Sight & light…

Sight & light…

In the Old Testament, God’s choice of David over his other brothers speaks of our own inability to see spiritual truth as God sees it. David is portrayed as the least likely to be the candidate for divine election. God sees into the heart and directs the prophet to choose and anoint the young David and consecrate him to be shepherd of God’s people as king. The blindness of those around David to his potential as God’s chosen leader speaks of how sin can blind us to God’s will for us.

Blindness, as attributed to the man born blind from birth in our gospel today, is a fitting image of the human condition we now know as original sin. John tells the story of the man’s cure by Jesus in a way that reveals who it is that is truly blind: those who stubbornly refuse to accept Jesus as the light of the world. Social sin is not the same as original sin, but flows from it, and is the accumulation of human choices to turn away from the light. The dramatic unfolding of John’s story gives eloquent expression to the way individuals in a community compound their blindness. Everyone gets involved: the man’s neighbors, his family, those who have seen him begging, the Pharisees, the evil spread like cancer until in an act the man is expelled from the synagogue for acknowledging Jesus as the Messiah.

As we celebrate Enlightenment Sunday, we pray: “Father… we do well always and everywhere to give you thanks through Jesus. He came among us as a man, to lead us from darkness into the light of faith. Through Adam’s fall we were born as slaves of sin, but now through baptism in Christ we are reborn as adopted children…”

As we pray physically away from each other but close together in spirit these days, we ask God for courage and strength as we go through this current pandemic. We ask God to let His light penetrate the darkness of our lives, helping us to re-discover our sense of family and care for each other as we try to prevent the spread of this coronavirus. Just as Jesus opens the eyes of the blind man to the wonders of belief in God’s son, God call us from this social crisis to an awakening to what is really important in our respective lives. From a life of selfishness and indifference, God call us to a new life, a life of loving and caring for one another.