Fourth Sunday of Lent-A
Well into Lent, our Gospel this Sunday recalls another encounter in which Jesus’ healing presence is evident. Last week was the meeting with the Samaritan woman at the well, in which Jesus became the way for a sinful woman to be reconciled with God through His mercy and her faith. Unlike the woman’s spiritual malady, today’s encounter is with a man who has both physical and spiritual afflictions.
In the ancient world, a blind man was relegated to begging because he was unable to work; all he could do was ask for assistance. Nothing better represents humanity’s utter need than a man at the lowest level of the social and economic ladder. Not only was the man maligned in the community, but it was also assumed that his ailment was a result of his sinfulness or, at the very least, his parents’ moral failings. Jesus made it clear that neither he nor his parents was the result of his blindness. The blind man was to become the example of how lowliness can be the conduit for the glory of God. Jesus said, “It is so that the works of God might be made visible through him.”
After correcting the Pharisees that it was not sin that caused his blindness, Jesus spat on the ground, made clay with his saliva, and smeared it on his eyes. He then told the man to wash in the Pool of Siloam, which means sent. After he did what Jesus ordered him to do, he came back able to see.
Two things besides the miraculous healing are noteworthy. Jesus made a mixture of clay and his saliva, which can be described as a salve. Salve has a rich meaning. In Latin, it means “be well”.
Secondly, the Pool of Siloam is a sacred site, adjacent to the city of David, and was used for ritual bathing. Without getting into the weeds, ritual bathing was meant to cleanse a person from a profane state to a holy one, allowing him to engage in religious activities. These two apparent nondescript things clearly are the symbol of what will come after Jesus’ death and resurrection. It is the forerunner of the sacramental system by which physical matter is used to bring about a spiritual reality. One that comes to mind immediately is baptism, where a person becomes an adopted child of God through the regenerative waters poured on him in the name of the Trinity.
To better understand this reality of the sacramental system initiated by Christ, the venerated St. Bonaventure offers us a tool to see it more clearly. He begins with the three ways in which we can see. Obviously, the first one is through our physical eyes, and no other explanation is needed.
The second is the eye of the mind. Here, Bonaventure describes this as a mental endowment. Anyone who has struggled with mathematics can understand this type of vision. Starting with a bunch of x’s and y’s, can turn a question into an answer solved—nothing physical, only mental.
The last and hardest way to see is what Bonaventure calls the eye of the soul. In the deepest recesses of our existence, we may have the opportunity to believe in a God we see through the eye of the soul. The vision is a certain conviction that God is alive and his Son, Jesus, is the Savior of the world, even though God is invisible. The surety of our belief and faith is rooted in the eye of our soul attuned to His divine presence.
Now returning to the Gospel story, the Pharisees were enraged and proclaimed that Jesus could not be a man of God because he cured the man on the Sabbath. For a practicing Jew, this would amount to blasphemy. However, this fact did not dissuade the blind man from his healing and search for a relationship with God. After questioning his parents, who attested he was blind from birth, the self-righteous Jews threw him out of the community, irrespective of his healing.
After he was banished, Jesus asked him, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” In response, the blind man said, “Who is he, sire, that I may believe in him?” Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, the one speaking with you is he.” He said, “I do believe, Lord,” and he worshiped him.
Through our baptism, we have all been washed clean, opening the eyes of our souls to see our God in a way we could not previously. Yet sometimes we willfully remain blind and ignore the healing. When we fail to pray daily, or give God worship, and act as a Christian should, we answer the question negatively when Jesus asks us, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?
Lent is the time for us to be aware of the question asked every day. Our answer should always be an affirmative answer, “I believe in the Lord,” knowing we have regained our sight because of Him who came to save us.