4th Sunday of Lent, Cycle A

1st Reading: 1 Sam 16:1b; 6-7; 10-13a

Intro: This is the anointing of David as the king chosen by God. Note that the Spirit rushed upon (leapt up in) him. This is a statement made of prophets. It speaks of God working within him, which is, obviously, different from human guidance.

2nd Reading: Eph 5:8-14

Intro: Paul reminds us that we should live as the children of the light that we are. Where he uses the concepts of darkness and light, the Gospel will use the concepts of blindness and seeing to speak of this.

Gospel: Jn 9:1-41

If you were blind, you would have no sin; but now you are saying, ‘We see,’ so your sin remains. Jn 9:41

Homily:

I’d like to say that this is my absolute favorite Gospel story, but I have so many favorites, I don’t know which is my absolute favorite.

I’m very visual; when I hear a story I visualize what is going on. Follow this: Jesus spits on the ground, and it has to be a huge amount of spit if he is going to make enough mud to smear on this guy’s eyes. Visualize that! Then, he takes his fingers and needs it into mud… Then, he smears it on this guy’s eyes. That may seem to you like a crass take on this story, but that is what it says happened. And, I told you, I visualize it.

[If you were able to pay attention, you heard later that the Greek word used for “smeared” actually means “anointed”. They translated it properly when he is telling his neighbors what happened. And that is what we are going to do for our young catechumens today. I’m going to spit and make mud and anoint their eyes. No… I’m going to anoint their foreheads with the oil of catechumens.]

But that is not all this story is about. It’s about sight, but not just physical sight, as you can tell from the portrayal of the Pharisees as being blind. Obviously they could see physically. Their blindness went deeper than that. And, the man-born-blind’s sight went deeper than physical sight; Jesus gave him insight.

Another element of the story is the courage this man had to live out the insight he had been given. [Our catechumens are being supported by their family, their church community and the government just stays out of it. Not the case with the blind man in our story.] His family wouldn’t support him. His neighbors, at first, didn’t believe it was really him and his religious/civil community persecuted him. Imagine the courage it would take to live under those circumstances.

Now that was exactly the experience of the Christian community who first heard this story. Their families wouldn’t support them; look at the Acts of Perpetua and Felicity. Their communities wouldn’t support them, in fact, there neighbors may have been the ones who turned them in. Their faith communities wouldn’t support them. If you were Jewish you were thrown out of the temple. If you were pagan, you were accused of not supporting the civil community which required sacrificing to thier gods.

Like the man born blind, we need to be courageous in hanging on to the truth with which we have been enlightened. And, it has to show in our actions. We don’t want to be accused by the Lord, like the Pharisees, of continuing in our blindness where our sin remains.

I’m going to give just one example of a person who was a child of the light and lived it out courageously. That would be Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who understood that the Gospel teaches the opposite of might makes right. He lived his enlightened understanding courageously and was rejected, even by some of his own, and assassinated. Yet, his sacrifice brought us the beginnings of the still unfinished business of racial equality. God’s truth is effective!

It’s dificult for us to see our blindness, just like the Pharisees. I think it is because of what we call implicit bias. We all suffer from it. It’s the truth we learned from this world, which, oftentimes,is different from God’s truth. We need the insight like the man born blind was given to be able to see beyond this bias.

In the Dr. Martin Luther KIng, Jr. example… most people, I think, have the implicit bias that power, or money, or influence is the solution to whatever problem we face. Dr. King had the insight that confronting your oponent with the truth, without using power, or money, or influence over them, was the only way to achieve real equality. Some people call this Jesus’ “third way” and use Matthew’s Turn the Other Cheek story to illustrate it.

There are several other examples but no time for them. They all deal with the search for wealth, power, pleasure or honor; the classic substitutes for God. And, they all deal with implicit bias , which we all have, and which allows us to say “we see", yet... our sin remains.

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Insight often comes after disillusionment. Disillusionment is an interesting word. We often think of it as describing a time when we are confused, when something we believed turns out to not be true. Disillusionment means we have lost the illusion, the false truth, by which we have been living. It can be painful, but it’s a good thing!

That is what I think this story is about. The blind man couldn’t see the truth because he was living under the illusion of non-truths that kept him from seeing the truth. Jesus spat on the ground and made mud and smeared the mud on this man’s illusions, muddying his truths, so to speak.

The man washed the muddiness away and was finally able to see the truth that Jesus is. It was a truth that his family and the world did not want him to accept, but it was the truth nonetheless. The man, to his credit, was encouraged by finally seeing the truth.

This Gospel invites us to ask the question, “what beliefs do I hold on to which blind me to Gospel values?” What beliefs do I hold which go against the Gospel values of love of neighbor, inclusion, concern for the good of the other, etc?

In our society today, we seams to have many of those illusions; the belief that strict adherence to the radical platform of one, or the other, political party will bring salvation to the world, the belief in a conspiracy theories, or other lies, which distort reality into something which I can accept, the belief that one social or ethnic group has supremacy over others, the belief that might can make right, etc.

Do I have the courage to allow the Lord to muddy those beliefs, so that I may wash clean, and see as he sees. Do I have the courage to live out my baptism?