March 27, 2014
The following is a homily based on the Scripture readings for March 30.
“It’s not like looking for a needle in the haystack; it’s trying to find the haystack in the first place.” An Australian official used these words to describe what it was like to fine Malaysia 370, the plane whose mysterious disappearance has shaken the world for the past three weeks. Sometimes it’s just hard to see what’s there; the object is elusive. We squint. We use all kinds of technology, but we barely make the image out.
Sometimes, however, it’s pretty easy to see what’s in front of us, but we just don’t recognize it. Millions of eyes watch television without any awareness of how implicit values in television come to take our own value systems. Or couples get into patterns of arguing about the same things but don’t see a way to change this. They keep seeing and saying the same things.
Our Gospel, however, points out one more difficulty in seeing. That we become responsible for what we have come to see, for what we have come to know. We are witnesses to it. Contrast, for example, the attitude of the parents of the man born blind with those of the man himself. When the authorities approach the parents, they kick the football away: “Ask him, why bother us?” They could not even affirm the life-changing event that came to their son. But when the authorities come to the son, he dishes it right back to them – “Do you want to become his disciples, too?” – because he is more than willing to bear witness to what has happened in his life. “What I know is this, I was blind, but now I see.”
This might make a lot of us uncomfortable because so often we are like the parents. Our faith is a cultural thing. We don’t want to take risks because of it, and we certainly don’t want to pay the price. I believe as long as it doesn’t cost me too much. The blind man might be evicted from the synagogue, but the parents don’t want that to happen to them. So the Gospel today is asking us if we are willing to accept our faith so deeply that we becomes witnesses for it, that we accept its consequences in our lives, that we live by what we see.
Because every time a Scripture is read, every time a sacrament is celebrated, every time we approach the altar, we are seeing, hearing and accepting a reality. God is touching us as much as Jesus touched that blind man. What, after all, was the particular force of giving sight to a man born blind? It was this – that Jesus made happen something that was not there before. Something new came into a life.
And are not new things coming into our lives all the time? The fact of our faith, the way we have come to know love, the children that have been born, the way our vision of life is refreshed again and again, the hope that will not die in our hearts? Every day we are stepping into a world of wondrous new reality, of marvelous new life. Every day our eyes are being opened.
So like our blind friend, the invitation is clear: live in accord with the wonder that God shows us all the time, to act out of the grace that comes to us every single day. To let the vision of faith become our primary viewpoint in life. To bear witness to the life and love that has come to us.
Who knows? Maybe living this way will not only transform our lives, but also transform the lives of others who are waiting for someone to come and open their eyes.