FOTA X: First session, talk i.

So obviously I made it to FOTA X.  For FOTA VIII I was stuck in the very room where I write this, before this very computer but with my foot in a cast while for FOTA IX I was up in Ards, Co. Donegal ministering to the faithful (Confessions and Mass, etc).

 This year it seems well attended with a mix of clergy and laity, Irish, German, French, American and British.  The first talk this morning was not the scheduled one by Fr joseph Briody but instead we had Mr Markus Bünning, from Munster Germany.  He spoke to us on Panis animarum - The Eucharist in St. Bernard of Clairvaux.  I must point out that what I write here is my poor impression based on my own notes and not a verbatim record.

Mr Bünning introduced us to this giant of the Church, a true Father of the Church, for he was a holy, orthodox and loyal witness to Tradition.  Bernard's spirituality emerged from the talk as deeply Christocentric but a Christ encountered intimately in the Liturgy of the Church as it has been handed down from the earliest days.   Bernard was not a monk cut off from the sources of the Faith in a remote monastery but a man who used Latin as if it were his mother-tongue.  Indeed Bernard's Latin is that of antiquity not the Middle Ages.  He knew the Fathers, especially the Latins, but he knew Christ more, his 'Iesus meus'.  He was not a scholar in the mold of Aquinas but a pastor in the line of Ambrose and Augustine.  Bernard was a man who radiated holiness and challenged his age and those subsequent to really encounter Christ.  Like Francis of Assisi to see him was to see a prayer and feel the call of God.

It was Bernard's profound love for Christ that fueled his love for the Liturgy and his fear of any innovations.  In the Liturgy Heaven and Earth mingle. He believed that to change the Earthly liturgy was to risk adding to the heavenly praise and so to weaken it.   Therefore it was safer to stay with Tradition.  Prudence was needed when dealing with the Liturgy especially when it came to necessary changes such as the addition of feasts for new saints.

Bernard believed in the virtue-promoting power of the Liturgy, especially the Eucharist.  The Eucharist was the  refugarium (place of rest) of souls and our link between Heaven and Earth.  It was the panis animarum our food for the growth of our souls.  This is why in his sermon for the Feast of All Saints he preached on the Eucharist.  The Eucharist is primarily food for the soul given by the Father through the priest to His people.  We are beggars before the door of the rich King.  We must be properly disposed to receive this richest of food.

Note that Bernard's understanding of the Liturgy is not priest-centered.   The Father gives through the priest's ministry.  Bernards ultimate concern is the relationship between the table of the Word and the table of the Eucharist.  He believes deeply in the 'sin-inhibiting' power of the Sacrament, that if we remain free of sin it is because of the grace we have received in the Eucharist.  But proper disposition is necessary.  Bernard does not believe in cheap grace.   The Eucharist requires all our attention, intention and preparation.  Since in every Mass the Sacrifice of Christ is offered, that Sacrifice whihc restored peace between God and man, we must have a peacefull  attitude toward, God, our neighbour and our own self.

In his great and influential work on the Song of Songs Bernard explores his nuptial mysticism.  He sees in Sg 2 "sweet to my palate" a reference to the Eucharist.  In the overshadowing of Mary he sees the flesh of Christ as that which shadows her and so combines Mariology and the Sacraments.  In the Mass, the Wedding Feast of Christ and His Church, Christ renews His love for His Bride.  This love drove Bernard to be a peacemaker.

TENTH FOTA LITURGICAL CONFERENCE

 I missed last year's conference because I was stuck in Donegal and the year before I was only down the street but stuck in my room with a shattered ankle.  So perhaps this year I will be able to make it even though I am in Carlow at the moment.  If you can it is worth attending as it's always interesting and stimulating.

THOMAS THE BELIEVER: a homily for the Second Sunday of Easter, Year A, (John 20:19–31)

I am in Carlow at the moment and have no opportunity for proper preaching so this is a draft homily.

What it must have been like to be alive at that time, to be a believer just as the Church is beginning!  What drama there must have been as they struggled to deal with not only the horrific death of Christ but with the shock of His resurrection!  Remember orthodox Jews had no such expectation of a resurrection before the Last Day.  They did expect the Messiah, the Christ to herald a new Jewish Kingdom.  There world was turned upside down by the shameful death of our Lord upon the cross – that’s what the Jewish leaders intended!  Then they find the empty tomb.  Then He starts to appear to believers.  Peter sees Him, and the other apostles, then five hundred disciples.  There are many appearances.  This is just one of those.

Christ is not restricted by His humanity or the materiality of His body.  He could work miracles before but He still respected the laws of science and knocked on a door rather than walk through walls.  Now He does not even bother with that.  As Lord and Creator the Universe is His sandbox and as its Creator He can play with the laws He has decreed as a harpist plays with the strings of His harp. 

There is a playfulness in His sudden appearances.  They are in hiding afraid for their lives and He just shows up and confronts them with His reality.   They are incredulous so He gives the evidence of His identity – His wounds – proof of His suffering, His love, His obedience to the Father, of His resurrection.  He eats and drinks with them to show them that He remains truly human.

Peace is His first wish and gift to us – not just any peace but real peace, peace between us and God.  To make that peace effective He gives them, the apostles, the power to forgive sins or to retain them!  Our sins can be forgiven!  Any evil we may fall into can be wiped away if we repent and allow the Church to apply the healing salve of Christ’s grace in the Sacrament of confession.  His Sacrifice of Himself on the Cross, His offering of His eternal worship of the Father on our behalf, infinitely outweighs any and every evil we could commit.  His song to the Father corrects all our errors and makes us fit for the choirs of Heaven.  Our sins can not only be forgiven but they can be retained!  That’s not a fact that is often mentioned today! Absolution can be withheld if the penitent does not admit his guilt, or denies some article of the Faith, or for some other serious reason.  I have come across penitents who denied the sinfulness of their actions or obstinately denied Church teaching.  Any priest will do his best to bring someone around, to open even a tiny crack, to give a penitent the benefit of the doubt but there are times when one is confronted with obstinate refusal to face reality.  Let us not fall into that trap!

Thomas, the positivist, one who asserts that only those things that can be proved are worthy of belief, wants his experiential, measureable evidence.   He is much like many in the modern world that thinks it is being scientific and mature by demanding proof for everything it would rather not acknowledge.  Such people get stuck in their teenage years with a narrow understanding of science and knowledge and however highly educated they may get manage not to let that inner teenager grow up.  Growing up is hard and we have to face up to our responsibilities! 

Science can only deal with the material world, it cannot prove quite a number of things, rational beliefs that cannot be subject to scientific measurement or examination.

It cannot prove logical or mathematical truth since it presupposes them.

It cannot prove metaphysical truths such as the existence of minds other than my own, the reality of the world around me or existence of that world prior not only to my existence but to my present self-awareness.

It cannot deal with ethical judgments about right and wrong.  Science cannot tell us whether the Nazis were right or wrong in what they did to the Jews and other minorities in the concentration camps.

It cannot deal with aesthetic judgments on the beauty of anything.  Scientists can weigh and measure a painting and subject the materials to various tests but as scientists they have no more to say on its beauty than anyone else.

Lastly science cannot prove science!  Science not only assumes mathematics and logic but also many other concepts such as the constant speed of light between two points upon which so much cosmology is based.

Christ’s response to Thomas and His doubt is to present him with the tangible proof of His resurrection, His Real Presence.   Thomas still needs faith to see beyond Christ’s humanity to His Divinity and he is not found lacking.  He goes further than the other disciples and confesses Christ’s Divine personhood.  According to tradition he also went further than the others geographically and ended his days in India.

What proofs can we offer the doubters today?  What evidence can we present?  We must first know our Faith and hold to it.  We should also know how to present it in ways that are rational and reasonable.  I recommend one book: the Case for Christ which, although written by a Protestant, lays out the evidence for the reliability of the New Testament accounts of Christ.

We are also called to be the proof of the resurrection by living our faith.  No one will believe what we say if they are not convinced by what we do.  We must seek to be saints, really and genuinely holy, devoted to the will of the Lord.  The important thing is faith in Christ and His teaching and obedience to it.

TAKE A HIKE: a homily for the Third Sunday in Easter year A (Luke 24:13-35)

I am stationed for the moment in Carlow where there is no public Mass on a Sunday and so no opportunity to preach.  So the homily below has not actually been delivered and is a draft!

How often have you gone for a long walk?  How often during times of stress will someone go for a walk to clear one’s head, get away from a place of stress and conflict?   My late mother was forever threatening to leave us but she didn’t.  I would go for long walks as a teenager to clear my head.  Sometimes the only thing you can do is walk away if only for a time.

Here are two disciples walking away from the stress and danger of Jerusalem.  They are escaping, getting away, perhaps even giving up.  Jerusalem is set on seven little hills well above sea level so these two disciples are not only leaving Jerusalem they are also going downhill.  They are leaving Israel’s sacred city and walking away from all their hopes, dreams and beliefs. 

It is while they are going downhill that the Lord appears and walks besides them.  He opens up the conversation and draws out their feelings of disappointment and fear.  They had expected so much of Jesus.  They had looked forward to a free and holy Jewish Kingdom.  They felt betrayed not only by their religious leaders but also by their own friends.  Perhaps they also felt betrayed by the Lord.  They could not stomach the stories of a risen Jesus that the women told.  Remember that women were not considered reliable witnesses!  It was all too much for them so they are walking away.

It is at this point that the Lord lays into them.  Fools!  They had been with Him for so long and still understood so little.  He explains the scriptures for them to the point that their hearts burn with His Light and the recognition of the Truth.  Still when they reach Emmaus they have to insist on His staying with them.  It is not until He has taken the bread, blessed it and broken it that they recognise Him.  As soon as they do He disappears.

It is then that they rejoin the believers in Jerusalem, their fears dispelled, their faith renewed.  They walk back up the road to Jerusalem, back to the danger and fear but full of joy and hope.  Jesus is risen and the world is changed, changed utterly.  The greatest beauty of all has come into being.

Often we are battered and bruised by the world we live in, the people who surround us.  Our faith in Christ and His Church can be shaken or even snuffed out by scandals and abuses.  It can seem easier to walk away and start afresh somewhere else.  It can seem easier to throw in the towel and abandon the Lord.  We can forget the wonders that have been done for us, the blessings we have received.  It is all too true that eaten bread is soon forgotten. 

Yet the Lord never abandons us.  He walks with us and speaks to us if only we would listen.  Hearing is one thing but really listening is another.  Paying attention to what the Lord is saying takes time and effort for as Elijah discovered the Lord is often found in the gentlest of voices. 

When we give time to the Lord to listen to His voice in the Scriptures, in the Teaching of the Church and in the depths of our hearts we discover the power of His word to transform us.  He wants us to know that everything is ok.  There’s nothing that can happen that we cannot overcome with His help.  There is nothing we ought to fear except sin, that is, doing the things that separate us from Him.  To walk away from Him and His Church is to abandon all hope for our only hope is in Him and the Church He has founded.  There is no other way to Heaven but in and through Him.

The art of being a Christian lies in learning how to listen to the Lord and to recognise the sound of His voice calling us to follow in His footsteps.  It means giving time each day to prayer, to listening to His word in the Bible, to pouring out our hears before Him.  It also means giving time regularly to learning about our Faith and what it demands of us.  It means examining our conscience and bringing our sins to the Lord in the Sacrament of Confession.   Paying this attention to the Lord leads us over time to become better persons, more faithful to the Lord and to the ones we love.  It leads us to have hearts and minds ever more attentive to His voice so that we co-operate more readily with His grace and grow in holiness.  We become founts of grace for others.  We can walk with others who are in despair and bring them to peace, hope and joy in the Lord.

FOUR FACTS THAT POINT TO THE TRUTH OF THE RESURRECTION: a homily for Easter Sunday, (John 20, 1-9)

“Christos Anesti!” and “Aleithos Anesti!” are the greetings among the Greek Christians as they greet one another this morning. ‘Christ is risen!’ and ‘He is truly risen!’.   How do we greet one another?  “Happy Easter”  A bit lame, is it not?  Not exactly a proclamation of the great work of the Lord and the central belief of our Faith is it?  We have contemplated the life, sufferings and death of our Lord and now we celebrate His resurrection but for how many of us does this go much beyond a mere piece of information, something else we ‘kind of’ believe?  It is a common place to disparage the Christian faith today but that only shows the ignorance of those who do not believe.  For if one examines the evidence the solid foundations of our Faith appear. 

Let us examine the evidence.  We have John’s own account.  John tells us that he entered the tomb after Peter and while Peter could not believe that our Lord had risen from the dead he, John, saw and believed.  What did he see?  He saw that the guards were gone, the heavy stone was rolled away, the body was missing and the cloths were rolled up, left behind.

I propose to you that there are four facts that alone point to the truth of our Lord’s resurrection: His burial, the empty tomb, His post-mortem appearances and the disciples belief in His resurrection.  I don’t have the time to go into all the details but there are plenty of reliable videos and books that lay out the evidence more thoroughly than I can.  First though I must tell you about the principle of embarrassment which states that if an account includes facts embarrassing to the community if affects then it is likely to be true.  Made up stories do not have embarrassing details!

It might surprise you that I begin with the fact of our Lord’s burial.  There can be no resurrection without a burial.  How do we know He was buried?  Well even Jewish archaeologists accept, as the recent work on the Holy Sepulchre showed, that the Sepulchre in Jerusalem stood in a graveyard and is, I quote, “almost certainly the tomb of Christ.”  There are no other contenders and the Christian community in Jerusalem remembered where it was even after the Roman’s built a pagan temple on top of it.  That the Roman’s went to that trouble is itself evidence of that we have authentic tomb of our Lord.  We also have multiple independent sources attesting to Christ’s burial.  In his first letter to the Corinthians Paul quotes an early creed that is now dated to within five years of our Lord’s death.  It mentions His burial.  The embarrassing fact in all this is that the tomb was provided by Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the very Sanhedrin that had just condemned our Lord.   

Then there is the empty tomb.  Christ was buried but the body then disappeared.  The apostles, like all Jews and indeed our own selves, had a horror of touching the dead, especially someone who had bled to death.  They would not and could not have taken the body and yet no one else had it.  The embarrassing fact in the finding of the empty tomb is that the first people to discover it are women.  These women are listed as witnesses to this.  In first century Israel women were not considered reliable witnesses and some would not even accept their testimony in court.  That they are listed as witnesses is a sign that the story of the empty tomb is true.  Our Lord’s body disappeared.

Thirdly Christ appeared not just to individuals but to large groups of men and women.  The New Testament records the principle names even of the women who saw Him.  As I have just said  women were not considered reliable witnesses so why mention them?  They are mentioned because they had seen the Lord.  These appearances were not visions, for they ate and drank with Him, walked and talked with Him, and even put their hands into His wounds.  Many years later John writes in one of his letters of his amazement at the resurrection.  Paul, in listing those who had seen the risen Lord, including himself, says in passing that many of these witnesses were still alive.  Why does he mention them?  So that they could be consulted on what they had seen.

Lastly the apostles and disciples insisted from the very beginning that our Lord had risen from the dead.  It is the central point of their preaching: Christ died and is risen!  Jews at that time had no expectation of any resurrection before the Day of Judgment.  In addition their understanding of the Messiah was of one who would establish an earthly Kingdom.  The crucifixion and death of our Lord was seen as a contradiction of this.  That’s why the Jewish leaders had pushed for our Lord to be crucified!  Yet these men go out to proclaim that our Lord is the Messiah and the evidence they point to is His resurrection.  In return they were persecuted, tortured and all but one of them was martyred.  The gospel, the message of the death and resurrection of our Lord, brought them toil and suffering.  It separated them from their families and communities and sent them all over the known world and beyond.  It even cost them their lives.  It did not make them famous, nor did it make them rich or powerful.  Yet they continued to assert Christ rose from the dead.  If someone is willing to put not only his money but also his very life where his mouth is then he must be telling the truth.

So the resurrection of our Lord is well attested.  In rising from the dead He did not merely resuscitate.  He did not return to His earthly life.  Instead He no longer hid His divinity but rather He began to manifest it through His Church.  We can experience His life in us by keeping His commandments, repenting and confessing our sins, by putting the gospel into action in our lives and by receiving Him worthily in Holy Communion.  He reveals Himself to those who trust Him and do not put Him to the test.

There are other evidences that support the truth of the resurrection and of our Faith.  I could point to the extraordinarily rapid growth of the Church despite persecution.  I could point to the work of His grace in all the saints down the ages.  I could point to the Shroud of Turin and all the recent work on it that reinforces the belief that it is not only Christ’s shroud but also a witness to the resurrection.  I urge you to research these things for yourselves.  Arm yourselves with the truth of the Faith.  I will recommend just one book, written by an atheist who became a Christian, the Case for Christ by Lee Stroebel.  They’ve just made it into a movie.  That is a book that is well worth reading and study.

Perhaps the greatest evidence of the resurrection is us.  If we inform our faith, we will come to understand better what we believe.  As we believe more deeply, we will love our Lord more.  As we love our Lord more we will love our neighbour more and as we love our neighbour more they will come to see that Christ is not dead, He is risen.  Indeed He is truly risen!

CHRIST COMMANDS THAT WE LEAVE THE TOMB: a homily for the Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year A (John 11:1–45)

You can hear the homily here.

In my time as a secondary school chaplain I buried four students, three girls and a boy.  I felt inadequate that all I could do was offer my prayers and words of condolences to their parents.  I wondered how I could have so failed to cooperate with God’s grace that there was no miracle for each of them and no restoration of them to their families.  This is probably the experience of all who minister to the dying and bereaved.  We want to make the problem go away and end the sorrow.  In this we touch on the mysteries of suffering and death.

Suffering is part of this life because our first parents refused to live in obedience to the Lord and asserted their own will.  The human race morally fell and we have been asserting our own will ever since.  Every family row, legal battle, crime, or sin is a testimony to our addiction to our own will.   Deep down in the core of our being we believe, each and every one of us, that we are the centre of everything, the hero of our own drama, the composer and singer of our own unique song.  We are not usually aware of this but if you examine any evil act there you will find at its heart the human drive to be the centre and to assert one’s own will over all others’, even God’s.  From this arises most of the suffering in our world.

Especially death.  Death is the one absolutely certain fact of our lives.  We cannot avoid it.  It takes from us our family members, friends and neighbours and eventually takes us from those that remain.  We die because our nature is fallen but our soul is immortal.   Here lies the suffering that we all experience in life, the one we dread will come to us inevitably, and the one we learn to live with: the loss of those we love.  As human beings everything we do is done in the shadow of our own mortality.  We fear death and dying and in that fear we flee away into all sorts of what addiction counselors call ‘self medications’.  We use the things of this world to numb us against the profound reality of our own limitedness.  Pretty gloomy thoughts for a Sunday evening yet there is hope.

So many Christians do not grasp the significance of this: we were made for communion with God.  We are a work of God’s goodness and humility and it was so that He could take the lowest possible place that God created us.  But through the disobedience, the self-regard of our first parents we have lost our friendship with God.  According to Genesis God saw that “it is not good for man to be alone” but this not only means that man and woman are made for one another but that we are also made for communion with God.  The ultimate loneliness is to be without God.  That is now reestablished in Christ.  More than the friendship our first parents had we are offered communion with God in the heart of the Trinity, a communion not just on the spiritual level but even on the level of our bodies; all in Christ.

In the meantime though, made as we are for eternal life with God yet subject to suffering and death, we struggle to cope with this tension.  We long for the infinite, the everlasting, the final victory of all that is good, beautiful and true and yet we are constantly facing the reality that even as new beauties and wonders arise, so many are passing away.  If you have read the Lord of the Rings you will understand what I talking about.

So we come to this Sunday’s gospel.  The Lord loves his friends, Mary, Martha and Lazarus, yet delays to visit dying Lazarus in order that His Father be glorified.  The Lord always answers us but, whether He answers with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’, He may delay the answer for His own good reasons. Martha gives testimony to the Faith, much as Peter did elsewhere, and our Lord affirmed her.  Mary has faith but not as Martha has.  Mary sat at the feet of our Lord and He fed her with His word but Martha, labouring in the kitchen, heard the word and believed.  In Martha the word has set down roots that have flowered in her confession of faith in the Lord and the resurrection on the Last Day. 

Our Lord gave a sigh that came from the depth of His heart.  He was moved at the suffering around Him.  His Divine love comes to us through a human heart, a human heart that is to be pierced on Good Friday and from which, as John himself testifies, he saw blood and water flow; often understood as symbols of the Sacraments especially Baptism and Eucharist.  It is through the Sacraments that we are given communion with the Holy Trinity.  But He does not love us only with His heart.

Our Lord wept.  He wept but He did not mourn.  Some take the line that He wept so as to give us a model for moderation in our emotions.  We are not to keen and mourn over those who have passed away the way unbelievers do because we have the hope of the resurrection and eternal life.  The only true reason to mourn is over our sins and the sins of others.  Why did He weep over Lazarus though?  He knew that He would raise Lazarus from the dead so why did He weep?  One does not weep for someone one will see again in a few days (not if you’re a man anyway).  I would suggest that our Lord wept for the condition of man, of the human race, fallen under the power of death and sin, deprived of grace, deprived of truth, deprived of God and His light, of the possibility of the Beatific Vision, the sight of God for ever in Heaven.  He weeps for man stuck in darkness, without the friendship of God, without the Divine illumination, and without saving faith, doomed to the domination of the evil one and his minions.   He wept that at that moment He could only raise Lazarus from the dead not the whole human race from the tomb of sin and death.

Lazarus is us.  We are Lazarus.  Christ has raised us from spiritual death through His suffering, death and resurrection.  He has unbound us and brought us out of the darkness of the tomb into the daylight of grace.  By this means He has revealed that we are made for communion with God and that outside of that communion true peace cannot be ours.  By becoming man, truly human without surrendering His Divinity, He made it possible for us to become one with Him through the Sacraments in His Body the Church.  Our old self died in baptism; it is up to us to apply the death and resurrection of Christ to all aspects of our lives.   We are a new creation in Christ, members of the Body of Christ the New Adam and children of Mary, the New Eve.

            When we die we leave our bodies behind but we will get them back on the Last Day, the Day of Judgment when all mankind, everyone who has ever existed will stand before God and give an account of themselves.  On that Day we shall get our bodies back for we are made to be embodied spirits.  The just will join the Lord in Heaven and the unjust, the unrepentant will go down into Hell.  Purgatory will be no more.  

As one man who had died and came back to life said “when you are dead everything is different.  What is important to you here is not important there.”  One can be confused in this life, ignorant and subject to bad habits and pressure from others but once dead all these fall away and one sees onesefs as one, what you and I have made of our own self.  One chooses where one goes when one dies by how one lives here on Earth.  If you refuse to take Him seriously in this life how can you expect to attain to eternal life with Him in Heaven?  You can delude yourself that you will receive mercy when you die but you will only receive that mercy if you repent of your sins and confess them in this life.  We are to throw ourselves on His mercy now and not some time in the future. 

You and I are Lazarus in the tomb.  The voice of the Lord commands that we come out and join Him in the daylight.  It is up to us to repent of our sins and confess them and step out into the light of Divine grace.  It is only in the daylight of His loving mercy that we can be free to flourish and live.  The tomb has nothing to offer but darkness, dust and death.

GAINING TRUE SIGHT: a homily for the Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year A (John 9: 1-41)

           As usual you can listen to the homily here.

            Have you ever had something bad happen to you and immediately blamed God?  Sudden news of serious sickness or the death of family member, something serious and painful, enough for any of us to feel that God has let us down?  How easy it is to assume that God is a puppet master in charge of every little thing, controlling every event or to see Him as a kind of absolute monarch dishing our rewards and punishments as He sees fit.  Bad theology leads to atheism. 

It is important to understand that for the Pharisees everything came down to whether or not you kept the Law.  Not just the Law as it is recorded in the Old Testament but the body of commentary and legal interpretation build up around that body of Law over the previous centuries.  That version of Judaism held that being rich and healthy was a sign of God’s blessing and being poor and or sick was a sign of God’s curse.  If you wanted to be blessed by God you kept that Law but it governed every aspect of people’s lives, what you could eat and when and how, how you dressed, etc and only the rich could easily manage that.

For the Pharisees this meant that the man’s blindness was a sign that he and his parents were sinners and therefore unclean.  They would do nothing to ease their sufferings, in fact, they misinterpreted the Old Testament Law to forbid even doing good on a Sabbath.  It is on this last point that they accuse the Lord of being a sinner because he works a miracle on the Sabbath.  They considered the mixing of clay with spittle to make a paste a breach of the Sabbath because it constituted work!

This also explains why the Apostles ask about the cause of the man’s blindness.  The Lord corrects their misunderstanding that it was caused by sin.  In this particular case the man suffered blindness so that he could receive the greater sight.  We can go further though and say that we must distinguish between so called natural evils such as earthquakes and floods and even many diseases and disabilities and moral evils, that is, real evil, evil that is the result of deliberate human acts.  Moral evil covers every evil choice made by human beings: from adultery to theft, including gossip, lying and murder and everything in between and contained within them as well as all the suffering that results from them.  As the early Church Father St John Chrysostom says “the evils of the present life are not evils, so neither are the good things good. Sin alone is an evil, but blindness is not an evil”. (HOMILIES ON THE GOSPEL OF JOHN 56.1).  Blindness, though experienced as an evil, a deprivation, is not an evil when it occurs naturally but an absence of the good of sight. 

This is at the heart of this gospel passage.  The Pharisees are so keen to hold onto the sway they have over the people, so keen to keep their interpretation of the Law, that they will  doing anything rather than admit that Jesus’ restoration of the blind man’s sight is a sign of God’s action in the world.  They who have their physical sight and claim to be followers of the God of Israel cannot see, will not see, that the God of Israel is in their very midst.

The paradox is that the man thought cursed, the blind man, is the man who comes to faith in Christ, who has his spiritual sight restored.  It does not happen suddenly. There is a process to this healing so that it differs to other miracles our Lord worked.  In each miracle our Lord responds differently depending on the needs and the openness of the individual, just as He does today.  Then He uses His spit and some dirt to make a paste and puts it on the eyes of the blind man.  Here, as the Fathers tell us, Christ shows that He really is the Light who illumines everything, that pre-existed Creation and that He is the One who created Adam in the Garden of Eden.  He creates eyes for one born blind and enlightens His soul at the same time.  This is the sign that He is giving to the world but the world does not receive. 

This is the beginning of the man’s journey into the light of faith.  At first when interrogated he only acknowledges our Lord as a prophet but at the interrogations go on he grows further in his faith and begins to defend our Lord refusing to admit any sin in Him but rather defending the miracle than our Lord has worked.  That is what we hear when he says “This is what is so amazing, that you do not know where he is from, yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if one is devout and does his will, he listens to him. It is unheard of that anyone ever opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he would not be able to do anything”.   The poor, ignorant, former blind man ends up teaching the wealthy, learned, sighted Pharisees the obvious.  Our Lord must be righteous for God listens to Him.  He gets thrown out of the synagogue for his troubles.

It is then that our Lord finds him and asks the final question “Do you believe in the Son of Man.”  The title ‘Son of Man’ refers to the Messiah.  The man, informed that our Lord is the promised Messiah, bows down and worships.  Now there are those who will claim that our Lord never claimed to be God.  It is passages like this, and other parts of His teaching that tell the truth.  Our Lord does not stop him worshiping for it is the proper response to meeting one’s Creator, Healer and Saviour.

The question for us this Lent is am I a Pharisee who thinks he sees but does not or am I spiritually blind and in need of Christ’s healing?  Or am I a disciple who really believes?  Perhaps there is an element of each of them in us all.  Each of us must confront the Pharisee within and overcome him.  Each of us must face up to our spiritual blindness and like the blind man we must go to Christ for healing.  The only true evil is sin and to be in sin is to be truly blind, blind to our state, blind to the harm done to ourselves and to others and blind to where we are going if we do not repent.  We do not have to walk in the darkness.  We can go to Christ in prayer and above in the Sacrament of Confession and there let His light illumine and restore us.  Remember to check your conscience daily and if you find anything that is not of Christ in your life go to Confession.   Only when we choose to see by the true sight, by faith, illumined by Christ’s truth do we see correctly and clearly and will be able to follow Christ.