--------------------------------------------
Homily:
4th Sunday of Lent – Cycle A
As many of you know I grew up in a Catholic household. My parents practiced their faith and taught
their children to do so also. My
siblings and I all spent eight years in Catholic grade school (well, nine, I
guess, if you count Kindergarten) and three of the four of us spent an
additional four years in Catholic high school (it was still segregated between
boys and girls when my oldest brother went, which didn’t sit well with him, so
he went to the public high school).
Thus, when I went off to college I felt pretty confident that I knew
what it meant to be Catholic: Go to church, don’t eat meat on Fridays, be kind
and generous to people. This is what I
did. I followed all of the rules (well,
most of them, anyway) and otherwise I pretty much did whatever I wanted to do.
A couple of years after I graduated from college, this
system fell apart on me. I wasn’t happy
with my job or my decision to move to Indiana, my relationship with my
girlfriend of nearly three years ended disastrously, and those thirteen years
of Catholic schooling didn’t seem to leave me any answers for why I ended up so
unhappy. It was then, of course, that I
had an encounter with Jesus.
In this spiritual encounter that I had with Jesus he showed
me how blind I had become to my sin (that is, how blind I had become because of
my own self-righteousness). “I’m a good
person”, I used to say. “I’ve never
really hurt anyone intentionally, so I’m ok.”
While this latter part was somewhat true, Jesus opened my eyes to see how
I had actually hurt many people through my selfishness and
self-righteousness. Although he didn’t directly
command me to do so, I knew what I had to do next: I had to go and wash in the
“pool of reconciliation” by making a good confession.
From there I began a journey, not unlike the blind man who
was given sight in today’s Gospel reading.
At first, all I could do was say “Jesus healed me.” When others would ask me, “Who is this Jesus?
point him out to us”, I couldn’t. I had
encountered him, but I was still getting to know him. As I more intentionally engaged all of the
practices that I had before—going to Mass, giving up meat on Fridays, being
kind and generous to people—as well as taking up new practices—giving time to
daily prayer, studying the Bible, and volunteering in my parish and the
community—the answer to the question “Who is Jesus?” started to become clearer
for me until the point that I could see him clearly and, thus, worship him in
truth.
Of course, the man in the Gospel reading today had a much
more profound experience. In many ways,
his story is a baptism story: one that highlights the “re-creation” aspect of
the sacrament that we celebrate. This
man was born without sight. In other words,
he was born broken: “damaged goods” if you will. Jesus confirms for his disciples that this
was not caused by any particular sin either by the man himself or by his
parents. Thus, in a sense, his blindness
is a result of a legacy of brokenness that man has inherited. Does that sound like a description “Original
Sin” to anyone? Well, it should!
What Jesus does next is very symbolic. He makes clay using his saliva. (I know, it sounds gross, but back then they
believed that saliva had healing properties.)
Think for a moment about some other time that God used the dirt of the
ground to do something important… In the
book of Genesis, right? “Then the LORD God formed the man out of the dust of the
ground…” So Jesus uses the dust of the
ground to make clay and places it on the man where there should be sight,
although there never was…
Interesting. Then he tells the
man to do what? To go wash in the pool
of water! And what does that remind us
of? Baptism! of course! So the man is baptized and washes the stuff
of creation off of his eyes and, voila!¸
the sight has been created in the man. (Suddenly this doesn’t look like the same old
story anymore, does it?)
Thus, this man’s faith journey begins. At first he doesn’t have much to say about
this Jesus that gave him sight. He knows
the name of the man who gave him sight and, because of what he did, that this
man must, therefore, be a prophet and a man of God, but he didn’t know much
else about him. When he then sees Jesus for the first time, he is
open and ready to make a profession of faith.
“Do you believe in the Son of Man?” Jesus asks him. “Sure!
Just tell me who he is, that I may believe in him”, replied the man. He trusted Jesus so completely—because of what
Jesus did for him—that he put his complete confidence in whomever it would be
that Jesus would identify. When Jesus
reveals himself to the man—“the one speaking with you is he”—the man then professes
his faith in Jesus and bows down in worship before him.
In many ways, the Elect—those who will be baptized at the
Easter Vigil—are having this same experience.
This Sunday we will scrutinize them again and call them to acknowledge
their blindness because of sin; and, in a way, to imagine Jesus putting the
healing, creating clay on their eyes. We
will then send them forward towards Easter to be washed in the pool of Baptism,
where their blindness caused by sin will be washed away; and, re-created, they
will walk as “children of the light”. As
their brothers and sisters in light, we walk with them on their journey towards
re-creation. Thus, Lent is also our call
to scrutinize our own lives and to identify how sin has increasingly made us
blind to our selfishness and self-righteousness; and, thus, to the needs of the
poor and those living on the margins around us that we have been ignoring.
My brothers and sisters, Jesus wants to meet us there, in
our acknowledgement of our blindness, and he wants to place the healing clay on
our eyes. He will then send us to the
pool to wash—that is, the sacrament of reconciliation—so that we too can have
our sight restored. In this time of
preparation for the great celebration of Easter, let us not be afraid to
approach him in this sacrament and to let him do this great work for us. For when we do, we will truly know what it is
to worship him; just as that man in the Gospel did; and just as we are invited
to do every Sunday here at this altar.
Given at All Saints Parish:
Logansport, IN – March 29th & 30th, 2014
No comments:
Post a Comment