Today’s readings: 1 Samuel 16, 1.6-7.10-13; Ephesians 5, 8-14; John 9, 1-41.
Today’s gospel narrative of the healing of the man born blind is an animated catechesis of the way the primitive Church proclaimed Christ as light of the world. This man emerges from his darkness through baptism and immediately has choices to make and resistances to face. The protagonists here are not only Jesus who heals, but also the hard-headed Jews and the spirit of persecution already marking those times.
In daily life, and referring to what we go through in the intimacy of our hearts, it is at times too complex to grasp concretely what is light and what is darkness. The man born blind lived in darkness. But his darkness was not due only to his impairment. His society classified him as beggar, condemned him to live on the margins, and denied him any right to speak for himself.
Jesus was struggling with all this, and by restoring his sight, restored also his vision of the world, of his own self, and changed radically his perspective on life. ‘Seeing’ in this gospel is understanding, taking stock of one’s whole being, acknowledging and going beyond all sorts of imposed blockages and hindrances. Jesus gives back to this man the way God sees him.
In restoring sight to this man, Jesus makes manifest the blindness of those reluctant to open up to God’s power, presence, and creativity. Lent is a time of revision. It is mostly an open heart that the Lord invites us to. One of the major challenges and commitments engaging the churches in our times is the required disciplined effort to understand faith lived out both in community and in all diverse settings of daily life.
In his book Anam Cara, John O’Donohue writes: “Too often, people try to change their lives by using the will as a kind of hammer to beat their life into proper shape”. This is the way we were brought up to tackle our emotions and desires. But this way of approaching the sacredness of our own self is violent. The gentleness of Jesus shown to the Samaritan woman and now to this man demonstrates how God’s wisdom and understanding of our own nature is different from ours.
Whenever we subject God to our frame of mind, whenever we filter God’s ways through ours, it is not God’s will we are seeking. In the Gospel this is manifestly told when the Jews, vehemently arguing with the man who was healed, ended up “driving him away” from the Synagogue.
This, to some extent, is the same situation we are living today 2,000 years or so later. There are those who see and those who do not see. The Pharisees and the Jews’ main concern was that this man born blind was healed on a Sabbath. It may sound laughable. But with our own way of arguing in the name of God’s law we still do it. Who knows how often we shut down people: “Are you trying to teach us!”.
As we read today from Samuel 1: “God does not see as man sees; man looks at appearances but the Lord looks at the heart”. It didn’t occur to Jesse, David’s father, that his youngest son, a shepherd boy, might be the most suitable in God’s eyes to be anointed. Likewise in the gospel, it was a blind beggar condemned to live by the wayside at the mercy of passers-by who, against all odds, sees through Jesus and acknowledges him as prophet and Messiah.
There is a big truth the Scriptures are teaching us today: that the real blindness is in those who know it all, who are not at all open to God’s future, and for whom God’s future is in the past. Again, as O’Donohue writes, many of us have made our world so familiar that we do not see it any more.
This happens also with the way we relate with God. We have domesticated his mystery to the extent that we have no great expectations from Him and, where our journey of faith is concerned, we content ourselves with a status quo that suffocates and leaves no space for God’s wonders.