Homily

Several years ago, at one of our priests’ conferences, we were shown a short video clip of a woman who said she had a problem that she suddenly noticed one morning when she was home alone. She was rushing about getting ready to go to work and all of a sudden, she dropped her coffee mug. It hit the floor and coffee and ceramic went flying everywhere. The woman said, “The first words out of my mouth were ‘Frank, I can’t believe it.’ I blamed my husband, and he wasn’t even there. I realized that maybe I had a little bit of a problem.” Of course, it was somebody’s fault the coffee mug hit the floor. But it wasn’t her fault.

Ah, the blame game! Adam and Eve were the first to play it, and their children picked it up from them and it soon became an ordinary part of human behavior. When God questions Adam in the Garden of Eden, Adam says, “The woman you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit from the tree, and I ate. Then the Lord God said to the woman, ‘What is this you have done?’ and the woman said, ‘The serpent tricked me, and I ate.’” See! Someone is to blame but it’s not me!

It’s somebody’s fault. It’s got to be somebody’s fault. It’s someone’s fault that I am angry, unhappy, nervous, frustrated, late, ill-prepared, or for a thousand other states of mind, and I can easily come up with a suspect’s name. Kids practice at it: “He made me do it.” But by the time we are adults we have long since perfected this art and learned many ways to point the finger of blame at someone who is not me.

How much time did we spend last week thinking about the faults of others, those guilty others? Probably hard to remember, but good to try. Now contrast that with how much time we spent last week thinking about how blessed we are to have wonderful, generous, helpful, considerate loving people in our lives. They not only are a part of my life, sometimes they even live in the same house I do. Now, from a different angle let’s also check how much time we spent accusing other people either mentally or verbally, versus how much time we spent accusing ourselves of wrongdoing. Why do so many people avoid confession? Because thinking about the sins of other people is so exhausting that we don’t really have the time to think about our own.

The woman in the video said, “I was completely amazed at myself. Here my husband had been gone from the house for half an hour but somehow it was his fault that the coffee mug I was holding fell to the floor. And it made me think about how much time and how many times I spend assigning blame to other people as though somehow that is a great help to my peace and happiness—because it never is. And it made me wonder how often I have blamed other people in the most foolish and thoughtless ways for trouble in my life. Even when it is just a dropped mug of coffee.”

Notice that Jesus’ disciples, in today’s gospel, ask him whose sin it was that the man was born blind? Whose fault was it? Then the Pharisees question the Man Born Blind, asking how he received his sight. Then they question his parents who grow afraid. Then they drag the man back once again. And in all this what are they looking for? They are looking for someone to blame, not to praise, not to thank. They want to blame the man responsible for giving this fellow his eyesight. And they threw the Man Born Blind out, blaming him for not blaming his healer. So, how happy and peaceful do you think these Pharisees are in their daily lives?

Now it is indeed sometimes necessary to discover who is to blame, who is at fault. If little fingers steal a dollar bill from the counter it might be wise to find out who did it so a lesson can be taught and learned. If someone commits a crime it is right for us to accuse and punish the guilty party to satisfy justice. Of course, we sometimes need to blame those who do wrong. I think we have enough wisdom to understand that a fair amount of our accusations against other people in our own lives may be untrue and unjust or out of balance—but even if they are true, how often does our blaming them only create more anger and frustration within us? Our finger-pointing may be correct, but it may also be, at the same time, very unhelpful and unnecessary, and sometimes more harmful to us than the original mistake, accident or bad deed that the person did. Most of our blaming other people does not happen with our mouths. We spend most of our time accusing other people in our thoughts.

If we blamed ourselves with the same vigor with which we blame others, I suspect the line for confession would run out into the lobby. Let’s not blame a man Who performs miraculous healing, nor blame a spouse for a mug that we dropped. Let’s look instead to see whether and how much we are falsely accusing others for the troubles in our lives, and even if we correctly see the blame that belongs to other people, let us honestly question how much help and good it does for us to dwell on it and keep thinking about it. Then let us ask the Lord to forgive us our own trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

And one little quote from St. Augustine: When the Pharisees claim they are disciples of Moses, and yet the Man Born Blind is a follower of that horrible Jesus, St. Augustine remarked, "May such an 'evil thing' be also said of us and of our children!'"