The Fourth Sunday of Lent
March 15, 2015
Click here to listen to this
homily (mp3 file)
You’ll pardon the pun, I hope, if I call today’s scriptures eye-openers. That’s
what they are. They get us to look below the surface, to get beyond appearances.
Things are not always what they seem to be; points of view long and tenaciously
clung to can be dead wrong and often are.
In the reading from the First Book of Samuel, God
sends the prophet Samuel on a search for a new king to replace Saul. He
sends him to a very unlikely place – to backwater Bethlehem, of all places.
Why not to the big city, Jerusalem, where there would surely be many more likely
candidates to choose from? But no, it’s Bethlehem he’s sent to, to the
house of Jesse who has a veritable stable of sons – eight of them, in fact.
When Jesse presents his oldest son, tall of stature and impressive, Samuel
thinks to himself, ‘this must be the one,’ but God tells him no: “Do not judge
by appearance, or from his lofty stature, because I have rejected him. For
not as man sees does God see…man sees the appearance but the Lord looks into the
heart.”
Samuel reviews the whole line-up of Jesse’s sons but
he knows that none of them is God’s choice for king. So he asks if there is
another one. And, there is. There is the one out tending the sheep,
the youngest -- David -- the one no head hunter would have had on his list. And
David, of course, turns out to be God’s choice. Score one for the God of
surprises; score one for ‘don’t trust appearances;’ score one for “God’s ways
are not our ways.”
The David story sets the stage for the story of the
man born blind, another story where appearances are misleading. When Jesus sees
this man who was blind from birth, his disciples ask him why such a thing ever
happened. Were his sins to blame, or his parents’? The first part of the
question is, of course, absurd (how could he have sinned before he was born!);
the second is based on a false premise, a false religious premise that, sadly,
some hold onto even today: namely, that illness is God’s punishment for sin.
This is the very sort of thinking Jesus came to do away with, the sort of
thinking that turns God into a petty, punitive tyrant. Jesus came to reveal a
very different God altogether: a God of mystery, yes, and, as Pope Francis keeps
reminding us, a God of mercy and compassion. So Jesus’ answer to his
disciples’ question about whose sin was involved was “Neither! “This has
happened,” he said, “so that the works of God may be made visible in and through
him.”
So that’s the first thing: this is a story about how
God works. God doesn’t work like we do. Simple as that. But the story
has another dimension too. We’re in John’s gospel, remember, the gospel of signs
and symbols, and so, not surprisingly, blindness becomes a metaphor: a metaphor
for obtuseness – willful obtuseness – and seeing becomes a metaphor for
understanding. A word about both.
In the story, the Pharisees should be the ones who
see, who understand. They are the teachers, after all. They know the Law,
they know the sacred Traditions. But, unfortunately, as can happen with
religious leaders, they are so trapped by the tradition, so locked up in it --
straight-jacketed by it and close-minded -- that they are unable to learn
anything new. They know it all, or think they do. Their understanding of the Law
and tradition assures them that the blind man has been steeped in sin from his
birth. And they also know that Jesus has to be a sinner. Why? Well,
because he blatantly broke God’s Law by working on the Sabbath. His work, by the
way, was making a little clay with his saliva and smearing it on the blind man’s
eyes. That was work, believe it or not, a violation of the Sabbath! What
they saw as Jesus’ cavalier disregard for the Law convinced the Pharisees that
he was a sinner, that he couldn’t possibly be from God. Case closed. So much for
those who see!
And as for the one who doesn’t see – the man born
blind – he ends up, of course, being the one who not only sees with these eyes
but the one who understands. He not only gains physical sight, he also comes to
see – to understand – what only the eyes of faith can see and understand. And
notice how he comes to faith. It’s something we should all be able to relate to
(certainly our friends with us this afternoon who are preparing for baptism at
Easter). He comes to faith, not all at once like the way he gained his physical
sight; no, he comes to faith gradually, step-by-step. Notice how, at the
beginning of the story, he refers to Jesus simply as “the man called Jesus.”
That’s a little detached, isn’t it? Later in the story he calls Jesus “the
prophet,” and that’s getting closer. And later still, Jesus is “the man from
God.” Only at the very end of the story does he own Jesus as “Lord,” and
worship him in a dazzling act of faith.
It’s that way with us, my friends. Faith for us is
always more a pilgrimage than a possession: a pilgrimage towards God with many
questions along the way -- doubts, too, as well as discoveries -- dark and foggy
days, for sure, and some days that are clear and bright when everything seems to
make sense.
Dear friends, today’s readings are meant to open
closed minds. They are meant to awaken us to how different God’s ways are from
our ways. And they are meant to give us comfort in knowing that the way of faith
is a journey towards the Light but not always a journey in the light.
May the Christ we now encounter in the Eucharist
open closed minds and bring a ray of light to eyes that are blind!
Father Michael G. Ryan
