The Man Born Blind

As preached by Sr. Rebecca
Holy Wisdom Church

            Today’s Gospel celebrates the healing of the man born blind. It centers on the dawning of new Light and Life and the victory of Light over darkness.

      The story starts with Jesus and the disciples on the road.  Suddenly, the disciples see along the wayside, a man who is blind from birth. They ask Jesus. 

“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” This kind of thinking was common:  sin was the cause of sickness and all bad things that happen in people’s lives.

            Jesus tells them: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” - many translations from Greek say: “so that the works of God should be made manifest in him. Another possible translation is:  Neither this man nor his parents sinned “but, let the works of God be manifested in him”. In other words, God did not mysteriously cause the blindness in the child SO THAT Gods work might be made manifest, but rather:  here is a human being, a child of God suffering from blindness and Jesus sees him, knows he is called in this moment to heal this man’s blindness manifesting God’s light.  He was blind – now he sees.  Amazing grace!

            Jesus leads his disciples to spiritual light of consciousness to see that all things (no matter what the cause) can become a path to manifesting the power of God’s grace, grace that has no other cause than as sheer gift of love-we don’t have to merit it.

            There is much to unpack in this story. We can see a certain irony in this story: the man born blind receives light, yet everyone else loses their sight-not their physical vision, but the capacity to trust and understand what Jesus has done and what they witnessed in this man’s healing.  Without exception neighbors, Pharisees and even his parents are not able to see in this event God’s loving and compassion healing.

            As to the healed man, he comes to seeing gradually. His sight increases and grows in outer and inner depth and clarity through his willingness to be true to himself:  he knows he was blind and now he sees. He stands firm in the face of blindness of others.  When he was blind he was alone, marginalized, and now that he sees, he experiences a different kind aloneness – that of a distancing from his parents and even to the point of being thrown out of his religious community.  He now stands again alone- a totally different kind of aloneness:  and at this very point Jesus seeks him out.  He now sees the face of Jesus and in the light of Jesus faith he sees his God. He is no longer alone.  We see this in our own lives, don’t we?  A moment of enlightenment, seeing more clearly is most often followed by many challenges, and sometimes we have to undergo a certain sense of aloneness before we are able to integrate this light into our lives in a healthy and wholesome way.

            In his journey this man shifts from blindness to seeing not only the world outside him, but interiorly, to claiming his own graced God-given power over his life.  He stands up for what he has experienced regardless of how it displeases and angers the powers that be: social, religious and political. He knows who he is and claims his new found identity and differentiates himself from ‘crowd think’ the tribal mindset. 

            The kind of seeing that we are invited to this morning invites us to step back from the different levels of darkness around and in us.   From the soul’s perspective we can see a two-fold reality unfolding simultaneously:  a process of dying and at the same time a birthing anew.  In the absence of soul vision we have a world of ugliness, hatred, fear, ignorance-a world on the edge of an abyss.  It is the tendrils of the heart reaching upwards to the Light of the soul that are helping us to cross the abyss into a new world.

 We are learning together to see through the eyes of the heart, which are also the eyes of the soul.

       This vision is not far-fetched.  We are presently seeing many initiatives that are manifesting the first stirrings of soul awareness on a wide scale.  The challenge for us all is to do our inner work, to free ourselves from entanglement in patterns of thinking and acting that come from our conditioning and lack of insight.   We are all blind to some extent, but we are called to recognize our limitations, our ignorance, and our attachments that blind us to the Light of Christ Jesus that is continually offered to us.  This is real inner work – God’s work in us –we call synergy. We are called to attend to the true Light that pierces our consciousness and we need to nurture and develop our will to love-to learn to abide in the soul’s inner vision of connection to the Source of Life replenishing our inner and outer lives with one another and in this world of ours.