You’ll pardon the pun, I hope, if I say that today’s scriptures are
eye-openers. They are. They get us to look below the surface, to get
beyond appearances. Things are not always what they seem to be, and
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 succeed Saul. He sends him to a most unlikely place – to
backwater Bethlehem. Why not to the big city, Jerusalem, where
there would surely be many more likely candidates to choose from? But
no, it’s to Bethlehem that God sends Samuel - 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,” he tells him, because I have
rejected him. For not as man sees does God see…man sees the appearance
but God looks into the heart.”
Samuel reviews the whole
line-up of Jesse’s sons but it’s clear to him 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
who would never have made any head hunter’s list. And unlikely David
turns out to be God’s choice. Call that eye-opener number one: don’t
trust appearances: things are not always as they seem. God sees
differently than we do.
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 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 even enjoy currency today:
namely, that illness or physical defect are 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 likes to remind us, the God whose very name is mercy. So,
Jesus answers his disciples’ question about whose sin was involved by
saying, “Neither! “This has happened,” he says, “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 here: a metaphor for
obtuseness – for refusing to see – and seeing becomes a metaphor, too, a
metaphor for understanding. A word about both.
In the story, you would
expect the Pharisees to be the ones who see, who understand. They are
the teachers, after all. They know the Law and all 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. In a word, they know it all, or think they do, and their
understanding of the Law and tradition assures them that the blind man
has been steeped in sin from his birth. Why else would he be blind? And
they know more: they know that Jesus has to be a sinner. Why? Well,
because he blatantly broke God’s Law by working on the Sabbath. And what
was his work? It was the effort he put forth to mix his saliva with clay
and smear it on the blind man’s eyes. That was work, believe it or not,
a clear violation of the Sabbath! That’s all the Pharisees needed
to prove that Jesus was a sinner. He broke the Law. 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 morning who are preparing for baptism). He
comes to faith not all at once, not like the way he gained his physical
sight; no, he comes to faith only gradually, step-by-step. Notice how,
early in the story, he refers to Jesus simply as “the man called Jesus.”
That’s a bit detached, isn’t it? Later he calls Jesus “the
prophet,” and that’s coming closer. Later still, Jesus is “the man from
God.” And then, at the very end of the story he calls Jesus “Lord” and
worships 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, and then 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
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