Fourth Sunday of Lent

Bishop Peter Muhich
Homily from the Televised Mass, NewsCenter1
Fourth Sunday of Lent, March 19, 2023

He went and washed and came back able to see.

The healing of the man born blind on this Fourth Sunday of Lent is one of the seven signs or miracles in St. John’s Gospel. And like any sign, this sign of the blind man being giving his sight points to something else. Ultimately to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. All the other signs in John’s Gospel, also point to this reality, and of course, it’s what we are preparing to celebrate at the end of the Lenten season. The death and resurrection of Christ which brought about our redemption, which changed the course of history that freed us from sin.

This passage from John is a rich encounter like the encounter Jesus had last week with the Samaritan woman at the well, also in John’s Gospel. It’s full of meaning on many levels. Now we’ve been using the short versions of these readings because the long versions are just too long for our format, so I encourage you to open up John’s gospel and find these passages.

The encounter of the man born blind with the Lord, first leads to his sight being restored on a physical level, but then it goes further. Then it proceeds to his sight being restored on the spiritual level. So, he receives his eyesight back in that physical healing, but something more important, deeper happens. He comes to faith in Jesus. The blind man’s increasing ability to see on a spiritual level is paralleled by the Pharisees’ dissent into spiritual blindness. They become increasingly hostile to Jesus, the true light of the world, and in the process, they fail to see the son of man right there in their midst.

You know the middle of Lent is a good time for us to hear this passage from John’s Gospel and to think about spiritual blindness, our own spiritual blindness. It’s also a great time for our RCIA catechumens and candidates to hear what happened to this man born blind as they seek Jesus Christ as their light and prepare to be anointed and washed and enlightened in baptism, confirmation and Eucharist. On the spiritual level, what happened to the man born blind will happen to them.

The question for all of us as we ponder this text is what blind us from seeing spiritually? What clouds our vision? What keeps us from having clarity in our spiritual life? Of the many things that can possibly blind us to the Lord and his light, I’d like to focus on three — fear, anger, and sloth. Fear, anger, and sloth.

Fear. By fear I don’t mean being afraid of God as if he were some fickle tyrant. No, what I mean here is being afraid of going deeper in our relationship with the Lord. Being afraid that he will ask us to turn away from a sin we’re still clinging to. Being afraid of having to do more.

You know there are three basic levels to the spiritual life, or stages. Hopefully, when we’re young, we get rid of mortal sin, serious sin. And then later on, after that, we moved to eliminate venial, smaller sins from our lives. And usually, we get kind of stuck there, and we forget there’s a third stage to the spiritual life which is heroic virtue — going beyond mere avoidance of sin and growing in a heroic virtuous life. The Lord always calls us to that kind of depth and fear can keep us from responding to that deeper call or that call to go deeper.Anger. Anger is almost always devastating in the spiritual life. While being angry about something, some kind of injustices that we encounter is a natural reaction that can help us right a wrong, the vast majority of our anger is not that. It involves instead holding on to past hurts.  Since Jesus came to bring forgiveness, to reconcile sinners, to teach us to love our enemies, we know that holding on to anger, fostering this kind of anger is wrong. Anger also blinds us to so much because it keeps us from thinking about other things and we simply kind of dwell on how we’ve been wronged, or things haven’t got our way. This kind of anger takes up an awful lot of time and energy and it really does open the door to Satan to come and make a home in our lives.

Sloth. Sloth is an old-world word that tells us the important truth. Normally we think it was sloth as laziness, but that’s not really quite it. Sloth is an indifference spiritually. A determination or an attitude that we don’t really care. That we’ve done enough for God. That it really doesn’t matter if we do it more. It’s kind of a spiritual retirement. This puts us in neutral spiritually and easily turns into self-centeredness and we can stop looking for new ways of serving God. So how indifferent am I to God or how zealous is my faith? To ask the question in a different way, are we parking ourselves spiritually thinking, “well, this is good enough.”

Today’s reading about the healing of man born blind calls on us to take stock of our lives and to think again about seeing spiritually. Ultimately, that means if we’re clear in responding to God’s call, seeing Earth in the light of heaven, time in the light of eternity, our lives in the light or our destiny to live in God’s kingdom and so join that blind man, who was touched by Jesus and went and washed, and came back able to see.