The fourth Sunday of Lent is known as Laetare Sunday – Rejoice Sunday – marking that we are more than halfway through our Lenten journey, and so we begin to anticipate the joy of the Risen Lord on Easter. We wear rose vestments not to celebrate a birthday, but to celebrate the joy of the Risen Lord beginning to invade the Lenten season as we have passed the halfway point in our journey to Easter.
Today we journey in the company of the blind man. It is the long, often painful, journey of a person who is called to see life in a new way. As a result makes a new commitment. As his blindness was removed, the man could now see. The gift of sight is a most precious gift. But the real message of this Gospel is greater than the gift of sight. It is the gift of faith. Jesus bestows not merely sight but a faith-filled insight. The man born blind eventually sees Jesus, but – a greater gift – he comes to see who Jesus really is.
The man born blind is symbolic of the human condition. We need the continuing creation of God, spreading mud on our eyes and washing in the waters of the pool of Siloam.
Again and again in the course of our spiritual journey, God’s saving work, symbolically opening our eyes, but really opening our hearts, happens through the One who is sent, Jesus Christ. In the second Scripture reading from the Letter to the Ephesians, Paul challenges us to make this miracle our own: “You were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light.”
As we listen to the story of the man born blind, pray for the discernment of how each one of us is able to have our eyes opened to see the saving power of God, calling us to a relationship with Jesus Christ. As the man born blind witnessed to “that man they call Jesus”, we are to witness to a spiritual sightedness that was not from birth, but one that we have learned through life experience.
The Scriptures invite us to reflect how has the season of Lent has revealed to you your “blindness” and your need for Christ’s light, Christ’s reconciliation?
As we are in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, we wrestle with the unknown of our fear and isolation, of the need for social distancing, yet there is still very much a holy longing within us to experience the love of our family and our faith community and the love of our merciful and faithful God.
This needed reality of dealing with the coronavirus can easily cause a fear-based blindness and anxiety of what is coming next. The Lord Jesus wishes to remove our spiritual blindness so that our soul is not infected by this virus; rather the Lord calls us to a rebirth of love and a rebirth of a faith-filled trust that Jesus is our light that will remove the darkness of isolation and loneliness, the darkness of sickness. We are now and always will be children of the light.
Yes, the discipline and the social distancing that is now demanded of us is a Lenten spiritual discipline that is not of our own choosing; nonetheless, the grace we seek is to remove the spiritual blindness caused by our fear and isolation and to experience the faith-filled sightedness the Lord calls us to our family life and in the quiet of our prayer.
On Ash Wednesday, we may very well have wished for the opportunity to slow down the busyness of our lives and to welcome the gift of quiet prayer and the gift of spending more quality time with our family. In these days of being on “house arrest,” may we experience the God moments of quiet prayer and the gift of precious family time.
Yes, we won’t be receiving the Eucharist that is for us the bread of eternal life but be assured the Lord is present in your family life. Your home and your family are your little church. Could the Lord be calling you to deepening the quality of your family prayer? Could each member of your family share their moment closest to God that happened this day? What are we thankful for this day? How have we experienced the love of another even in this time of social distancing?
Whether we are dealing with the coronavirus or not, there is no way to over-emphasize the priority of knowing we are God’s beloved sons and daughters. This is the spiritual sightedness that the man born blind came to.
The real darkness in my life and in yours is not knowing how much we are God’s beloved.
In our Lenten journey, in some form or fashion, the cross is going to be a part of your life and mine. When we can trust in God’s love for us while we are experiencing the cross the in our life, we come to know the sightedness of the man born blind in the Gospel.
Somehow in God’s providence in ways I don’t understand, our Lenten cross is the forced isolation and the shut-down of much of what we previously so relied and taken for granted -- the availability of schools, churches, restaurants, our favorite sporting events, the theater and so on and so on. Even more than all of this, as I say, the real darkness of our lives is not knowing how much we are God’s beloved,
Trusting another is a most precious quality in the friendships of our life. Even more so, trusting in God’s unending love for us is the sightedness that overcomes much blindness in our lives.
Trusting in God is easy to talk about, but it is a blindness we struggle with in the face of the crosses of life that turn our life upside down. The spiritual sightedness we seek in this Lenten season is to embrace the light that comes from Christ to help us navigate through the muddy waters that have been caused by the coronavirus.
May the grace of this Lenten season continue to go with us as we journey from spiritual blindness to living in the light and joy of the Risen Lord.