The Twice Blind Beggar

4th Sunday of Lent Year A

Quite a story you have just heard! A miracle which in the other Gospels would be told quite briefly and to the point gives rise to a powerful drama in John’s Gospel, involving a number of actors, above all a blind beggar, the group of pharisees he encounters, and Jesus himself. For John’s gospel, the actual cure is the backdrop to the real story that John wants to tell. Indeed there are two kinds of blindness going on in this story. There is the physical blindness of the beggar cured by Jesus, but there is also spiritual blindness, which is gradually removed in the case of the physically blind man, but which remains in the Pharisees. It is on the spiritual blindness that John focusses.

The blind beggar’s spiritual blindness is cured gradually. He passes from Jesus being just another person he has heard about vaguely to being his Lord and Saviour. The cure begins with his encounter with Jesus who removes his physical blindness. But this sets off a chain of events. He is challenged in depth by people who did not want to deal with the evidence before their eyes that he has recovered his sight through Jesus. First he was asked by those who knew him as a blind beggar how his eyes were opened. He points to Jesus as the man who was the author of this cure. Jesus becomes someone who stands out as significant for him. Then the Pharisees to whom the formerly blind man is brought get into the act, and they ask him the same questions. They are initially divided as to what happened, and they ask the beggar what he thinks about Jesus. This helps him bring Jesus into clearer focus. He affirms Jesus not just to be the author of his cure but also a prophet. Then the Pharisees pursue their questioning further, trying to get the blind man’s parents involved. The parents refuse to get involved in the question of how he was cured, and the blind man is left to fend off the attacks of the Pharisees. He defends his view that Jesus is a prophet from God. As a result the Pharisees drive him out of the synagogue. Then he meets Jesus again and in a dialogue with Jesus ends up seeing Jesus clearly with the eyes of his spirit. He says to Jesus “Lord, I believe” And he worshipped him, as the story tells us.

Note the progression. The cure of his spiritual blindness is gradual. He first says that Jesus is the man who responsible for the cure, then that Jesus is a prophet, then he acknowledges Jesus as Lord, someone to be believed and worshipped. He goes right to the heart of the matter. And what moves him to do that? At first he is challenged by curious bystanders and especially by the pharisees. They try to push him around, but he holds his ground. As a result he is driven out of the synagogue. But then he meets Jesus, and his final step in recognizing Jesus occurs in his conversation with him. Jesus is very gentle, inviting him to an act of faith and the cured beggar responds positively. This is the experience of our own lives. At times we express our faith more clearly as the result of challenges from others, but at times it is simply a question of Jesus encountering us in a special moment and removing the film from our eyes.

John also tells us that on the spiritual level, it is the blind beggar cured by Jesus who sees, and the pharisees who are blind. They are part of the religious establishment, they think that their narrow framework enables them to understand and judge everyone else. Already they had made up their mind that followers of Jesus did not belong in the synagogue. They tell the blind man “You were born entirely in sins, and you are trying to teach us.” They were not willing to accept the clear evidence that Jesus performed this miracle and that he has to be from God. They are enraged and as expected drive the beggar out of the synagogue.

As the epilogue of the story Jesus says “I have come into this world for judgement so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” This is the type of paradoxical statement we often find in John. It cannot be understood without some reflection. We might expand the statement this way: “I have come into this world for judgement so that those who acknowledge their blindness may see, and those who think that they see may become blind.” The blind beggar does not have any religious pretense. He is a man who has always suffered from a deep affliction and who looks for anyone who can help him. His heart is open. He is ready to grow in understanding about the one who cured him, and little by little he is prepared for the encounter in which he comes into the light of Christ by making his profession of faith. By contrast the Pharisees are confirmed in their blindness, even though they think they see clearly, with the right to pass judgements of condemnation. There is within the blind beggar an openness for the truth of Christ; the Pharisees in this story are full of their own righteousness and fail to see the signs that should have led them to the truth of Christ.

Jesus is the light of the world. He tells us this just before performing this miracle, and the miracle is designed to demonstrate what he means by this statement. He is the light that shines in the darkness. We are invited to come out of the darkness and, as the second reading tells us, in the Lord we become light. We are to take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose such works for what they are.

How does this apply to us? All of us here without exception have parts of ourselves that are in the light, and parts of ourselves that are in the darkness. What Jesus is inviting us to do is to face up to those parts of ourselves that are still in the darkness, the parts that we are ashamed of, the parts we pretend are not there, the parts that are repressed and hidden. To face up to them, to acknowledge them, to allow our hearts to be humbled and broken, is to allow them to be healed as the light of Christ shines on the darkness within us. We need not fear the light of Christ, because it is compassionate and merciful. Christ lets us see who we really are in his sight. Yes, we are sinners, there are in us blemishes, flaws, areas of resistance and of disorder, but we are loved and forgiven. He hates not us but the sin and the disorder that prevents us from fully being who we really are and wants to take them away.

This process is gradual, just like it is for the blind man. We are brought into the light gradually, according to what we can bear at any given moment. This journey into the light is at the heart of our Lenten observance. And in that journey we are guided by the word of God and fed by the bread of life.