“The only thing I know about the dark is...you can’t see in
it.”
That quote is from the
movie The Natural, when Robert
Redford’s character, Roy Hobbs, first meets “the Judge” in his unlit office. It’s a great movie about baseball, but it’s
also a movie about life; about how, even if we make mistakes--some seemingly
unforgivable--we can still repent and get back on the right path, if we go
about it the right way.
Today’s readings
deal with darkness, and blindness; in other words, they deal with sight--more
specifically, the inability to see.
In the first reading from Samuel, God told Samuel not to be focused on
Eliab’s stature when considering whom the Lord would anoint as king,
because: “Not as man sees does God see,
because man sees the appearance, but the LORD looks into the heart.” That is why the Lord rejected all of Jesse’s
other sons and chose the youngest, David, to be His anointed.
In the second
reading, from Ephesians, Paul urges the people to live in the light of Christ
when he says: “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” and later when he encourages them to “take no part in
the fruitless works of darkness.”
In the Gospel
today, we hear the familiar story of the man born blind. “As Jesus passed by he saw a man blind from
birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi,
who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (I want you to notice here that it was his
disciples that asked him that question.
Finally, we have a question coming from someone other than a lawyer trying to trick Jesus...((lawyers
get such a bad rap in the Bible)) The
prevailing wisdom of the times was that bad things happened to bad people
because they were sinners, and God was punishing them. Alternatively, bad things happened to good
people because their ancestors were
sinners, and therefore deserving of God’s wrath. Does
this make any sense? Can you justify
this way of thinking with the loving and merciful image of God that Jesus
offers us in the Gospel? Is God so petty
that he has to have his own way, and then punishes those who don’t do as he
says? This is the kind of thinking that
today’s Gospel is trying to dispel. The
religious leaders, as well as all of the people of that time, presumed that the
man in today’s Gospel was blind, either because of his own sins, or those of
his parents. So he was seen and treated
as an outcast, a sinner. Jesus came into
the world not only to dispel mistaken notions about sin, but to offer unlimited
love and mercy to those who suffer from such misconceptions. He came to heal our inner blindness
that leads to prejudice and the mistreatment of others we consider outcasts and
sinners.
As John makes
clear in his Gospel, the man’s physical blindness is not the focus of this
story, even though Jesus did restore his sight.
The Gospel today reminds me of a story.
A woman had just sat down at her desk to begin the working day when one of
her co-workers came flying into her office.
"You won't believe this!" he said. "I was just almost
killed outside! I had just walked out of
the deli where I buy my egg sandwich every morning. Suddenly a police car came down the street
with its lights flashing and sirens blaring!
The police were chasing another car!
The other car stopped right in front of me! The guys jumped out and began shooting at the
police, and the police shot back! I hit the ground and could hear bullets
buzzing over my head—it seemed like a hundred of them! It was so scarey! I'm telling you, I'm lucky to be alive!" After a moment of silence the woman said:
"You eat an egg sandwich every
morning? You know, that’s bad for your
cholesterol.”
The
point of the story is that we can become so involved in our own narrow
interests that we miss the obvious. This
Sunday’s Gospel illustrates the destructiveness of such narrowness. Jesus had just healed a blind man, "to
let God's work shine forth." You’d
think that everyone would be rejoicing, and praising Jesus for the miracle of
sight that he had just bestowed on the blind man. But you see, by performing this miracle,
Jesus threatened the comfortable, ordered life of the Jewish leaders. How could God possibly be working through someone
other than them? If “outsiders” were going to claim God's work
outside of their structure, then their authority was being threatened. They missed the fact that God was indeed working—through
his son Jesus, the very Messiah they were expecting! They were more concerned with the possibility
that he was working through someone else. They focused on the egg sandwich instead of the
whole picture of what was taking place.
So, these leaders sought some way to discredit what he had done. They condemned Jesus for working on the
Sabbath. Even though it was a sign of
the presence of the Messiah that sight would be given to the blind, and even
though the man's parents testified that he was indeed born blind, they refused
to see the presence of God among them.
By the end of the reading it is clear that they—the Jewish leaders,
are the ones who are blind—spiritually blind. There’s a great exchange between the Pharisees
and the man, where they ask him again if he were indeed born blind, and he
retorts: “I told you already and you did
not listen. Why do you want to hear it
again? Do you want to become his
disciples too?” I’ll bet that angered
them to no end! The blind man tries to
remove their impediments to sight, but they keep their eyes tightly closed.
In what ways are we, too, spiritually
blind? Today’s Gospel is a call for us to allow the Lord to open our
eyes. The Temple leaders
and Pharisees were too concerned with themselves to have some commoner from Nazareth upset
their lifestyle. Unfortunately, we are
tempted to do the same thing ourselves. Things may be rocking along in our
family when we suddenly realize that our spouse or one of our children has a
problem. A family member is drinking way
too much, or using drugs. Rather than
addressing the issue, we so often “turn a blind eye” so to speak, and hope that
it will go away. Or, perhaps at work or
in school we are confronted with people pushing us to make unchristian
choices. We know that we should take a
courageous stand and say "That is just not right,” or “Sorry, but I don’t
agree with that,” but this could lead to further conflict, discomfort, or
alienation for us. We don't see the
whole picture. This is our opportunity
to really stand up for Christ. But, instead of perhaps making life difficult
for ourselves, we go along with the crowd, in conversation if not also in
deed. We refuse to see the Lord calling
out to us in others. We end up being blind to God’s presence in the world. As a result, we live in darkness.
God's reality, and our human perception
of things, often do not match. Neither
Jesse nor Samuel thought that the future king of Israel would be
the youngest, most insignificant of Jesse's sons. No one expected the Messiah to be the son of
a carpenter from Nazareth. When we focus on our perceptions of
what God should be like or how he should act, we miss his presence
in our lives. In times of sickness, we
expect God to heal us, when actually our sickness might be the very way that we draw closer to him. We expect God to solve our problems, when
actually those problems may help us
to keep a perspective on what really is important in life. By demanding how God should act, as the Pharisees did, we become blind to his presence
among us. It is then that we need to
refocus. Our focus should be on our need for
inner healing from our spiritual blindness.
As we progress through this Lent, Jesus is among and within us, as the
healer of our internal, spiritual blindness.
Can we see clearly enough to first of all know that we need healing, and
then, have the humility to ask for that healing? Let’s seek that healing in the Sacrament of
Reconciliation this Lent.
I began by saying that the one thing I know
about the dark is, you can’t see in it.
But another thing we know about darkness is illustrated beautifully and
powerfully at the Easter Vigil Mass.
We begin in total darkness. And
then, the lighted Paschal candle is brought into the church...and we can see. And then, the individual candles that we are
holding are lit from the Paschal candle, and we can see even better. Light always
conquers darkness. 100% of the time. Jesus
Christ, the light of the world, will
always defeat our darkness—whatever
it may be—if only we will let him.
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