| On this coming Sunday, we reach the last Sunday of Paschaltide. On Wednesday, the Holy Church celebrates the Apodosis (leavetaking) of Pascha, the Feast of Feasts, and on the following day we will celebrate the Holy Ascension of the Lord. Sunday’s Gospel provides two important lessons for us. Both involve a blind man. They also encompass the concerns and complications brought about by the lack of sight the man suffered. He lived in a vapid world of darkness, without form or shape, lacking color, light, and depth perception. Never could he see a sunrise, or, perhaps, his grandchild’s precious face. All was a blank. The American author, Barbara Kingsolver, describes this black estate grimly as follows: “What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that, you may not exist. You could be nowhere at all.”
This is the blindness that Jesus healed – the physical blindness. In doing so, He revealed Himself as the Divine Physician, the One who makes whole again, the One who restores brightness to a human soul. He is the One who gives shape, texture, and new perspective born of light by Him Who is the Light of the world! Even when the Jews standing nearby raised a pernicious question – “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents? – Jesus would not let them drag the man down again. He dismissed any threat to the light. He put to rest the Hebraic understanding of the “genealogy of sin and blame” as passing from one generation to the next. Light prevailed again!
This is the first lesson gleaned from today’s Gospel – Jesus is the Divine Healer, whose compassion and mercy over-spill into His every word and deed. Jesus never whitewashed the man’s sins and failures, neither did he lay blame for them at the feet of the man’s parents, or even the man himself. He forgave, He challenged, He healed with and in love! Our holy father St. Athanasius the Great best describes this lesson: “The Lord did not come to make a display. He came to heal and to teach suffering men. For one who wanted to make a display the thing would have been just to appear and dazzle the beholders. But for Him Who came to heal and to teach the way was not merely to dwell here, but to put Himself at the disposal of those who needed Him….”
The man’s blindness, therefore, was not only physical, affecting his daily life in unimaginable ways, it had other dimensions as well. The teaching of the Orthodox Church tells us that while the man’s own sins, or the sins of his parents did not actually cause his blindness, he did share, as all humans do, in the effects of the ancestral sin of our first (Biblical) parents. The fracturing, the disengagement caused by that deliberate turning from God extended not only to God, but to human relationships, to our individual interior life, and to the very cosmos itself! Everything tilted off-center. All creation became marred, and spiritual blindness was born in that tainted Paradise. Here lies our second lesson – far worse than sightless eyes, is a sightless soul. The darkness of physical blindness pales in comparison with the fact that we have within our freedom, the ability to close our eyes to God, to shut out the Light of life, to literally obstruct the “Son.” It was St. Augustine, in his Confessions, who forcefully described this journey through spiritual blindness: “Where do you go along these rugged paths? Where are you going? The good that you love is from Him… Why then will you wander farther and farther in these difficult and toilsome ways? There is no rest where you seek it. Seek what you seek; but remember that it is not where you seek it. You seek for a blessed life in the land of death. It is not there. For how can there be a blessed life where Life itself is not?”
This from a man and Bishop who knew sin, not as a theological construct, but as a real lived experience in his own heart and soul!
What is spiritual blindness? Elder Cleopa of Romania shares his understanding: “What else than the darkness and enslavement of man’s soul through all kinds of passions and self-centered behaviors; — pride of the mind, the hardness of the heart, the weakening of man’s will and moral conscience, the weakness of faith, the killing or abuse of body and soul, the hate and the anger among people, lies, desire for more and more things, stinginess, greediness, drunkenness, laziness and many others.”
All of these are ego-driven. Their source and their end is the “self.” It is the “I” in us that becomes, in so many ways, our motivation, our comfort, and the greatest delusion of our lives! We become blind to “the Other”, blind to the path God lays out for our lives, unable to see Him as the center of our life and lifestyle, frittering away with the things outside of us, in the world, that we mistakenly believe will make us happy and give our life fulfillment. Abba Dorotheos of Gaza warned us in the 6th century: “We are fools who do not know how to be happy!” This spiritual blindness is essentially a refusal to see the Light, by making some lesser brightness, some substitute luminary, some shadowy specter a replacement for the One who, in today’s Gospel, says: “I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”
What, then? Does the Lord leave the world in darkness? Are we abandoned to this spiritual blindness because, as we will celebrate this coming Thursday, He ascended to His Father no longer to be with us “in the flesh?” When we see the natural disruptions in our world, the violence, pandemic illnesses, human poverty and hunger at a staggering level, wars and a myriad of human disasters; when, in our private thoughts, we sense an encroaching darkness from which we fear we will never be extricated – how we long to hear the celestial voice once heard on the blankness of a coming Creation — “LET THERE BE LIGHT!” And light was made. Let there be light! It is the cure for spiritual blindness. It is the remedy for impending darkness in our lives. It is OURS, it is redemptive, it saves us – it is the love of God dwelling in our heart of hearts. It is Christ the Lord, Son of God, the Author and Finisher of our faith.
So many of Christ’s miracles, such as in today’s Gospel, were preceded by the question: “What wilt thou that I should do for thee?… Believest ye that I am able to do this?” If a person makes that choice, makes a decision to place himself completely into the hands of God, adopting the “mind of Christ Jesus,” – he welcomes the Light, tames his ego and diminishes its power over himself. The decision is difficult to be sure, but it is also freeing, it liberates, it can change the kind of person that we are into the kind of person we truly yearn to be – the person God intended when he bent low and breathed His own self into the nostrils of the human person. He inasmuch said “Be THIS self, grow and develop as THIS self, abandon all other selves, all masks and pretentions, and live as I live, be the self I breathed into your lungs and for the second time in Creation’s history, you will have discovered fire and light!.
Let us search our hearts, look deeply into the self of our self, and see what blindness needs healing, what passion, what mindset or behavior needs changing. Let us play the game no more but honestly work to develop a fervent life of prayer, reading of Sacred Scripture, coming to the Holy Mysteries (when we can!), being more merciful and compassionate, making “Christ choices” in our lives rather than picking the shallow things the faltering world would have us choose! Let us actually give flesh to our Orthodox faith. Avoidance, denial, and closing our eyes won’t work.
It is the Light we are after and the Great Augustine, from his own sinful soul, answers the question “Will Jesus leave us in the darkness? The Bishop responds: “He departed from our sight that we might return to our hearts and find Him there. For He left us, and behold, He is here. He could not be with us long, yet He did not leave us. He went back to the place that He had never left… He is within the inmost heart, yet the heart has wandered away from Him. Return to your heart, O you transgressors, and hold fast to Him who made you. Stand with Him and you shall stand fast. Rest in Him and you shall be at rest.” To the thrice-holy God who is our Light and the only one who can still our restless hearts, be honor, thanksgiving and praise, this day and forevermore! Amen.
Christ is Risen! Indeed. He is Risen!
Faithfully in the Risen Lord,
Fr. Dimitrios
(Please find below the Bulletin for Sunday, meant for your prayerful preparation.) |
