You’ll pardon the pun, I hope, if I say that
today’s scriptures are eye-openers. They are. They get us to open our
eyes, 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 sometimes 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, 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 God looks into the heart.”
Samuel reviews the
line-up of Jesse’s sons but he’s clear that none of them is God’s choice
for king. So, he asks if there is another son, and, there is. There’s
the one out tending the sheep, the youngest - David - 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 enjoys currency
today, sadly: that illness or suffering or physical defects 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
love and mystery, yes, and, as Pope Francis likes to remind us, a 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 a deeper dimension. 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 or sight 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 understood. They were
the teachers, after all. They knew the Law and all the sacred
Traditions. But, unfortunately, as can happen with religious leaders,
they were so trapped by the tradition, so locked up in it -
straight-jacketed by it and close-minded - that they were unable to
learn anything new. In a word, they knew it all, or thought they did.
And their understanding of the Law and tradition assured them that the
blind man had been steeped in sin from his birth. Why else would he be
blind? And they knew more: they know that Jesus had to be a sinner. Why?
Well, because he blatantly broke God’s Law by working on the Sabbath.
And do you know what was his work was? 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 comes to see with these physical eyes, but the one who
understands. He gains physical sight, yes, but 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 which was instanteous; 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 pretty detached, isn’t
it? A bit distant. Later he calls Jesus “the prophet,” and that’s
getting closer. Later still, he refers to Jesus as “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 minds that are closed and bring a ray of
light to eyes that are blind!
Father Michael G. Ryan
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