HOMILY FOR FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT (A)

Fr Billy Swan

Since my early twenties, I have worn glasses. With them I can see clearly. Without them everything is blurred. I have often wondered what it would be like to see perfectly again without glasses and without seeing everything through a lens.

But when we think about it, all of us see things through a certain lens whether we know it or not. All of us see the same reality before us but often interpret it differently because we see through a different lens. As it is often said, there is my truth, your truth and the truth. In other words there is always some gap, big or small between how things really are and how I see them.

The Gospel for this fourth Sunday of Lent is all about sight and seeing. At the heart of the story is a man who has been blind from birth who is given the gift of sight by a miraculous intervention by Jesus. The man represents humanity and is afflicted by physical blindness but also by a spiritual blindness caused by sin. In the Scriptures, one of the consequences of the Fall and original sin is a compromised vision where one does not see correctly. Because of our disordered desires, our way of seeing things does not exactly correspond to what is there before us. To put it another way, we see what we want to see and are blind to what we rather would not see.

In the Gospel text from St John, Jesus explains himself as ‘the light of the world’ who had come into the world ‘so that those without sight may see’. So when Jesus invited us to believe in him, he promised that all who would come to faith would share in his own way of seeing things clearly as they are, and have their blindness healed. This connection between faith in Christ and seeing is heightened by the healing of the blind man taking place after he had washed in the pool in the temple which of course speaks to us about coming to see through the eyes of Christ because of our baptism.

So what then do we come to see with the gift of faith? With Christ we see the world as it is and God as He is. We see that we are part of a vast and infinite universe where we inhabit a small planet along with 7 billion other people. We see that we are one human family of peoples where there is some unity but sadly many divisions. We see those who suffer from the lack of basic necessities in life like food, water and medicine. We see that they too are our brothers and sisters. This is what the miracle of the blind man is about. The Pharisees who claimed to see were really blind because they drove the blind man away. This is blindness at its worst: where we cannot see each other as a fellow child of God and are blind to another’s need. With faith we also see the kingdom of God: how things are meant to be and what is the proper order of things. We come to understand what St Paul means in the second reading who encourages us to be ‘children of light for the effects of the light are seen in complete goodness, right living and truth’.

We also see God as he really is. As the blind man came not just to see Jesus but to believe in him, so we come to see God in all things and to see God in Jesus himself: blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.  Finally, we come to see ourselves as we truly are and not as we seem to be. As we heard in the first reading, ‘God does not see as man sees. Man looks at appearances but the Lord looks at the heart’.

No one, on their own, can understand themselves fully. Our self-understanding is always limited and a work in progress. As an old negative of a photograph can only be discerned with the light that passes through it, so only in the light of God and the truth of the Gospel can I fully understand myself.  St Catherine of Siena once wrote that ‘we can see neither our own dignity nor the defects which spoil the beauty of our soul, unless we look at ourselves in the peaceful sea of God’s being in which are imaged,’ (Look at yourself in the Water). Similarly, Pope Benedict said that ‘without God man neither knows which way to go, nor even understands who he is,’ (Caritas in Veritate, 78).

A final point from the Gospel story of the man born blind is that after he was cured, there was confusion among people whether he was the same man who used to beg. Some said yes and others said no. What we can conclude from this is that the person who has been baptised and who believes is always changed. They are a new creation, different from before. We have new sight but become new as well. Those who have been enlightened by Christ can never again see themselves and their lives in the same light as before. The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes to see the old ones in a new way.

I conclude with a quote from two beautiful hymns from our tradition that express the gift of faith as making clear what was before hidden in darkness. One is from the ‘Tantum Ergo’ where we sing ‘praestet fides supplementum sensum defectui…faith, our outward sense befriending, makes our inward vision clear’. The second hymn is the beautiful ‘Amazing grace’ where we sing ‘I once was lost but now I’m found, was blind but now I see’.