confession over the course of the years.

For those who have difficulty overcoming negative thoughts and habitual criticism of others, I encourage them to pray, “Lord, give me your eyes,” so that they might see not only the good things that God has given the person, but also be able to look with compassion on the various hardships that the other person has endured leading to some of that person’s irritating habits.

To men and boys caught up in the slavery of lust, I encourage them to pray, “Lord, give me your eyes!,” so that they can see women not as sex objects, as diving boards into sinful fantasy, but rather as beloved daughters of God, as sisters in Christ, as persons with an immortal soul who should be prayed for and loved rather than objectified and violated.

To those who are encountering serious Crosses, I encourage them to say that prayer, so that in the light of faith they may see them not so much as mortifications but as gifts from God to help them to grow in holiness, to acquire Christ’s own virtues, to unite themselves to Christ on the Cross and follow him up close all the way through the Cross to glory.

To those who have a problem with their own self-esteem and morale, who think they’re no good and can’t get anything right, I encourage them to repeat as often as they need to, “Lord, give me your eyes,” so that they can discover themselves their true dignity and recognize how tremendously lovable they are to God. Such a divine perspective allows them to glimpse and experience God’s own love, patience and mercy toward them, and why he would die for them a thousand times out of love.

And lastly, when people have problems properly looking at their sins — either because they don’t have proper contrition for them or because they cannot let them go — I encourage them to pray for that same vision of the Lord. For those who have trouble with contrition, God’s perspective will help them to see just how horrible their sins are and what each of them cost the Lord: that each of them led to the Lord’s torturous suffering and death, that each of them was a choice of a disguised Barabbas over a disguised Christ, and that each was in effect a clamor to crucify Christ. I remember once a young woman who very candidly told me after hearing me say that contrition is the most important part of the Sacrament of Penance that she knows her sins are wrong but has never really been able to feel much sorrow for them. She asked me for help. I encouraged her that when she’s examining her conscience to hold a crucifix in her hands and to recognize that Jesus loved her so much that he died to take away that sin, and the next, and all her sins. I told her that this is what I do when I prepare and I was holding on to a crucifix in the room where we were speaking, my eyes started to water as I thought of all my sins that led to the horrible death of the One who most loves me and whom I love the most. Seeing me start to weep over my sins, she began to weep herself and then to cry uncontrollably for three minutes, just letting out so much contrition for all the sins of her life. When we see our sins for what they are and what they did to the good Lord, we really can’t help being filled with sorrow.

But that’s not all Christ’s vision allows us to see with we behold sins. When we look at them with the light of faith, we see that even our most embarrassing, horrible and shameful ones are enveloped within the scope of Christ’s merciful love. We are led to cry out as the Church does at the Easter Vigil, “O happy fault — o happy sin! — that brought me such a great redeemer.” We start to see ourselves as God’s beloved prodigal son or daughter whom the Father always runs out to greet, embrace, reconcile and reconstitute. The clear sense of love that comes from this recognition of our divine filiation, that God loves us infinitely despite our sins, that his mercy is so much greater than our self-imposed misery, fills us with a tremendous joy —  the type of joy God wants to give us this Laetare Sunday.

Seeing the Mass with Gods’ own eyes

As we come forward today toward this altar on this Christian Sabbath — recognizing that the Lord worked most of his miracles of curing the blind on the Sabbath —  we ask the Lord to remove the scales from our eyes, so that we can see everything with His own eyes in the light of faith. In a special way, though, we ask him to help us to see with his own eyes what is about to happen. If we could see the Mass as God sees it, we would never want it to end, because we’re about to participate live in the Last Supper, in Jesus’ own passion and death, and share right now on earth in his Resurrection as we receive His Risen Body. If Christ were to grant us his eyes, we would see all the angels and the saints about to hover around this altar. We would be able to recognize that we are about to share in the greatest event in all of history, the greatest love the world has ever seen or imagined, the deepest source of joy we could possibly ever have, the source of a joy the world cannot give nor take away. Jesus says to us here live, “Do you believe in the Son of Man whom you have seen and who is speaking to you now,” as he says “This is my body given for you … This is the chalice of my blood poured out for you for the forgiveness of your sins?” Faced with these ineffable realities, may we take our cue from the illuminated man in the Gospel and say, with every fiber of our being, “I do believe, Lord” and bow down to worship.

The readings for today’s Mass were: