Fourth Sunday of Lent

Dominica IV in Quadragesima A
19 March 2023

 Again, at this point late in Lent, the Gospel readings put particularly intense focus on basic themes of desire for God, purification, increasing faith, and illumination; themes that are relevant, especially for those in RCIA who are in their final preparation for the climactic moments of their reception of the sacraments at the Easter Vigil.  Again, I want to encourage everyone to make it a point to commit to participating in the special ceremonies of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday night.  It is always moving for everyone who attends and it will be a great way to pray for the Elect, our brothers and sisters in our RCIA program.

Today’s Gospel passage of the man born blind comes from chapter 9 of St. John’s Gospel.  To grasp a theme, however I also want to go back to John 8 and pass through both chapters to paint a picture.  In this section of St. John, Jesus has arrived in Jerusalem for the 8-day long Festival of Tabernacles, also called Booths.  It was an annual festival held in the autumn after the completion of the harvest season and marked by pilgrimage, people making a great migration to join together in prayer and celebration.  The festival celebrated God’s fidelity in providing for His people in the present harvest and the historical remembrance of His providing for them in the wilderness after the exodus.  Given that people were gathering in large numbers in limited space, they had to build tents or booths for lodging for the festival.  Those booths also served to be an image and reminder of the desert wanderings of their ancestors.  Jesus arrives in Jerusalem for this festival.  It is a chaotic scene due to all the people crammed in for the observance.  But it also becomes chaotic, in a different sense, because of the confrontations and hostility Jesus faces there about his identity.

Appearing throughout John 8 and into today’s selection from John 9 we see some prominent themes that are reminiscent of the Book of Genesis, the creation, the fall, and God’s plan for salvation.  To make a quick pass through John 8, we find chaos and the disorder of hostility against Jesus in the holy city.  Most especially is the chaos of hostility evident in the scribes and Pharisees who are opposing the Lord.  This chaos reminds us of what preceded God’s creation in Genesis when the earth was formless and void (cf. Gen. 1:1-2).  As His first act to bring order out of chaos, God said in Genesis, “Let there be light” (cf. Gen. 1:3), the first day of creation.  The Lord Jesus reveals himself in John 8 to be the light of the world (cf. Jn. 8:12).  In Genesis, after the Original Sin that deforms our human nature, leaving it fallen and inclined to sin, Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, stand alone among creation and they hide themselves from the sound of God’s arrival (cf. Gen. 3:7-8).  In John 8, after no one is without sin to cast the first stone at the woman caught in adultery, it says that the woman was left alone standing before Jesus (cf. Jn. 8:9), which seems to replay the dilemma of the first man and woman in the Garden, with Jesus now as the New Adam.  At the end of John 8 as the hostility and disorder becomes most intense, it says that Jesus hid himself and then left the Temple area.  That can be viewed as the Lord recapitulating these significant moments of God’s creation, the harm done by man’s sin, and His – God’s – choosing to place Himself into this same history in order to redeem it.

With all these images and echoes of Genesis with chaos, the creation, the fall, and the consequences of sin, we come to John 9, today’s selection.  Here we have the man born blind.  In other words, there is no light for him.  He is in darkness, and in darkness from the beginning.  In other words, this is not one who formerly could see and then became blind, but he has been in darkness from the beginning.  That’s a hint of Genesis.  I’m not making a scientifically precise observation, so don’t get hung up on the beginning point of life – as we know now – being conception as opposed to birth.  Simply acknowledge that to be blind from birth is a reference for this purpose that means the man has been in darkness from the beginning.  This can reinforce the theme of what has happened to mankind since the Fall, since what is narrated to us in that book of the beginnings called Genesis.  The man blind from birth serves as an image of mankind’s fallen nature that blinds us to God, to holiness, and to spiritual realities.  Why is the man blind from birth?  The prominent religious idea of the time is that it is due to someone’s sin, that it is punishment for sin.  Again, sin brings disorder and chaos and lack of light, lack of vision.  Just as Genesis tells us that God formed man from the dust of the earth after a mist had watered the ground and then man became a living being (cf. Gen. 2:6-7), what does Jesus do to heal the blind man and restore him?  To maintain this theme of the interplay of creation and Genesis, the Lord makes clay of the earth using the moisture of his saliva and refashions the man’s sight and then tells him to wash in the pool.

In Lent, those in RCIA preparing for baptism are being made ready to enter more deeply into the order of God, being refashioned – recreated – by being washed and having the blindness of sin removed so that they see and are enlightened.  Those of us already baptized have been washed; yet, we know our dullness, our laziness, our slowness of heart to believe – to see!  And with this torpor in mind we have to keep battling against our fallen nature and experience ongoing conversion and re-formation, a re-creation by God’s generous grace.  Lent is a time for us, the baptized, also.  It is a time to confront the ungodly chaos in our lives, which is sin.  It is a time to acknowledge our blindness, and to be washed in confession, which restores us to baptismal grace.  Our focus in this rich selection of God’s Word is not so much physical sight, but the connotation of sight that refers to faith and to belief.  Our sight is healed, purified, and made whole when we see the world as it truly is, when we see ourselves as we truly are, that is… when we see our need for God, when we admit the defect – the blindness – of our sin and seek to be healed so that we can truly see and live.  Like the man born blind, upon being healed in both physical and spiritual sight, may we say with him, “I do believe, Lord,” and, may we do as he did, “and he worshiped him” (Jn. 9:38).