St. Paul sounds the trumpet today: Awake, O
sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you! Blindness of
the eyes is a symbol of the death of the soul, of our inability to receive into
our being the fullness of illumination God wants to communicate to us, that we
may come to share in his own splendor and glory, that we may come to understand
in depth the wonders of God’s most intimate life and so enter into divine joy.
And Paul further admonishes us: At one time you were darkness, but now you are
light in the Lord. Walk as children of light! If Christ has awakened us with
his light, we must walk as children nourished by light and not deny his gift.
Our behavior must be transformed by this illumination that changes the manner
of our relationship with others. We must strain with every fiber of our being
to give admission the light Christ gives us and actively allow it to do its
transformative work in us, just as the sunlight makes plants grow and blossom.
Our hearts must gladly cooperate with the light.
The first reading stresses: Not as man sees
does God see, because man sees the appearance but the Lord looks into the
heart. Samuel has to learn by trial and error how to discern among Jesse’s
seven sons which one is the Lord’s chosen. Paul advises: Try to learn what is
pleasing to the Lord. The chief fruit of interior enlightenment by Christ is
that we develop the gift of discernment it communicates. Illumination of the
heart is not a single moment of piercing joy. Like Samuel, and later the
disciples, we must learn slowly to see and judge things as God sees and judges
them, and not according to our own innate prejudices and com-pulsions of
temperament. Seeing justly, discerning the truth, is an act that goes hand in
hand with Christ-like love.
In this Gospel episode, we normally
concentrate on Jesus’ power and willingness to heal a man who is blind from
birth, as an illustration of the Sacrament of Baptism and its spiritual
effects. This text is an important part of the catechesis of those to be
baptized at the Paschal Vigil, and hence its place in the late Lenten liturgy.
But the interior dynamics of this narrative reach further, teaching us how
the grace of Baptism takes root and develops in our mature lives as hopeful
disciples.
Everything revolves around Jesus’ gaze. He
looks upon the blind man very differently from his disciples. These, reducing
and boxing the man, ask: Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he
was born blind? But Jesus liberates him by making his plight a vehicle of
divine light: Neither he nor his parents sinned; it is so that the works of God
might be made visible through him. The plot then unfolds quickly, leading the
healed blind man finally to discern Jesus’ true identity and profess faith in
him: ‘Who is [the Son of Man], Lord, that I may believe?’ — ‘The one speaking
with you is he.’ — ‘I do believe, Lord,’ and he worshiped him. The opening of
the eyes of the body has led to the opening of the eyes of the soul, resulting
in faith and adoration. The healed man here represents the fullness of human
nature as re-created by Christ. The other players (the disciples, the
Pharisees) close themselves off from such discernment and remain in spiritual
blindness. This gospel is really about how the human heart must gradually learn
to see what appears before it with the eyes of Christ. If we cannot discern the
royal, anointed status of our fellow humans—the divine life within them—
neither will we be able to discern the divine Christ in Jesus. Jesus looks on
the man with love and such looking communicates to him the power of sight. We
can only truly see God and others when we know ourselves to be fully seen, that
is, to be unconditionally loved.
How can we learn to see as Jesus sees? The
text says: Jesus saw a man blind from birth. What Jesus sees above all is an ánthropon,
a man. He does not primarily see a sick man, mind you, but simply a man. The
disciples, however, sadly do not see a man, but a case. They see only abstract blindness.
Not only do they not see a concrete human being but, in a sense, not even a
blind man, but only the problem that blindness poses in the world as a
dysfunction to be explained away from a distance. They do not interact at all
with the man; rather, they talk about him in front of him, as is often done
with children or the sick. They turn him into an object by ignoring his full
human presence. Jesus’ manner of discernment, by contrast, begins by seeing
before him a whole man, despite his infirmity: not a category; not a
theological case study; and not a legal issue of culpability (‘who has
sinned?’), but simply a man—painfully human, vulnerable, in need of compassion
and human tenderness, and himself capable of offering faith, friendship and
love.
In order to live this gospel, let us see clearly in conclusion that discernment always begins ascetically, with us working on ourselves and engaging a desire for personal purification so as to free our hearts from prejudices that prevent us from seeing reality. The gaze of Jesus should be our constant model of how to relate to others. Jesus looks at persons in a way that instills confidence. Jesus shows he believes in the man and heals him by speaking to him and touching him intimately. Jesus’ direct, compassionate gaze generates new life, while the disciples’ scowling, the averted gaze is judgmental and closes off the possibility of deeper communion. Our Lord sees the man’s suffering and this draws him even closer to him. Samuel anoints David as king with oil. But Jesus anoints the man with a healing paste he concocts by mingling his own saliva with the dust of the ground. Imagine the sacramental power of the divine DNA in Jesus’ humanity commingled with earthly dust and applied to the eyes by Jesus the High Priest! In this gospel scene Jesus enacts the benefits of the Incarnation, the saving effects of the Word’s becoming man. We’ve already heard the powerful call of grace: Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you! So let us respond energetically to the one who assures us: You are the light of the world! and anoints us with his own Blood at this altar.
Photograph of Abbey stained glass by Bri\other Daniel. Homily by Father Simeon.
