FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT 23

4TH LENT SUNDAY, 19 MARCH 2023, 1 SAM 16:1, 6-7, 10-13; EPH 5. 8-14; JOHN 9. 1-41 Pivot: Light sees, and darkness blinds! Indicative: Inner blindness is much more serious than physical blindness because it blinds the whole person and the entire life 1. Last Sunday, to the Samaritan woman, Jesus announces and reveals himself as the Living Water. He is the Living Water of the new life of God, and eternal life. He quenches perennially the crucial and deeper thirst. This is symbolised by the Samaritan woman along with her villagers “believing” in Jesus 2. This Sunday Jesus heals a blind man. He announces and reveals himself to be the Light of the world. Light removes darkness, gives visibility and sight, and enables one to walk and do works. Accordingly, he gives the blind man not only the physical sight but also the inner sight of faith. He is enabled to see him, believe him and worship him as the Lord 3. There is a dramatic and progressive contrast between the Pharisees and the blind man. The Pharisees suffer from inner blindness while the physically blind man is restored with total sight. The Pharisees are able to see physically but fail spiritually. They do not see the divine identity of Jesus. They also fail fraternally to see in the blind man a brother of the same family of God. They fail to rejoice in his healing 4. They are blinded by the blind following of the laws. Consequently, they fail to see and appreciate the immense good done to the man born blind. They are blinded by jealousy against Jesus. They are also blinded by their intellectual and spiritual arrogance against the blind man. 5. They are presumptuous that they know better than him and they are holier than him. That is why when the blind man speaks favourably about Jesus, attesting that Jesus cannot be a sinner because a sinner cannot open the eyes of a blind man, the Pharisees protest and despise him, saying, “you were born totally in sin, and are you trying to teach us?” 6. Their inner blindness and the blind man's recovery of sight are also very progressive and in sharp contrast. They progressively accuse Jesus as a violator of the law, as a man not from God and finally as a sinner as well 7. On the contrary, the blind man progressively opens his inner eyes of faith: initially, Jesus was an unknown and an unfamiliar person; then, he addresses him as a prophet; then, he sees in Jesus a man from God; and finally he accepts him and worships him as the Son of man and Messiah. He commits himself to Jesus so much so that he willingly bears witness to Jesus and risks being thrown out by the Pharisees 8. The story of the blind man, his cure, his faith and his witness on one hand, and the Pharisees' malicious and incredulous acting, on the other hand, are a clear call for all of us to check upon our own blindness of various sorts 9. All of us suffer from this inner blindness. Whenever we fail to see the heart and are influenced and guided by mere externals and appearances, we are acting blindly. This is exactly in line with what God cautions us in the first reading, “Not as man sees God does see because man sees the appearance but the Lord looks into the heart” 10. Further, whenever we fail to see and accept Jesus who is the Light of the world, whenever we do the fruitless works of darkness in terms of integrity and immorality, whenever we fail to do the works of light, namely of goodness, righteousness and truth, we too are blind 11. Like the Pharisees we too will become blameworthy and culpable, when we have the physical sight but lack the inner sight of faith and benevolence. This is what Jesus conveys to the Pharisees, when he says, “If you were blind, you would have no sin, but now you are saying, ‘We see’, so your sin remains”. Very clearly, the blindness that Jesus is referring to is inner blindness, that is the lack of faith 12. Today, the same reference of Jesus can apply to us as well. We who claim to be capable of seeing so many things with our intellectual and social sight, how much we suffer from the blindness that is fraternal, moral and spiritual? We need to constantly seek Jesus' healing to recover our sight and vision. Imperative: Let us not be blinded by our presumptuous knowledge and pretentious holiness and peripheral appearances. Rather let us try to put on God's mindset