IC 1:5: Lætare Sunday A (use long form of Gospel)
It should be obvious that our Lord uses the word “blind”
with a double meaning in these concluding words. By a miracle of Christ, a
blind man’s eyes are made to see the physical world, while some of the
spectators who witnessed the miracle were “blind” in another sense: they could
not see spiritually because they lacked faith. The word “light” here
also has two senses: the natural light from the sun that illuminates the world
we know; and Jesus Himself, the world’s light, illuminating the spiritual
world. There is another twist to things here: not everything is as it
may seem. This once-blind man had been handicapped by no fault of his own. The
stubborn Pharisees (who were popularly regarded as devout Jews) were culpably
blind due to their wickedness. While these well-thought-of Pharisees
accused the blind man of being a “sinner” Jesus accuses the Pharisees of being
sinners in a worse sense for all their self-righteousness.
Now, it is typical of the Gospel of Saint John to deal in
these sometimes confusing ambiguities because it is the story of God entering
the world of man. Miracle meets nature; truth dispels ignorance; the new
replaces the old. While not all passages in this Gospel are so constructed, the
Fourth Gospel has many instances where the meaning is not immediately clear.
Not only does one have to study the word and the deeds of our Lord to “get the
point” but, as many a scripture expert will admit in unison with the common
layman, the exact meaning of many things in it often eludes the reader. The
reason for this difficulty in understanding the Gospel of Saint John is part of
the wider mystery of understanding the whole bible. The bible is the word of God.
The reason that He spoke these words is so that He might communicate with us.
The bible is, with Tradition and the guidance of the Church’s magisterium,
God’s way of talking to us. God wants us to be “in the know” and not in
ignorance of many spiritual things. Why then is the bible so difficult to
grasp? Why didn’t God make it easier?
The problem of the understanding of the bible is not merely
due to the fact that it was written long ago in human history, in a foreign
language with strange idioms, by people very different from ourselves.
Nor is the problem confined to the fact that there are many different
manuscripts of the bible, many of them of great antiquity that offer different
readings for certain passages. Language studies, archeological findings,
historical research and many other tools have been employed in the attempt to
crack the mystery of the bible. These days the scientific methods used for
scriptures studies have been very useful and contributed a great deal to our
knowledge. This has been good. The fundamental thing however must remain
that this is a book of religious truth, and one that was authored by
God. All too often in bible studies there is neglect of the Tradition of the
Church, the writings of the holy fathers, and the living voice of the Teaching
Church, as well as the reluctance to use other books of the bible to illuminate
the meaning of the passage at hand. I’m sad to say that our seminarians today
are all too often dealt a huge helping of the modern scientific studies of the
bible but are not led to the deeper and, in the end, only worthwhile and
lasting thing: the spiritual meaning of the word of God! This explains why many
sermons in some parishes are often sterile recaps of what was just read by the
lector with perhaps a trivial application to some current event or with some
concluding platitude about our “daily living”. There is too often no spiritual
depth to the comprehension of this scripture as the word of life, as a transforming
agency, the power of God talking to us so as to move us and change us. This
circumstance causes both priest and people to be spiritually starved: to borrow
a phrase from our Lord, having stones when hungering for bread. But the problem
is deeper than that still. For, even if one should expand his resources for consultation
to include the writings of the fathers and the Popes, there still would be
something missing, and something essentially missing, and it has much to
do with this gospel passage and with the selection from the Imitation of
Christ given for our reflection today.
The comprehension of religious truth is not like the
mastery of other kinds of knowledge where the goal is to application of the
mind to the subject matter. The truths of faith may well remain opaque to one’s
understanding in spite of all the talking, reading, arguing and study. The
problem is not simply one of intellectual mastery of the material. Faith
must be, as we say, a “living” faith, that is, one that is brought to life by infused
charity and grace. God, in other words, must make a move in the interior of a
person’s soul for the achievement of spiritual understanding. But, even this is
not the whole of the matter. There must also be on the part of the recipient,
a good disposition, a certain kind of adaptability or conformity that will enable
God’s initiative to take effect in him. And that component is not in his
intellect but in his will. One must be a sincere seeker of truth
and must not place any moral obstacles in the way that would “blind” him to the
truth. Simply said, unless one is trying to live a good life, refraining from
sin, he will not be able to see the truth. In vain will be all the
exhortations, readings, discussions! One needs a measure both of humility and
purity-of-soul to have spiritual insight. The Pharisees of this Gospel are good
examples: for all the wonders they had seen and heard, they obstinately
remained unmoved and unconverted by Jesus.
And so, in the long run, having faith and getting to heaven
is not a matter of “being smart” with regard to religion. It’s not that
theology is a waste of time, or biblical knowledge unnecessary. It’s just that
these in themselves are incapable of salvation for anyone. Keeping in a state
of grace, growing in holiness and the love of God, keeping the commandments:
these are the things that matter ultimately. Anyone with the least intellectual
endowment can achieve these and become among the brightest lights in heaven.
Just a few pertinent sentences from the Imitation here: “In the holy
scriptures, truth is to be looked for rather than fair phrases. In them we
should seek food for our souls rather than subtleties of speech. Curiosity
often hinders us in the reading of the Scriptures. Read with humility,
simplicity and faith, and have no concern to appear learned.” The rest you can read
for yourselves in the brief chapter 5 of the Imitation.
The world today and poor, badgered