What an exciting Gospel Account!
Everything was moving with such an incredibly fast pace. So many things happened in that one day. However, we can all agree on one thing. Everything started with the healing of a blind man. Therefore, I think it is fair to pick “blindness” as the topic for our reflection.
The man in the Gospel today was born blind. This physical defect, as well as many others, is understood among the Jews as God’s punishment for those who were sinful. That was why the Disciples asked Jesus, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
In our life, it is not uncommon to think, whenever we encounter sufferings such as misfortunes or serious illnesses, that we are punished by God for our sins. It is almost like God was getting back at us for not being perfect. It is certainly not the case as Jesus pointed out, “Neither he nor his parents sinned; it is so that the works of God might be made visible through him.”
To put it in a different way, whenever we suffer, or whenever we are most vulnerable, that is when we truly realize that we need God. Suffering is a part of life. It is an unfortunate consequence of Original Sin. However, God does allow suffering to occur, so that his children will not get too big headed, so that we can realize that we are always in need of the Savior.
Jesus, as the Savior, healed the blind man today. I purposefully use the word “heal” because I want to make a distinction between healing and curing. Curing is just taking away the illness. Healing has a deeper meaning than that. Healing takes place in the interior of one’s being. Curing restore the person back to the way they were. But healing transforms him/her to become better.
The Gospel account does not tell us only the story of Jesus curing the blind man. He healed him. He did not only take away the physical blindness which imprisoned the man in darkness. Jesus took away the darkness of his soul as well. He brought to the man light – light of hope and of courage. He brought to him the true light of the world – the knowledge of knowing him – the Eternal Word made flesh and God-among-men.
And at the end of the Gospel account, the true encounter with Christ happened. The man filled with faith uttered, “‘I do believe, Lord,’ and he worshiped him.”
The man wasn’t only cured. He was healed.
There is, nonetheless, a second message which I wish to draw out from this Gospel reading.
The Gospel presented another form of blindness. The following story demonstrates it well:
Once, there was a man who dreamed of nothing but gold. He was obsessed with it. One day, he got up from his desk and ran to the marketplace. He ran through the crowd of people to come upon the table where the man was selling gold. He swept them all into his bag and ran away. A police was standing right next to the table and he nabbed him.
He was taken to the police station where he was questioned, “I can’t understand it.” The police said. “There you are, me right next to the merchant’s table and at least one hundred witnesses, and you steal something right in front of us all!”
The man replied, “I never saw any one. I only saw gold.”
That is the second form of blindness in the Gospel today. And sadly, many of us suffer from it.
It might not be the gold or greed that makes us blind, though we can’t deny that it is the most common cause – too common. There are other factors which can cause us to be blinded. They could be ambition for high ranks and prestige. They could be hunger for power or lust. Whatever the case is, this form of blindness allows us to walk about in life without seeing a single thing. We can see where things are alright. But we are just blinded to the beauty of love and of compassion. We are just blinded from seeing others as others. We only see ourselves.
These things become our gods. We worship them. We become lost forever in the dark prison of our own blindness.
But see, it’s not only the bad people who can be blind. Good Christians who practice religious laws can also be stuck in this form of blindness. And just like the rest of them, we often don’t realize it. We suffer from what can be called “Pharisee-itis.” After all, the Pharisees were good Jews. They practiced their faith. They observed the Sabbath. Alas, they were pitifully blinded.
They were blinded in their rigidity, in their judgmental attitude and their prejudice. This blindness caused them not to see an amazing thing happen to a poor man who was blind since birth. They only saw one thing – Jesus broke the observance of the Sabbath. They could not see the compassion of the Messiah being in their midst. They saw only a rebel who broke the law.
Don’t we, sometimes, also make the same mistake? We allow our rigidity, our prejudice, and our own narrow-minded religious understanding to blind us from seeing the beauty of God’s compassion. We choke the love of God out of those in need with our harshness. In the process, we choke ourselves too. We become the most condemning people in the world. We become anything but Christians.
We observe all the laws and the commandments. Sadly, we only overlook one, the one which matters most – the Law of love.
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