Society of St. Peter and Paul Seminary

Society of St. Peter and Paul Seminary

4th Sunday of Lent Year A

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Year A: Homily for 4th Sunday in Lent

 

1 Samuel 16:1, 6-7, 10-13

Ephesians 5:8-14

John 9:1-41

 

Just as last week there was a dominant image of water that tied the readings together, this week we have the image of light and sight that does the same. But, of course, the readings, and their selection, are much richer than just an image or symbol.  As we go through Lent, there is a movement to the readings.  The first two weeks of Lent let us meditate on the relationship between sin and grace, grace being God’s gift to us. Last week, the middle week, we were asked to make a conscious choice in choosing God over sin in our own lives. This week  we focus on the community of believers – the church, and next we look at more universal matters.  So hopefully you can see the movement from self, to community, to world.

 

In the first reading we look at the Israelite community who is seeking a new king.  But it is God who is going to make that decision, and God’s ways, as we know, are not our ways.  God sends Samuel to Jesse who has eight sons, though he only shows Samuel seven of them. Since seven is a number in Jewish thought which is perfect, we get the idea that the eighth son is rather an outsider, someone who doesn’t fit in and who was probably too young to even be considered. But God sees the youngest son’s heart and it is David the shepherd that he wants.

 

When Samuel proclaims that David is the one, he is taken by the appearance of the boy. The word “ruddy” which is used in our translation to describe David, has the same root as the word used to describe Adam who was made out of dust in the Book of Genesis. Thus the writer ties together Adam and David who are both empowered by the Spirit of God and who were both at the beginning of new chapters in Israel’s history. Samuel saw the light and chose David, seemingly the weakest of the brothers. The community of Israel would have a new king because God could see into the heart of this boy.

 

In keeping with the communal aspect of the theme today, we sang as a response to the first reading the most popular of all psalms “The Lord is my shepherd”.  If David was the shepherd boy who would lead his people, so is God the shepherd over us all. He watches over his community, he finds a pasture that has enough support for the flock, he leads them there, he protects them and he sees to their needs.  It is no wonder that this is the most prayed of the psalms and that it is the one we turn to when we are most fearful or troubled.

 

When we move to the second reading from St. Paul we get our first look at the image of light which will dominate our reading and our thought for the next little while. The actual transition is from darkness to light which is a metaphor for the changes that need to happen in each Christian and each Christian community.

 

The darkness/light metaphor is a strong one.  We were not just IN the dark, we WERE the darkness, Paul says. Because of Jesus and our acceptance of his way, we have now BECOME the light. From this insight, Paul draws theological insights that we should follow: each of us and the community of believers have to choose the things that keep us in the light, we must choose to live honestly and openly, and we must light a path for others.

 

The quotation at the end of Paul’s letter: “Sleep, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you!”  is probably an early Christian prayer associated somehow with the Baptism ceremony. It shows how the Christian moves from a negative to a positive state – from sleep to wake, from death to life from dark to light – and how Christ is the cause of this transition.

 

The Gospel from John is about darkness to light as well – as a result of Jesus’ intervention.  The man born blind is cured by Jesus.  Unlike what we know today, the Hebrews believed that blindness was caused by sin and, therefore, a blind person was seen as impure. Since this man was born blind, he has always been in darkness.  Note that Christ was not ‘restoring’ sight to him but giving him new sight.  Sight for someone who had never seen! This is reminiscent of St. Paul’s idea that we were the darkness and now are the light.

 

After the man is cured he is interrogated by the Pharisees who are trying to find out and understand how a man born blind is suddenly able to see. When they are told by the blind man exactly what happened and how Jesus was responsible for the cure, the Pharisees try to disparage Jesus and point out that this must be an evil act because it was done on the Sabbath and so Jesus was disobeying the Law. But the blind man does not give in and, in fact, tells the Pharisees that he believes Jesus is a prophet. The Pharisees insult him, calling him a sinner, and who was he to tell them who was a Prophet. And they dismiss him, “drive him out”.

 

The final scene is the blind man being sought out by Jesus because Jesus has heard how the Pharisees treated him. Because he has been faithful to Jesus and wants to learn from Jesus, Jesus tells him his identity and the blind man treats Jesus accordingly and “worships” him. The images of light and darkness run all through this story and help us to see that the lesson is that we must, like the blind man, move from spiritual darkness to spiritual intuition and light. And again, it is through Jesus that this can happen.

 

Jehovah's Witnesses are great at house to house evangelism. I remember this man who used to frequent our neighbourhood. He was blind. He usually began by raising up his red-edged Bible and shouting, "I was blind but now I see." This way he would attract a group of curious people around him and begin witnessing to them. If you needed a distinction between physical and spiritual blindness, this is it. Physically he was blind, but spiritually he was clear sighted, or at least so he believed.

 

Today's gospel centres on the analogy and distinction between physical and spiritual blindness, as do most of the Gospel miracle stories where Jesus heals blind people. The early Christians saw physical blindness as a metaphor for the spiritual blindness which prevents people from recognizing and coming to Jesus. These stories testify, therefore, to the power of Jesus to heal not just the blindness of the eye but, above all, the blindness of the heart.

 

The clue that the evangelist intended this story to be read on these two levels, physical and spiritual, is found at the tail end of the story:

 

Jesus said, "I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind." Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, "Surely we are not blind, are we?" Jesus said to them, "If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, 'We see,' your sin remains." (John 9:39-41)

 

The mission statement that Jesus gives here is valid not only for the Pharisees but also for the men and women of our time. To learn from Jesus we must first admit our ignorance, to be healed we must first acknowledge our blindness, to be forgiven we must confess our sins. The I'm-OK-you're-OK mentality so prevalent today may in fact not be too far from the mentality of the Pharisees. The great archbishop Fulton J. Sheen used to say that in the past only Catholics believed in the Immaculate Conception but today everybody thinks they are immaculately conceived and, therefore, sinless.

 

From earliest times today's gospel story has been associated with baptism. Just as the blind man went down into the waters of Siloam and came up whole, so also believers who are immersed into the waters of baptism come up spiritually whole, totally healed of the blindness with which we are born. For, like the blind man in the gospel, we are all born blind - spiritually, that is.

 

Another reason why this story was used in the preparation of catechumens for baptism is that it spells out in a very dramatic way what it takes to be a disciple of Jesus. It is, in fact, a story of how a blind man who used to sit and beg became a disciple who went about witnessing to Jesus. As in last week's story of the conversion of the Samaritan woman by Jacob's well, this story of the healing of the blind man shows that the one thing you need to qualify to bear witness to Jesus is not doing a certain kind of studies but having a certain kind of experience. The crisis of faith in our time is not very different from the crisis of faith of the Pharisees, namely, thinking that true piety means knowing and following the Book. But Christianity has a lot more to do with knowing and following the Person, the person of our Lord Jesus Christ.

 

The crisis of membership and commitment we have in our churches today can be traced to the understanding in the past that being a Christian was a matter of following certain doctrines and rituals. The most important thing, bringing people into a relationship with Jesus was neglected. The irony of the situation is that it is only after such a personal relationship with the Lord that people can begin to appreciate the importance of church worship and doctrine for the life of faith. Faith experience comes before theology. That is why the blind man arrived at the true faith in Jesus before the learned Pharisees. So, when in our ministry we stress doctrine and ritual over personal encounter with the Lord, one begins to wonder whether we are not putting the cart before the horse. Let us today admit our spiritual blindness and pray with St Augustine of Hippo in the spirit of Lent and today's gospel: "Lord that we may see." The Lord will give us light and spiritual insight.

 

As we consider these readings today and throughout the week, let us look at what in our lives is darkness, the places where we are blind and try to shed light on them. Are we blind to the sufferings and needs of our neighbor, do we show prejudice in our daily dealings with people, do we ignore or put into a dark place the things that we might have influence on to help others? Even though we have become light, we still must choose to put forth that light, to help others, to be a light for others. We must make sure that our community of believers is supported and that we show our love to each other. And this is the call that the Good News makes to us today in this fourth Sunday of our Lenten journey to the greatest light – that of resurrection.

 

Sunday IV of Lent
While the theme of blindness and sight, darkness and light, witness and threat feature prominently in John’s account of the healing of man born blind and illustrate the great sweep of Lenten motifs in terms of conversion, baptism and grace, another aspect of the account of the miracle suggests itself to our consideration. If we look at the Gospel account, we can see that the blind man and Jesus have in common that the other protagonists of the incident fail to recognise them. Blindness envelops the entire scene, with the exception of Christ who bestows light, and the blind man who receives it. It is evocative of the first moment of creation, when the Spirit hovered over the darkness and drew forth from nothingness all that exists. Jesus is sent to do the ‘works’ that the Father has sent him to do, while it is still day (cf. Jn. 9: 4).
The blind man is repeatedly asked to prove his identity. He is no longer recognised by those who acknowledged him only as a blind beggar. They knew him only for his function, the inconvenience he represented, the occasional object of their good works. It is extraordinary that in the account of the blind man’s travails, even his parents have a role only as witnesses to his identity as their son, the blind beggar. The blind man is not recognised for who he is. We often talk of “assumed identities”, but in the Gospel passage we see a powerful representation of ‘forced identity’. In this, the blind man shares the experience of Christ, whom neither the crowd nor the Pharisees are willing to acknowledge for who he is.  
The newness of the sight of the man born blind is ignored by the Pharisees, the crowd, and even by his own parents. In his new condition, he remains for them as he had been before: an object, not a person, useful insofar as he can manifest the unlawfulness of Christ. Christ alone recognises the newness that is in him, the gift of sight in all its wonder. When before no one cared to share his wonder at seeing faces and colours, form and structure, Christ seeks him out to invite the response of faith in the language of sight, in the vision of Christ with the eyes of the body so that the mystery of Christ might be seen with the eyes of faith: so that sight might be the conduit of light even as light is the vehicle of seeing. In the marvellous experience of first sight, Christ invites the response of faith, that the first response of the experience of light, of seeing, of life might be the worship of the true light, Christ the Lord: “Jesus said to him, “You have seen him and the one speaking with you is he.” He said, “I do believe, Lord,” and he worshiped him.”
We live in a world saturated by sight, by the stimulation of the senses, particularly the sense of sight. The world transfixes our gaze, not to share in its wonder but to instrumentalise it for its own end: to sell a product, to induce a way of seeing the world that enslaves and wears down our capacity to see with the mind of the heart. Categorisation, caricature, calumny are the stock in trade of the world. In the words of T.S. Elliott, everyone must be “fixed with a formulated phrase…fixed and wriggling on a wall” (Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock). Casting out, wearing down, destroying, setting up for our own self-interested purpose requires but a ‘tweet’. In the world of ever-expanding liberty, where is freedom to be found? Many of us live lives that are exposed, but not, for all that, transparent and free in themselves. The more we reveal about ourselves, the more does the mystery of who we are recede into the distance. We are an image of ourselves, a ‘profile’, a page, but less and less a canvas.
Christ invites us to set our gaze on him. He seeks us out, as he sought out the man born blind. Perhaps if each of us heard that question: “Do you believe in the Son of Man”, we too might say, “Who is he… that I may believe in him”; we might be intrigued to know who he is who might be worthy of the first fruits of our spiritual sight. The response to that question is simply the invitation to look upon Christ. This might be just enough in the moments when we realise we wish to say that ‘who’ we are can no longer be answered by the world and its categories. What else have we to offer in terms of evangelisation and compassion, solidarity and relief but to draw one another’s gaze to Christ, “For in your light we see light” (cf. Ps 36: 9).
In Christ we are revealed for who we are. In him we see with the light of God’s grace. Looking upon him, we see the reflection of his own beauty that he has placed within us, whom he has made in his image and likeness. He continues to hover over the empty void that remains within us, to bring life out of nothingness, to bring redemption from condemnation and isolation. He seeks us out as he sought out the man born blind, attracted by the beauty he has created within us. It is a beauty that never be destroyed. We can never be detestable in his sight in who we are. His beauty endures. It is his spark within us. It is ready to spring back to life once the breadth of God blows over it, for as the first man was made from the clay of the earth, so the second Man is a life-giving Spirit.
In this time of exclusion and condemnation, of categorisation and marginalisation, of extreme and disaffection, the Christian is called to turn his gaze to Christ, to see in him the beauty of his being, to raise our mind from the din that surrounds us and from the priorities of the world and to see in Christ the reflection of who we are. Seeing in him our Creator and Redeemer, we too might be prompted with the blind man to give the first homage of our seeing to him, to “bow down and worship” (cf. Jn. 9: 39). It is the first act of our newfound freedom of the sons of God. “For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light, for light produces every kind of goodness and righteousness and truth” (cf. Eph. 5: 8-9).

By Rt.Rev.Prof. Kasomo Daniel

 

Bishop Kasomo is the Bishop of The Society of St. Peter and Paul (SSPP)