Fourth Sunday of Lent

Today’s gospel reading prompts me to ask myself, ‘How well do I see?’ Most of us see reasonably well with our physical eyes, although many of us need glasses to do so, and we need to get our eyes tested every so often to make sure our glasses are adequate to our needs. We can be grateful for the good work that our glasses do for us.

There is another form of seeing that doesn’t lend itself to being corrected so easily. We refer to his deeper form of seeing when we speak about our views or our outlook. Our outlook on life, our view of life, can change over time. Whereas our physical sight can deteriorate over time, that deeper form of seeing can improve with age. We may have had a view of our world, of others, of ourselves, when we were younger that we moved on from as we got older and gained more experience of life. Our outlook on life in our older years can be quite different to our outlook when we were young. Hopefully, over time, we come to see everything and everyone more deeply. Maybe we come to see that life is more complex than we realized in our younger years and the somewhat black and white views we may have held in the past do not do justice to life’s richness. We are all on a journey, trying to see more clearly, more deeply, more lovingly. We can only keep journeying on if we are prepared to say to ourselves repeatedly, ‘I don’t yet see clearly. I don’t yet know fully’. This is especially true of our faith journey. We never come to see or know the Lord fully in this life. We are always on a journey in the Lord’s regard. Saint Paul in one of his letters wrote, ‘Now we see as in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known’. It is only beyond this earthly life that we will see the Lord clearly and know him fully. In this life, we are always searching for the Lord, always trying to see him more clearly. In the words of today’s second reading, we are always trying to discover what the Lord wants of us.

In today’s gospel reading, we find two very different faith journeys laid side by side. When Jesus heals someone in the gospels, it is usually in response to their faith in him. They take the initiative to seek Jesus out. In our gospel reading, the man born blind doesn’t seek Jesus out. Jesus takes the initiative towards him. He sees the man born blind. He anoints his eyes with clay and spittle and sends him to wash in the Pool of Siloam. It is only when the man is healed of his physical blindness that his faith journey begins. Little by little he comes to see Jesus more deeply. Initially, in response to the questions of his neighbours he speaks of a ‘man called Jesus’. Under the more hostile questioning of the religious leaders, he grows in his insight into Jesus, saying to them, initially, ‘He is a prophet’, and then declaring, ‘If this man were not from God, he couldn’t do a thing’. When he is thrown out of the synagogue community by the religious leaders for such impertinence, Jesus takes a second initiative towards him, asking him, ‘Do you believe in the Son of Man?’ to which he eventually replies, ‘Lord, I believe’ and then he worships Jesus. He has come to see Jesus not just with his physical eyes but with the eyes of faith. He has been growing as a disciple of Jesus, and a very courageous one.

The second faith journey is that of the religious believers. They move in the opposite direction to the man who was born blind, away from Jesus, further into spiritual blindness. Having been enlightened by Jesus, the man has been Jesus’ representative before the religious leaders. Jesus has been appealing to them through him. Yet, they reject the light Jesus is offering them through this man whom they regard as their religious inferior. They repeatedly say, ‘We know’; ‘we know that this man (Jesus) is a sinner’, ‘we know that God spoke to Moses’. They dismiss the man born blind with the words, ‘you, a sinner through and through, since you were born’. Because they claim to know, to see, they cannot be enlightened. Because they are blind to their blindness, their blindness cannot be healed.

The Lord is always calling out to us to see him more clearly, to follow him more nearly, to love him more dearly. He will often call out to us the most unexpected people. The religious leaders could never have imagined that God was speaking to them through a man who had been born blind. In the first reading, Samuel could never have imagined that God was speaking to him through the youngest of Saul’s sons. The Lord can draw us to his light in unexpected ways. As light of the world, he is always finding ways of calling on us to keep turning towards him, so that we can be his light to others.