Today’s readings: 1 Samuel 16, 1.6-7.10-13; Ephesians 5, 8-14; John 9, 1-41.

St John’s gospel says from the very beginning that the light would shine in the darkness but the darkness would not overcome it. In today’s account, the man born blind stands out clearly as being surrounded by people who find it so hard to see clearly what Jesus had done.

The miracle of the man born blind is not just a miracle retold. Together with the account of the Samaritan woman and of the raising of Lazarus from death, they constitute basic catecheses whereby the early Church initiated new members to the Christian community and to the faith. The miracle of the healing, however, did not end merely with the opening of the eyes of the man born blind, but with his recognition of who Jesus really was.

St John narrates the story of a man whom people were used to see sitting and begging. For many people he was just a beggar and needed help. For Jesus he was blind and needed not just to open his eyes but also to have a new perspective on life.

In our human condition we are all beggars and blind. We can be happy with the little help others can offer which, though, leaves us always in our status quo.

Many people today accept life miserably, without seeing, without a broader viewpoint that goes beyond the immediate.

They even get used to not to ask questions. It is a sort of living blindly that can never make sense.

We belong to the western civilisation that recognises the Enlightenment as a pivotal moment in its history. The Enlightenment marks the time when, in the words of philosopher Immanuel Kant, we dared to use our own reason. Through the use of reason, moreover, we have found the means to free ourselves from the limits of nature, disease, and death.

But learning to see Jesus entails a training that challneges our presumption that we are already in the light. As Stanley Hauerwas writes in his book A Cross-Shattered Church, “the man born blind is able to see Jesus because he had the advantage of being born blind. We fail to see Jesus because we have the disadvantage of being enlightened.”

These are the times we live in, times when we are sceptic and very suspicious of all that sounds miraculous. Our minds are shaped largely by the rational and empirical set-up we breathe from.

At times it is so difficult for us to believe that the Father has redeemed humanity through Jesus. Like the man born blind we end up with a myriad of unanswered questions, possibly surrounded by people who make belief harder.

Our pride can easily mistake darkness for light. Like Samuel in the first reading trying to choose the king from Jesse’s sons, we wrongly assume we would know what a king should look like.

Today’s gospel account demonstrates that we will only begin to know how to answer those questions if, like the man born blind, we learn to see and worship Jesus.

Jesus refuses to accept the premise that this man’s blindness had anything to do with sin. But then, what he says, namely that this man was born blind so that God’s work might be revealed in him, may sound quite perplexing to the sceptical mind. How could someone be born blind in order that Jesus might show he had the power to heal?

Just like the people surrounding this man born blind, we live in a world that demands explanations all the time. Even the parents of the man born blind refuse to take sides and to commit themselves for fear of losing their good standing in the synagogue.

It explains Jesus’ hard judgment when he says he came into the world “so that the blind may see and those with sight turn blind”. As St Paul argues in the second reading, the world we live in makes it more demanding on us all to discern what it means to live in the light of Jesus, and to be that light for the world.

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