Fourth Sunday of Lent
We are living through dark times. As a global pandemic ravages our world, crippling our hospitals, and abruptly halting life as we knew it, everyone is anxious because no one knows what the future holds, just how bad this will get, and what our world will look like when we come out the other side. We can’t see what will happen, we can’t understand what is currently taking place. Anxious and frightened, we grope in the dark, grasping for hope, for reassurance that everything will be okay, that we will be okay.
In today’s gospel reading from St. John, the disciples of Jesus ask Him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, the he was born blind?” Whenever evil happens, especially inexplicable suffering, we are tempted to ask, “Are we being punished for our sins, collective or personal?” Notice, these aren’t the Pharisees or Sadducees trying to trap Jesus with a trick question, these are His own disciples trying to understand why we experience evil and suffering. Surely it must have been brought about by the sin of his parents or himself? Because if it was, then the disciples could feel reassured that such suffering couldn’t happen to themselves or their loved ones. It’s an unconscious defense against suffering, against the anxiety that comes from knowing that you are just as vulnerable to evil and suffering as the next guy.
But we are. Being a Christian, being a disciple of Jesus, does not make us impervious to suffering. It is strange that so many Christians think this way when the gospels show clearly that Jesus did not come to take US off the cross. If He did then what of the martyrs? He didn’t say, “Let me pick up your cross so you don’t have to.” No, He said, “Pick up your cross and follow me” “I am the way.” If Jesus came to save us from suffering, why did He heal so few people?
We have not been saved from suffering, but Jesus came and sanctified suffering, uniting our suffering into His own redemptive suffering. We are not saved from suffering, but through suffering.
The readings today focus on sight. The man born blind was born blind, he did not acquire blindness later in life. Nothing he did caused this suffering, and nothing he did could take it away either. Because of original sin our intellect is darkened, we can’t see clearly. We are born perhaps not physically blind, but spiritually blind. When Adam and Eve ate the fruit in the garden they were grasping after knowledge, after light and sight, but instead their spiritual sight was blinded. Jesus came to restore His creation, to heal our blindness. John uses the imagery of Jesus spitting into the dirt and rubbing it together making a mud, just as the first man Adam was created from the earth. He smears it on the man’s eyes, showing a recreation of the man’s sight. The man is told to wash in the Pool of Siloam, an image of baptism through which we are re-created and are endowed with light, with wisdom.
In this whole story there is only one person who clearly sees what is going on (other than Jesus), and that is the previously blind man. Verse 17 emphasizes this as the Pharisees ask the man “What do you have to say about him, since he opened your eyes?” There’s a double meaning here. This is the man who can tell them who Jesus really is not just because he was the recipient of a miracle, but because he was the only one among them whose eyes had been opened, whose sight had been restored. “He is a prophet.” Jesus further reveals to this man who has been given sight that He is the Son of Man. This is how we know that the man did not receive only his physical sight, because at that revelation “he worshiped Him.” Not “gave Him respect” not “treated him with deference” but “worshiped” Him as God.
That is the vision, the sight that God holds out to all of us. We cannot see the Truth and believe on our own. Faith is a gift and Christ is the light by which we see. In the First Book of Samuel we read that “not as man sees does God see.”
In this time of uncertainty and darkness let us lean into God’s light. We may not avoid suffering, but the light that God gives can help us in our suffering to know that it is no longer pointless but, joined with Christ’s, is redemptive and sanctifying. Everyone is suffering, whether from the virus, from the effects it is having on our world, from anxiety, from fear. Since the first man the question has been asked “Why is there suffering if God is good?” It is a mystery we don’t have the eyes to see or the mind to understand, but we can hold tight to God’s answer of Jesus on the cross: you will not suffer alone.
