Seeing in the Light of Christ, Fourth Sunday of Lent (A), March 22, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Fourth Sunday of Lent, Year A
March 20, 2020
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 today’s Gospel and homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• 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 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 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. 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, as St. Paul summons the Ephesians and us today to do. 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.
• 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.”
• Pope Francis spoke about the light Jesus gives us to see in his Angelus greeting this morning streamed on the internet from the library of the papal apartment in the Apostolic Palace. “At the heart of the liturgy of this fourth Sunday of Lent,” he said, “is the theme of light. The Gospel tells the episode of the man blind from birth, to whom Jesus restores his sight. This miraculous sign is the confirmation of the affirmation of Jesus who says of himself: ‘I am the light of the world,’ the light that illuminates our darkness. This is who Jesus is. He enlightens on two levels: physical and spiritual: the blind man first receives the sight of the eyes and then is led to faith in the ‘Son of man’ (v. 35), that is, in Jesus. It’s a whole journey. The doctors of the law … persist in refusing to acknowledge the miracle, and ask the healed man insidious questions. But he thwarts them with the force of reality: ‘One thing I know: I was blind and now I see it.’ Between the distrust and hostility of those who surround him and question him incredulously, he charts an itinerary that gradually leads him to discover the identity of the One who opened his eyes and to confess faith in Him. At first he considers him a prophet; then he recognizes him as one who comes from God; finally he welcomes him as the Messiah and prostrates himself before him. He understood that by giving him the sight Jesus ‘manifested the works of God’ (as Jesus said at the beginning of the passage was the reason why he had originally been born blind). With the light of faith he who was blind discovers his new identity. He is now a ‘new creature,’ able to see his life and the world around him in a new light, because he has entered into communion with Christ, he has entered another dimension. He is no longer a beggar marginalized by the community; he is no longer a slave to blindness and prejudice.” Then Pope Francis applies the lessons of this passage to us, saying, “The healed blind man, who now sees both with the eyes of the body and with those of the soul, is the image of every baptized person who, immersed in grace, has been torn from darkness and placed in the light of faith. But it is not enough to receive light, it is necessary to become light. Each of us is called to welcome the divine light to manifest it with our whole life. The first Christians, the theologians of the first centuries, said that the community of Christians, that is, the Church, is the ‘mystery of the moon,’ because it gave light but was not its own light, it was the light it received from Christ. We too must be ‘mystery of the moon’: to give the light received from the sun, which is Christ, the Lord. … The seed of new life placed in us in Baptism is like the spark of a fire, which first of all purifies us, burning the evil we have in our hearts, and allowing us to shine and illuminate with the light of Jesus.”
• During the time of the coronavirus, it is crucially important for us to see things with the light of faith, the light of Christ, and walk as children of the light. In the Responsorial Psalm, we prayed, “Even though I walk in the darkness of the valley of death, I fear no evil, for you are with me, with your rod and your staff, to comfort me.” Jesus is walking with us in this dark valley in which so many are suffering because of the virus, because of the fear associated with the virus, because of lack of ready access to the Sacraments, because of so many other associated issues. But Jesus has not abandoned us. He who walked through closed doors to enter the Upper Room can and wants to walk through our self-imposed quarantines. He wants to help us to see him present. He wants to help us to hear him saying, “I am speaking to you now!”
• As we have the privilege to celebrate Mass today on this Christian Sabbath, called Laetare Sunday or “Sunday to Rejoice” — 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: