Frances Flatman writes on next Sunday's Readings :-
We are now well into Lent and will shortly arrive at Holy Week. Today’s Readings are all designed to make us look differently at our belief in Christ; our faith. Our Gospel is the story of the healing by Jesus of the man born blind, another of John’s great ‘signs’ of the identity of Jesus. But something deeper is also going on underlying this incident which is miraculous and marvellous in itself. Last week we had the Samaritan woman of ill repute who brought her city to Christ. Today we have a picture of the great divide, as those John terms ‘The Jews’, the men in authority, reject Jesus’ ministry and will seek his death as they find him guilty of evading the law. But Jesus shows how this rigid agenda is outmoded by the glory of the presence of God himself incarnate, actually in the flesh, among them. In his Prologue, John has described Jesus throughout as ‘light’ the enlightener of the cosmos, ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.’ Our story of the healing of the man born blind – in the dark and taken into the light, a metaphor both for his actual given sightedness and his belief in the giver of this great gift, acts as we shall discover almost as a ‘trial scene’; here a pre-run of Jesus’ trial before Pilate where Pilate tries twice to reject the Jewish demand for Jesus’ crucifixion. Indeed, we will have the near duplication of the phrase ‘Behold the man!’ (9:36) and Pilate’s showing of Jesus to the crowd in the Passion (19:5). In this parallel the healed blind man will act as the defence council, speaking for Jesus who remarks in our Gospel, ‘It is for judgement that I have come into this world.’ It’s a tough Gospel and one which demands we take a good look at ourselves and our faith, rather than merely enthusing over the miracle and then passing by on the other side.
We begin with our Old Testament Reading from 1 Samuel (16:1,6-7,10-13). God has rejected Saul so Samuel has to find a new king for Israel. Sent to Jesse he sees the sons of the house and is suitably impressed by all of them, only to find them all rejected by God until the youngest, incidentally stuck out in the wilds with the sheep – so the lowliest - against all prediction by human thinking, is the one chosen by God. David will of course become the great king of Israel, founder of the dynasty and the one to shape the destiny of his nation. Clearly first impressions and observed facts are not what one should go by; but what a disaster it would have been had Samuel ignored God’s direction!
In John’s Gospel (Jn 9:1-41) what we find is a great battle between what the Jewish authorities, so observant to the law that they cannot see any way to move beyond it, battle by ‘reasonable arguments’ taken from the evidence before them, and their knowledge of the law, to condemn both the healed man and the one who did the healing. The man MUST be a sinner since he has been born blind, ineluctably punished and rejected by God! Jesus heals on the Sabbath- the God given day of rest - and not merely healing but working! Note the spittle, the clay paste made and applied to the eyelids, and his instructions to the man. Their reasoning, the very facts, told them that everything was wrong, utterly opposed to God! Yet they could not appreciate God’s working through this healer who defies all convention to work such a profound miracle releasing one stuck in penury and given life, a real life back from the dead to live as a full human being. ‘I am the light of the world.’ Tragically the Pharisees seem so stuck that they can’t find even the smallest space in which to marvel and praise God, but must simply condemn so as to keep things in order and above all, to retain their power.
As the story develops, we find that the fear induced by the Pharisees contaminates others too. For when questioned, the parents fearful of exclusion from the synagogue stand back from defending their son, and what should have been their overwhelming joy at his cure is lost in the need for blind conformity. Our healed man though brooks no such impertinence, lost to propriety in gratitude and the graces bestowed by Jesus, that only those truly in desperate circumstances know, he vigorously defends the Lord, suggesting sarcastically that perhaps the Pharisees, here in their second questioning, want to ‘become his disciples too’; only to have the division between Jesus and his followers and Judaism firmly established. By the time of John’s writing of his Gospel in the 80’s-90’s CE of course, the Temple lay in ruins, destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE and never to be rebuilt, and Christianity had gone out to the pagans in the cities of the Mediterranean. ‘Now here is an astonishing thing! He has opened my eyes, and you don’t know where he comes from!...God listens to men who are devout and do his will.’ Our healed man is driven away, now an outcast again, but here because of his loyalty to Christ; now no longer accepted by Jews or by his natural family but now entered into a new family, that of Christ. Quite simply we are told the man, made aware that Jesus is the Son of Man ‘worshipped him’. Jesus remarks that he has come into the world – here very unusually - ‘for judgment’; elsewhere for the salvation of the world or simply for love of it. And his concluding remarks are severe and condemnatory; those in power in Judaism have had their chance and have rejected it. It stands as a solemn warning to us all.
In the Letter to the Ephesians (5:8-14) the author, possibly writing after St Paul but in his style, and largely commenting on the behaviour of followers of the Christian way, remarks on the great divide which has come into the lives of converts, a divide between their former lives as pagans and their present lives. Commenting by way of a gloss on Isaiah 26:19 he speaks of this change as the call to awaken from sleep and rising from death – so dramatic is their entire mind and heart shift. Indeed how true, for Ephesus was an Imperial capital, a legionary base, a big cosmopolitan city, host to many different cults and abounding with images of Artemis/Diana especially in its theatres, amphitheatre and temples and at every street intersection. The Christian life there, albeit still infinitely small in numbers, was to be the powerhouse of the faith in the future. ‘You were darkness once, but now you are light in the Lord….be like children of the light, for the effects of the light are seen in complete goodness and right living and truth.’ In effect they are to become Christ-like, models of his grace and goodness, those like all of us who have to work hard on this most important of all relationships we shall ever have, of knowing Jesus.
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