Our Catholic readings come in a
three-year cycle. This year we are in
cycle B. However, because we have
Catechumens in our parish who will be baptized and will be entering our Church
during the Easter Vigil mass on April 4, we revert to the Cycle A readings
during three weeks of Lent to coincide with the scrutinies that the Catechumen
participate in during those weeks.
From the very beginning of today’s
Gospel, this story of healing strikes us as being different than most of the
other such stories in the Gospels. Usually,
we have someone rush up to Jesus with great faith and enthusiasm and energy,
pleading to be healed, trying to convince Jesus to help him. However, in today’s Gospel, as Jesus
and his disciples pass a blind man on their journey, the disciples ask a
question that is reflective of what people widely believed in the Ancient
World: that certainly this man is blind on account of sin – either his sin or
the sins of his parents. Yet, without even saying a word to
Jesus, before the blind man even knows what is happening, Jesus is spitting on
some clay, spreading that mixture on the man’s eyes, and telling him to go wash
in the pool of Siloam in order to be healed. We don’t know how much the blind man
knew about Jesus before his encounter with him.
If nothing else, I am sure it piqued his curiosity. What Jesus does in this encounter is
use it as an opportunity for God to manifest his saving power as a challenge to
the faith of not only the blind man, but to everyone who witnessed this healing.
The blind man was restored to sight both
spiritually and physically; he is able to finally say: “I do believe, Lord.” Yet the Pharisees, with their many questions and their continued spiritual
blindness, cannot make such a statement of belief. They cannot even come close to the faith of
the blind man. The Pharisees can see a
lot of things, they have a lot of knowledge and are very intelligent in a lot
of ways, but they certainly cannot see through the lens of faith. Have you ever had trouble seeing
something that was there all the time. Sometimes we are so distracted or
overwhelmed by other things on our journey. Sometimes, we start off on our
driveway and we start driving on autopilot toward our place of work, only to
realize, no, it is not even a work day, and we should be driving in another
direction. It might be that way on our
journey of faith – we could be on autopilot cruising in one certain direction
without questioning it or realizing we should be going somewhere else. Or, we are looking for something
specific, for something to point us in the right direction, and we just can’t
see it. On the pilgrimage route in Spain I
was just on, there are these bright yellow arrows pointing the pilgrims in the
right direction. Most of the time they
worked very well, but there were a few times when I missed the arrow and went
in the wrong direction. Another time, I
stood at an intersection for several minutes looking for the arrow, only to
finally see it placed on a stone. It was
really hard to see, but it was definitely there. The Pharisees had many things
showing them who Jesus was, they had miracle after miracle, sign after sign, yet
they just couldn’t see.
And what about that Pool of Siloam
where Jesus sent the blind man? What
significance or history might that place have? Why would Jesus send him there? It seems the history of this pool
goes back 8 centuries before Jesus. King
Hezekiah feared an attack in Jerusalem by the Assyrians, so in order to protect
the city’s precious water supply, they dug long tunnel under the city to bring
water outside the city’s walls to this pool – the Pool of Siloam. In fact, archeologists rediscovered
this pool when repairs were being made to a large water pipe in 2004 South of
the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. By Jesus’ day, the pool was used not
only as an important source of fresh water for the people, but it was also used
for mikveh – a ritual bath that Jews would take to cleanse themselves if they
did anything that made them impure. I mentioned our Catechumens who are preparing for their baptism at
Eastertime. Today, is called Laetare Sunday, it is always the fourth Sunday in
Lent, which comes at our halfway point in the Lenten season. Laetare is the Latin word for rejoice – we
rejoice today that we are halfway through Lent.
At Easter, our Catechumens will be baptized and will enter into our
Catholic faith. In his letter to the Ephesians that we hear
today, Paul tells us that through our baptism, we are called out of the
darkness that exists in our lives into the light of Christ, the same darkness
that the blind man emerged from in today’s Gospel. Healed by Jesus, the blind man was
able to overcome what was making him both physically and spiritually
blind. The waters of baptism cleansed the
blind man. We ourselves are cleansed by
the waters of our baptism. There might be something keeping us
from seeing the signpost God has put out for us on our Lenten journey. The Pharisees tried to pull the blind man
back into the darkness, but he resisted.
By our Lenten disciplines and the promises we made to God, we are
renewed and refreshed in our faith. Before I close, I have a task for
all of you to think about. As children
of the light of Christ, we are called to bring others back to the light. There are perhaps some parishioners you are
aware of who you are not seeing at mass or other parish functions. Perhaps before our celebration of Palm Sunday
and Holy Week and Easter, you could write or call one or two people to tell
them that we’ve missed them, to ask them to join us for these important
liturgical celebrations we have coming up. That would be a wonderful way for us
to rejoice in our faith, just as the blind man rejoiced at his healing, just as
we rejoice today on Laetare Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Lent.
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