Healed to See in the Light of Jesus, Vigil of the Fourth Sunday of Lent (A), March 14, 2026

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Our Lady of Lourdes Parish, West Islip, New York
Vigil of the Fourth Sunday of Lent, Year A
March 14, 2025
1 Sam 16:1.6-7.10-13, Ps 23, Eph 5:8-14, Jn 9:1-41

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• It’s a great joy for me to be here at Our Lady of Lourdes in West Islip for the Mass this afternoon. Prior to my coming to work for the Church in Manhattan — originally at the Holy See’s Mission to the United Nations, as Chaplain at Columbia University, and now as National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in the United States — I was pastor of a parish in Fall River Massachusetts named Saint Bernadette Parish, which had formerly been called Our Lady of Lourdes. Similarly, during my years at Columbia, the place of campus ministry was the Church of Notre Dame de Lourdes, which famously had within the Church a huge replica of the grotto in Massabielle. So coming here to Our Lady of Lourdes is like the experience of coming home.
• At the sanctuary in Lourdes, through our Lady’s intercession, there have been more the 7,000 claimed miracles since 1858 and 72 that have gone through the rigorous examination of the Lourdes Bureau of Medical Examinations and been officially approved. Of those 72, the 2^nd, 7^th, 37^th 59^th, and 64^th were all miracles in which people were cured of blindness: Louis Bouriette and Marie Moreau in 1858, Marie Lucas in 1908, Marie Bigot in 1953 and Serge Perrin in 1970. As soon as St. Bernadette had scratched the soil of grotto leading to a stream of water, Bouriette went to bathe blind right eye repeatedly in the water, and, after a short time, he was able to see completely. Moreau, who had totally lost her vision because of retinal issues, tied a bandage soaked in Lourdes water around her eyes when she went to bed and woke up with her vision completely restored. Lucas, who had suffered various brain injuries, woke up from a coma completely blind from bilateral optic atrophy. She was brought to Lourdes and during Mass had her sight completely restored so that she could read the fine print in newspapers. Bigot, as a result of neurological issues, was deaf in one ear had 1/20 vision in her right eye and 1/10 in her left, and after bathing in Lourdes a second time, had both her hearing and vision cured. And Perrin, because of multiple neurological issues, had become a blind invalid went to Lourdes on a diocesan pilgrimage in 1970 to please his wife. He went to a ceremony of the anointing of the sick. After he received the sacrament, he left both able to walk and to see. Our Lord, through the prayerful intercession of his mother in that sacred spot, had cured all five of their physical blindness. Today we come to this parish dedicated to God through the intercession of Our Lady of Lourdes asking the same Jesus, this Lent, to cure whatever spiritual blindness we have.
• Today’s Gospel is about one of Jesus’ most stunning miracles. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus, in fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecies that the Messiah would make the blind see, restores sight to several people, but they were all those who had lost their sight. In Jericho, for example, when Jesus asked Bartimaeus what he wanted Jesus to do for him, said, “I want to see again.” Today’s Gospel is about a man who had never seen from birth who had been born blind. And unlike Bartimaeus, the man in today’s Gospel, he doesn’t cry out to Jesus for help. He’s just there, in Jerusalem, along Jesus’ path, and his plight 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 be a conspicuous example of God’s own light illuminating him so that he might walk in light. This 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.
• As of yet, Jesus hadn’t yet spoken to the man. He just 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 someone came up from behind you right now and touched your eyes or your ears or any part of you with their spit? The blind man in the Gospel could have easily thought that some crazy person was making fun of him or abusing him, as probably happened often. But Jesus was not done. He then tells the man to go to wash in the pool of Siloam. The blind man easily could have thought, “What a stupid, pointless and dangerous hassle! Cover me with mud and spit and then send me, who can’t see, to wash in a pool, where I can easily slip, fall in and drown!” Jesus, however, must have given that command in a way that inspired trust. The blind man, by his willingness to carry out this simple imperative Jesus gives him, embarks, without knowing it, on the great adventure of faith, on the exciting journey from darkness into light. By working the miracle this way, Jesus allows this man 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.
• Three-and-a-half weeks ago, Jesus did to us something 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 imperative, the very same directive with which Jesus began His whole public ministry. Reminding us that we are dust and will return to dust, the minister repeated to us Jesus’ command, “Repent and believe in the Gospel!” 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, our own exodus from sin to love, our own Passover from death to life. Some of us might be tempted to consider what happens on Ash Wednesday more or less an empty and merely symbolic ritual — 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.
• The pathway for the Lenten cure of our blindness begins with repenting, which means turning away from the life of sin that blinds us. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church 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. Because of original sin, we were born visually impaired and since then we have often chosen darkness over light. 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” and “expose them to the light.” God allows us to be smudged with ashes and sends the catechumens to the waters of baptism and those of already baptized on a spiritual journey to wash ourselves in the “second baptism” of the Sacrament of Penance. This begins the healing process, in which we condemn ourselves for those vain, dark needs, expose them to the light of his mercy, and as the apostle tells us, “learn what is pleasing to the Lord,” which is to “live as children of the light.” At the end of both baptism and confession, God tells 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.
• The second stage in our cure, Jesus told us on Ash Wednesday, is believing in the Gospel. 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 a spiritual cure that would involve not just his 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?” Jesus replies, “You have seen him” — what a beautiful and touching thing to say to a man who can now see for the first time! — “and he is speaking to you now.” He then immediately replied, “I do believe, Lord!,” and worshipped him.
• 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 Gospel” 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 look on all things with Christ’s Light— 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, live as children light, and see Jesus and all things as they really are. So often we can think we see Jesus and hear his voice, but we can be 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, failing to recognize him as the long-awaited one and even accusing him of being a diabolical agent and blasphemer worthy of execution. They declared emphatically in today’s Gospel that Jesus “is not from God, because he does not keep the sabbath” as in the loveless way they demanded. They said about Jesus, “We know this man is a sinner.” They stated that they were disciples of Moses, not Jesus, and ridiculed the man for believing him, stating, because he was born blind, that he had to have been born in sin. And when Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see might see, and those who do see might become blind,” they retorted, “Surely we are not also blind, are we?” They couldn’t possibly consider themselves blind because they couldn’t fathom they were sinners.
• But this spiritual blindness that affected the hardhearted and hypocritical Pharisees can happen to any of us sinners. It can happen even to God’s holy ones, whenever they, whenever we, look only by human perspective rather than by God’s light. 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 judge from his appearance or from his lofty stature, because … not as man sees does God see, because man sees the appearance but the Lord looks into the heart.” 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, like Samuel, we can see things too much by human categories rather than God’s. We can look at others and ourselves by worldly criteria. And if we’re not truly 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, viewing others, at events, and issues in the same way people without faith do. And then instead of walking and living as children of the light, as St. Paul summons the Ephesians and us today to do, we live and walk like practical atheists. Like the blind man’s parents, we can be overcome by fear and fail to acknowledge Jesus. Like St. Peter in Caesarea Philippi after Christ revealed he would be a Messiah who would be betrayed, crucified, and murdered before rising, we can see and think as human beings do rather than like God does. 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. And just as the blind man’s cure was so that the “works of God might be made visible through him,” so our cure, our conversion, is meant to help others recognize the great gift of mercy God has given us and wants to give all those who meet us. Just like the blind man, our healing is meant to lead others to come to know, believe in and adore Jesus.
• But let’s get practical. How is our vision — and our life — 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? To appreciate the miracle Christ wants to work in us this Lent, it’s helpful 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. He could see himself reflected in the pool. He could see the faces of his parents and those who were talking to him. He could see Jesus face-to-face. 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 luminous perspective, to looking at everything through the lenses of faith, to see things as God sees them, and, therefore, to see all things aright. Practically speaking, it means making the time to come to Jesus to hear him say to us, “You have seen him and he is speaking to you now.” It means coming to him in prayer. It means hearing him speaking to us in the Liturgy of the Word and in the words of institution. It means coming to him to receive his forgiveness in the Sacrament of Confession. It means seeing him in each other and in all our neighbors in need. It means seeing him with us as our Good Shepherd as we “walk through the valley of darkness,” as we prayed in the Psalm, or mount the resplendent heights. It means, in all the events of the day, hearing him state to us, “I am speaking to you now.”
• To live and walk in the light of God’s presence to recognize that he is with us always until the end of time speaking to us through prayer, his word, the Sacraments, the Church and the events of daily life, is to live in joy. Christ came into the world to shatter the darkness and so that he may fulfill the words said during the first Mass, so that “may joy may be in you and your joy may be complete” (Jn 15:11). The Fourth Sunday of Lent is always called “Laetare Sunday” because at the midway point of this season of conversion and penance, Christ wants to fill us with the joy with which he filled the blind man in Jerusalem, like the joy experienced by Louis Bouriette, Marie Moreau, Marie Lucas, Marie Bigot, Serge Perrin, and so many who have received healings and blessings through Our Lady of Lourdes’ intercession. Today we ask the Lord to remove the scales from our eyes, so that we can see everything in the light of faith. In a special way, we ask him to help us to see what is about to happen, as we 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 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, which the world cannot give or rob. 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 indescribably awesome and joyful realities, may we take our cue from the illuminated man in the Gospel and say, with all our mind, heart, soul and strength, “I do believe, Lord” and bow down to worship.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Gospel
JN 9:1-41

As Jesus passed by he saw a man blind from birth.
His disciples asked him,
“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents,
that he was born blind?”
Jesus answered,
“Neither he nor his parents sinned;
it is so that the works of God might be made visible through him.
We have to do the works of the one who sent me while it is day.
Night is coming when no one can work.
While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”
When he had said this, he spat on the ground
and made clay with the saliva,
and smeared the clay on his eyes,
and said to him,
“Go wash in the Pool of Siloam” —which means Sent—.
So he went and washed, and came back able to see.

His neighbors and those who had seen him earlier as a beggar said,
“Isn’t this the one who used to sit and beg?”
Some said, “It is, “
but others said, “No, he just looks like him.”
He said, “I am.”
So they said to him, “How were your eyes opened?”
He replied,
“The man called Jesus made clay and anointed my eyes
and told me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’
So I went there and washed and was able to see.”
And they said to him, “Where is he?”
He said, “I don’t know.”

They brought the one who was once blind to the Pharisees.
Now Jesus had made clay and opened his eyes on a sabbath.
So then the Pharisees also asked him how he was able to see.
He said to them,
“He put clay on my eyes, and I washed, and now I can see.”
So some of the Pharisees said,
“This man is not from God,
because he does not keep the sabbath.”
But others said,
“How can a sinful man do such signs?”
And there was a division among them.
So they said to the blind man again,
“What do you have to say about him,
since he opened your eyes?”
He said, “He is a prophet.”

Now the Jews did not believe
that he had been blind and gained his sight
until they summoned the parents of the one who had gained his sight.
They asked them,
“Is this your son, who you say was born blind?
How does he now see?”
His parents answered and said,
“We know that this is our son and that he was born blind.
We do not know how he sees now,
nor do we know who opened his eyes.
Ask him, he is of age;
he can speak for himself.”
His parents said this because they were afraid
of the Jews, for the Jews had already agreed
that if anyone acknowledged him as the Christ,
he would be expelled from the synagogue.
For this reason his parents said,
“He is of age; question him.”

So a second time they called the man who had been blind
and said to him, “Give God the praise!
We know that this man is a sinner.”
He replied,
“If he is a sinner, I do not know.
One thing I do know is that I was blind and now I see.”
So they said to him,
“What did he do to you?
How did he open your eyes?”
He answered them,
“I told you already and you did not listen.
Why do you want to hear it again?
Do you want to become his disciples, too?”
They ridiculed him and said,
“You are that man’s disciple;
we are disciples of Moses!
We know that God spoke to Moses,
but we do not know where this one is from.”
The man answered and said to them,
“This is what is so amazing,
that you do not know where he is from, yet he opened my eyes.
We know that God does not listen to sinners,
but if one is devout and does his will, he listens to him.
It is unheard of that anyone ever opened the eyes of a person born blind.
If this man were not from God,
he would not be able to do anything.”
They answered and said to him,
“You were born totally in sin,
and are you trying to teach us?”
Then they threw him out.

When Jesus heard that they had thrown him out,
he found him and said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?”
He answered and said,
“Who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?”
Jesus said to him,
“You have seen him,
the one speaking with you is he.”
He said,
“I do believe, Lord,” and he worshiped him.
Then Jesus said,
“I came into this world for judgment,
so that those who do not see might see,
and those who do see might become blind.”

Some of the Pharisees who were with him heard this
and said to him, “Surely we are not also blind, are we?”
Jesus said to them,
“If you were blind, you would have no sin;
but now you are saying, ‘We see,’ so your sin remains.