Mass readings for the 4th Sunday of Lent (Laetare):
1 Samuel 16.1b, 6-7, 1-13 Psalm 23.1-6 Ephesians 5.8-14 John 9.1-41
Blindness is recurring theme of the gospels; but not physical blindness, spiritual blindness. The gospel writers use those stories from Jesus’ ministry of healing that involve restoration of sight to explore this theme, one summarized in the old aphorism, “there are none so blind as those who will not see.” That is, who refuse to see, or to a lesser degree of culpability, falter in their understanding of the gospel and fail to see what’s really going on. Christ the light arrives in the darkness, but there are those who shut their eyes to it; and worse, tell others to close their eyes as well!
The Pharisees are a case of the former, the willful ones. The episode from the gospels we just heard shows them who Jesus is; and that is something they want to deny since it threatens their power and privilege. The disciples’ reaction is an instance of the latter: they don’t get the gospel just yet, there eyes haven’t or can’t yet adjust to the light Jesus brings; and so, they view the blind man’s situation according to the conventions of the day – the disability is a punishment from God for sin.
We today see a man born blind and wouldn’t think it a divine punishment. And should sight be restored, that would be miraculous, a thing of God. We would think of it in those terms even if that healing came from medical intervention and not as a result of a visit to a place like Lourdes. Our Christian thinking on this is simple: the evils that befall us are not of God, but good things come from God. On that basis, we work out our understanding of God, the world, and our place between these.
Yet despite this being central to our faith, which is the foundation of our western civilization, we still come across both willful blindness, and that lesser inadvertent blindness all the time.
Spiritual blindness comes today from competing principles, beliefs from outside Christianity and a corrupted understanding of virtue. Within Christianity, truth is of preeminent importance, no matter how inconvenient it might be. Live according to the truth, and you are free. Yet the new cultural imperatives of tolerance and diversity have had a perverse effect on the concern for truth.
In Britain, law enforcement looked the other way in the case of South Asian grooming gangs that organized the sexual abuse of thousands of working-class British girls for over a decade because they did not want to be seen as racist if they pursued the matter. Higher up, the political class was concerned that the revelation that Muslim Pakistani men were predominantly involved would discredit their promotion of Britain as a diverse, multiethnic society. So, they sacrificed those working-class girls, their safety, their mental health, condemning them to a life of shame and neglect to preserve and promote their vision of society.
It’s a similar dynamic at work in what we see with the Pharisees who contend with Jesus. In this case, they aren’t covering up an evil, but trying to obscure something good. They don’t want anyone to know about this miracle because it runs counter to the story they tell people that explains why they should be trusted over all others, and especially Jesus.
So, they harass the man whose sight was restored and show themselves desperate to spin the news of this miracle from being a further proof of Jesus as the Messiah into evidence of a diabolical nature instead. Jesus did not share their political and religious agenda or in their fundamental understanding of God and the law.
For the Pharisees, God was a judge – that’s why keeping the law was so central to their teaching. And while Jesus also speaks of God as judge, he is a merciful judge; and the law is not a means by which we stand either condemned or justified, but rather it is to guide us into righteousness. As St. Paul’s writing argues, live out the law as a test of worthiness and we all fail and are justly condemned. And if you see God as one who metes out punishments and rewards, how else are you to understand the blindness of the man? He must have sinned, or his parents sinned. To undercut that understanding as Jesus does is to attack their whole system by which they exercised power among the people – so many practicing a piety rooted in fear, and so, dependent on the Pharisees for guidance through the confusing maze of a harsh and demanding sacred law.
Jesus brings them all good news, but it’s a message at odds with what the Pharisees say; and as people grow more convinced of Jesus’ gospel, the Pharisees lose influence, and hence, political power and social prestige.
The disciples, who’ve been raised in a culture in which the Pharisees were a major influence are going to have this as part of their thinking as well. Or rather, part of their unthinking response. And so, well meaning, wanting to understand, they ask Jesus, “who sinned?” They may not like the Pharisees, but they unconsciously frame their understanding of the world according to how the Pharisees see it.
As Canadians, as westerners, as the result of now a couple of generations of the message that Western Civilization is evil, so many assume that any accusation made against us, the Church, our institutions, must be true. It disregards the transformation of humanity by Christ and his Church. Frankly, it’s a rather Pharisaic reading of history.
As a Christian civilization we have developed over long centuries a sense of the moral law, and how we are to live by it, enforce, pass it on. Now, that was a process of centuries. But today, that Christian standard, the perfection we see in Christ, is no longer the goal we strive after, the guide that takes us through the dark night of history. No, it becomes like the old law, a means to condemn: failing to be always and everywhere Christ-like, we then are judged the worst of all people who ever were. A fair assessment sees progress from brutal barbaric competition amongst tribes and nations toward confession of a common faith rooted in compassion for others. In the course of those long centuries, rule of law was established over rule of might, slavery, in all its forms was overthrown domestically, and then it became a global crusade led by the British Empire. Where conquest once meant either the extinction or expulsion of peoples, there has been the slow development of reconciliation among competing peoples that refuses the taking of revenge or the stoking of resentment. While we have yet to end all war, as a culturally Christian, if no longer confessing, country, now ask if a war can be justified according to criteria that exclude the ancient motivations: confiscating another group’s wealth, gaining glory or restoring honour. Instead we apply something of St. Augustine’s criteria for just war: are we defending or assisting the innocent? Are we responding to attack? Before Christianity, before this thing we call the West, no one bothered with discussing such things!
We’re not perfect, but by faith and God’s grace we will be. We have been blind to injustice in the past, but as we adjusted our sight to Christ’s light, we’ve learned to search for justice. So, we walk through a dark world, Christ as a lamp to light our way, and to search out the truth of things so as to know what is real and what is illusion, what is false vision, and what is true sight, and so live accordingly. While the light exposes our faults, we should rejoice that we can now see, and know, not only our faults, but also their remedy – Jesus Christ.
Amen.