This Sunday, Jesus Escaped Death Long Enough To Help Us See

Meeting God, really meeting him, makes life more beautiful, more noble, more exciting, and more fulfilling — but first it makes it harder. The two go together.

Here are six takeaways for the Fourth Sunday of Lent, Year A, drawn from Sunday Readings columns at this site and the Extraordinary Story podcast.

First: The cure of the man born blind comes at a rough time in Jesus’s life.

It is fascinating to consider the context of the Gospel reading about the Man Born Blind that we hear this Sunday. It begins simply, “As Jesus passed by he saw a man blind from birth.” But consider what happened just two verses earlier in the Gospel of John.

Jesus told Pharisees he was God, saying “‘Before Abraham was, I am.’” “So they picked up stones to throw at him; but Jesus hid himself and went out of the Temple area.” That means that in Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus is on the run from powerful men who want him dead when he comes across a powerless man. He says the man has been blind from birth “so that the works of God might be made manifest in him.”

Jesus, fleeing for his life, says, urgently, “We must work the works of him who sent me, while it is day; night comes, when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” It is only then that “he spat on the ground and made mud of the spittle and anointed the man’s eyes with the mud, saying to him, ‘Go wash in the pool of Siloam.’”

The man went and washed and then could see. This is a fascinating melding of two images: God forming man out of clay in Genesis, and baptism. Put the two together and you get a vision of what baptism, the ultimate “Work of light,” does: It cleanses us, refashions us, and allows us to see.

All told, this Gospel reading is a summing up of salvation history. Jesus is God, and he is coming to those whom he created, insisting on saving us even as we try to kill him.

Second: That means those who are brought into the life of Christ experience what he did.

The cure of the man born blind wasn’t the end of his hard times, but the beginning. Look at all that happens after he is cured:

• Immediately, his neighbors reject him, openly speculate about him and pronounce him a suspicious person who needs to be reported to the Pharisees.
• Next, the Pharisees interrogate him and publicly speculate that he is a sinner. He is now ostracized by his neighbors and his faith leaders.
• But then it gets even worse. His parents are brought in: Given the choice between standing by their son or saving face in front of the Pharisees, they reject their son.

So the first consequences of the man’s encounter with Christ are terrible: He is ostracized by his neighbors, his priests and his own family. He met God, and that was when his biggest troubles started.

But what else happens? The blind man’s new gift of physical sight is accompanied by an increased spiritual insight, and at each stage in the story, he sees something new.

• He doesn’t speak vaguely about his cure to his neighbors. He gives Jesus Christ full credit.
• When the Pharisees object to his words about Jesus, he doesn’t backtrack from them either.
• Then, after his parents reject him, he becomes his own man even more.

He now directly takes on the Pharisees’ strained reasoning and calls it “amazing” that they “do not know where [Jesus] is from,” telling them, “If this man were not from God, he would not be able to do anything.”

His new sight has allowed him to see what those close to him cannot: Jesus Christ is special, and, with him, the man born blind is changed, utterly. He may have been rejected and underappreciated, but he gained something indescribably great: He met his Creator and saw the purpose of his life.

Third: This happens for each of us.

The man born blind becomes what every one of us becomes, according to St. Paul in our Second Reading. “You were once in darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of the light, for light produces every kind of goodness and righteousness and truth,” he says.

One day, for each of us, Jesus came into our lives, and got many of us, that is when our biggest troubles started. But that was also the day those troubles were dwarfed by an infinite gift: the blessing of knowing God and knowing ourselves.

Our baptism was the beginning of it; but our later acceptance of our baptism in the confessional may have been the occasion that is more like the man born blind. What happened to us then? As the Second Reading from the Letter to the Ephesians, says: “You were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light.”

Like the blind man, we thought of ourselves as helpless in a world that is overpowering us. Then, we encountered Christ, and saw the world afresh. But we don’t become someone new; we become who we were meant to be all along.

In a recent Wednesday audience, Pope Leo XIV described how our encounter with Christ doesn’t just reveal who he is — it reveals who we are. “In Christ, God has communicated himself to us and, at the same time, he has manifested to us our true identity,” he said. “We discover ourselves known by him as sons in the Son, called to the same destiny of full life.”

Fourth: What the First Reading says about the choice of David to be king applies to us, also.

“Not as man sees does God see, because man sees the appearance, but the Lord looks into the heart,” says the Book of Samuel.

In that reading, Jesse lines up the sons he most considered impressive, but the prophet Samuel, at God’s command, doesn’t judge by “appearance or by lofty stature.” Like Michelangelo looking at the block of marble in the quarry, Samuel looks at the youngest son, a shepherd boy, and sees King David.

This Sunday at Mass, God looks at each of us and sees not the mess our life may seem like to us, but the royal son or daughter he made us to be.

We were each chosen to be baptized for some mysterious reason, just like the man born blind. And now by following his example we can live a whole new life. There is an ancient custom of visiting your baptismal font on the Fourth Sunday of Lent. If you can, go to your baptismal font today and thank God. Pray today’s Psalm there. It describes what the life of a baptized person looks like: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. … Even though I walk in the dark valley, I fear no evil, for you are at my side with your rod and your staff that give me courage.”

And then remember that, like the pool of Siloam, your baptismal font is called “Sent.” Your baptism turns you into a light, and then sends you back into our nighttime world, to change it.

Fifth: This Sunday, we meet Jesus at Mass just as the man born blind did.

He carried the terrible cross of blindness; but we come to Jesus helpless as well and need to have the same disposition he had. He met Jesus as the Savior fled the people who wanted to kill him. At the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, we meet Jesus when he finally allowed himself to be caught.

Jesus heard the blind man was in trouble and sought him out. He did the same with us. The blind man answered with humility and obedience. Jesus wants the same from us. The Gospel says:

“Do you believe in the Son of Man?” Jesus asked. “And who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?” the man answered. “You have seen him, and it is he who speaks to you,” Jesus says. “Lord, I believe,” said the man, and he worshiped him.

This is the dialogue Jesus has with us in the Eucharist, when he says, “Here I am. Believe.”

Lord, we approach you in a world that is still full of enemies who want to end your life. We know that no one deserves our ultimate allegiance except you. Help us to recognize you in communion and then follow your command as you send us out into the world to change it.

By Tom Hoopes