Homily

I always feel sorry for this man born blind every time I read this gospel. All those years of blindness and how he can see but nobody is happy for him. He stands all alone…at least until the end. Even his parents won’t speak up for him. All through this episode, notice the divisions between all the different people involved. They are divided over truth. The first division is found between the neighbors. They can’t tell whether this man was the blind man or just somebody that looked like him. Some say “yes” and some say “no.” I think this clearly shows that not everyone can see the truth, even when it is literally staring them in the face.

Next, we have the Pharisees, who are divided among themselves also. Some of them think it is a miracle, but other Pharisees disagree. The man who performed this healing can’t be from God because He broke the Sabbath law—or at least that is how they interpreted the law. Interesting, no? Jesus can’t be from God, so he must be of the devil. In the strange way that they see reality, Satan is now going around having his agents cure and heal people. These religious leaders don’t even recognize the results of a good and blessed action even when it is staring them in the face. Though some, at the beginning, thought it could have happened by a man of God, they soon change their minds and the group, as a whole, refuses to believe the story.

Then there is the division between the parents and their son. They won’t stick up for him because they are afraid of being thrown out of the synagogue. You would think they’d be overjoyed to see their boy no longer blind. But fear for their own well-being and comfort is stronger than the love for their son, even as he is now staring at them for the first time in his life, staring at them in the face.

And finally, we see the division between the Pharisees and the man born blind. The cured man offers them what should be a very convincing argument, especially since they were intelligent religious leaders. The man Who healed him MUST be from God. Notice how they answer him. They don’t claim to be followers of God. So that idea doesn’t even appear here. They don’t know where Jesus came from, and now they really don’t even care. They proudly proclaim to be disciples of Moses. Moses gave them the Law. They know the Law. They claim Jesus broke the Law by healing on the Sabbath so He must be a sinner. They will not look on the face of the formerly blind man ever again because they throw him out of the synagogue.

The healing of his vision, is, of course, a great miracle. Imagine what it must have been like! Never in all his years having seen a thing, now he sees everything. What a shock it must have been, and certainly it altered the course of his life in a most dramatic way. But it was not the most important thing that happened to him. He came to see that Jesus was the Son of God. He believed. And what did he do once he believed? He fell down and worshipped, as we do here today. When Jesus looked at him, face to face, he knew he had to worship Him.

My friends, we see divisions in our society today also. Like the neighbors in the gospel there are some people who cannot see the truth even if it is staring them in the face. To say that two people of the same sex can marry each other completely changes the meaning of the word “marriage.” So if “marriage” no longer means “marriage” how can they get “married?”

Like the Pharisees some people cannot see the truth, because it doesn’t fit into the framework that they have chosen for understanding life. For the Pharisees, it didn’t fit into the way they saw the Law of Moses. We heard in the Acts of the Apostles today how St. Paul cast out the evil spirit that possessed the woman who kept harassing him. Here is what one religious leader has to say about that action:

“Paul is annoyed, perhaps, by being put in his place and so he responds by depriving her of the gift of spiritual awareness…Paul can’t abide something he won’t see as beautiful or holy, so he tries to destroy it. It gets him thrown into prison. That’s pretty much where he has put himself by his own refusal to recognize that she too shares in God’s nature, just as much as he does—maybe more so!”

This is from a sermon given in 2013 by the female bishop who was the head of the Episcopal Church in the USA, Katharine Jefferts Schori. For her the demon-possessed person was a spiritually aware lady, and St. Paul was a miserable old, patriarchal Semite.

Divisions within families. It used to be more that case that children would respect the moral beliefs of their parents, the beliefs and standards that they were raised in and taught. Children who veered from that moral path were usually at least embarrassed for their parents to learn of it. Today there are many, many children who not only turn away from the morality their parents taught them, but they even denounce their parents as unloving and hateful if they don’t accept the immoral actions of their own sons and daughters. When I think of all the love, sacrifice, hard work and dedication that my parents put into raising me and my brothers and sisters, I could never, in a million years, call them unloving for any reason at all, and certainly not because they disagreed with me over something they thought was morally wrong for me. I cannot speak for all parents and children, but I would be the most ungrateful son alive if I ever even thought of such an accusation against my parents.

Finally, divisions between those who recognize Jesus as the Son of God, and those who do not, including many who may say that they believe Jesus is Son of God, but they don’t care what He has to say to them. I don’t need to give many examples of this. In California they are trying to overturn the right of Catholics and other Christians to the seal of Confession. A politician is not happy with a Supreme Court nominee because, she says, “The doctrine lives loudly within him.” And the politician claims to be Catholic! For her, if you are a true, faithful Catholic you probably should not be allowed to sit on the bench of the court.

Division, division, division. How do we overcome these divisions? Should we change the framework of our faith? Should we agree that there are many different truths and one truth is better than another? Should we accept the moral behavior of our children no matter what they do? Should we allow others to push us out of social and political life because we believe in the words of the Son of God?

These are not divisions that are easily overcome, and often they present great difficulties for us as Christians. But when we do have to deal with these divisions the very first thing we need to do, is the very last thing the Man Born Blind did in the gospel: let us turn to Christ. Let us fall down and worship Him. And then let us get up and live our lives strengthened by His grace and with full and complete confidence in His truth. We will not ever be able to heal every division we find in our lives, but it is only with Christ that no division we face will be able to overcome us. Thanks be to God.