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| The healing of the man born blind. Front, Jesus heals the man. Left, the Scribes and Pharisees look on in disapproval. Right, the man washes his eyes and regains his sight. |
Speaking of cruelty and evil, the great
GK Chesterton once wrote: “If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can
feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can
only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as
all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all
Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic
solution to deny the cat.” (Orthodoxy)
When one reads some of the ludicrous attacks on Christianity in social media
such as Facebook, one cannot but be reminded of Chesterton’s amusing comment.
But this problem is much older than we
think. We find it amongst the leaders of Jesus’ people in today’s gospel, in
the healing of the man born blind. They do not want to face the implications of
Jesus’ work, which would lead them into having to accept Jesus as what he
claims to be; the Son of God. For them this is a blasphemy. As a result, they try
to deny the existence of the miracle by undermining the evidence of its having
happened.
The man who was healed and his parents
are interrogated. The parents are too afraid to say too much, in case they are
expelled from the synagogue. The man born blind sticks to the one indisputable fact:
“I only know that I was blind, but now I see,” he says. When the Pharisees try
to discredit Jesus, the man born blind laughs at them. “He opened my eyes, but
you don’t know where he comes from!” In other words, Jesus’ actions prove him
to be the Messiah. The leaders accuse Jesus of being a sinner for healing on
the Sabbath. Since God does not listen to sinners, the healing could not have
happened. They accuse the man born blind of being a sinner; being born blind
means being born cursed by the Law, so that his evidence is inadmissible. In
fact, far from investigating the miracle, they do everything in their power to
AVOID doing so.
But the man born blind sees and believes.
HE is drawn to recognise Jesus as the Messiah. Jesus, the Light of the World,
has given him not only the light of vision, but also the light of faith. And
Jesus applies this lesson to the leaders. They have vision, he says, but their
refusal to accept an undeniable miracle and therefore accept Jesus for whom and
what he is, makes them spiritually blind. And in that spiritual blindness, it
is THEY, and not the man born blind, who are the real sinners.
How often are WE blind to the wonders
that Jesus works among us, within us, because what he does and what he calls us
to be, does not suit us? We must not cling to our own dark little vision of
reality. We must invite Jesus to take away our spiritual blindness, so that we can
recognise him as the Lord and see the world as He sees it; so that we may follow
him wherever he leads us.
Fr Phillip.
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