FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT, YEAR A

March 19, 2023

Christ Episcopal Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

I Samuel 6:1-13

Ephesians 5:8-14

John 9: 1-13, 28-38

 

Saint Thomas Aquinas remarks that of our five senses, the two most closely related to understanding are sight and hearing. In the case of hearing, the connection is obvious. If we can’t hear what people are saying, we usually don’t know what they’re trying to tell us. [Although, of course, many deaf people are able to do amazing things with lip reading and sign language.]

 

And without sight, it’s a challenge to situate ourselves in the world around us, as we probably know from our experiences in an unexpectedly darkened room of stumbling over furniture and other obstacles. Along with touch, the gift of sight is our most direct means of contact with our physical environment. Moreover, our ability to see allows us to discern the spatial relationships among the objects in our field of vision—which ones are near, which ones are far away—thus putting them into proper perspective.

 

This visual sense of perspective is analogous to perspective in the more general sense of the word: the ability to distinguish which issues, concerns, problems, tasks, and goals should take precedence in the big picture of our lives, and which should be placed in the background or at the periphery. In this way, seeing becomes a metaphor for understanding. And so we speak of it. When we try to explain something or make a point to someone, we so often conclude by asking, “Do you see?” In other words: “Do you understand?” To which the response is often: “Yes, I see. Yes, I understand.”

 

All three of our scripture readings for today invoke the image of sight as a figure of spiritual understanding. Running through them all is the contrast between blindness and sight, light and darkness, seeing and not seeing, perceiving and not perceiving, understanding and not understanding.

 

Our Old Testament reading from First Samuel emphasizes the difference between how God sees and how we see. Jesse of Bethlehem brings his oldest son out to the prophet Samuel, who’s come to identify and anoint the new king of Israel. Samuel thinks, “Surely this is the Lord’s anointed.” But God tells Samuel, “Don’t be impressed by his appearance or his height … you look on the outward appearance, but I look on the heart.”  And so Samuel remains in the dark until God enlightens him by revealing his choice of David, Jesse’s youngest son, deemed so insignificant as to be left out in the field tending the sheep.

 

A similar contrast between darkness and light dominates the Gospel reading from Saint John. The man born blind receives his sight in more ways than one. At the natural level, a miraculous healing occurs. One who was physically blind from birth receives the use of his eyes.

 

At the same time, his spiritual eyes are opened as well. The people around him naturally want to know what’s happened. And each time he tries to explain, he displays a steadily growing understanding of who Jesus is. First, when his neighbors ask who healed him, he answers simply “the man called Jesus.” But later, when the Pharisees denounce Jesus as a sinner for healing on the Sabbath, the man born blind comes to his defense: “If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” For this, they insult him and expel him from the synagogue. Finally, when he meets Jesus again, he exclaims, “Lord, I believe,” and worships him. So, he’s received his sight both physically and spiritually. He’s come out of the darkness of ignorance into the light of faith.

 

The healing itself is shot through with sacramental symbolism. Jesus makes a bit of mud, smears it on the man’s eyes, and tells him to go and wash in the pool of Siloam—clearly an allusion to baptism. Not only that, but from the earliest days Christian baptism included an anointing, and this story features an anointing of sorts, albeit with mud rather than the oil of chrism. Symbolically, the story is telling us that Holy Baptism brings us out of darkness into the light of Christ. Indeed, the early Church often referred to baptism as “enlightenment” and to the newly baptized as “enlightened ones.”

 

In today’s Epistle reading, Saint Paul clearly has in mind conversion, baptism, and the baptized life when he writes to the members of the Church at Ephesus, “once you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.” His message is that those of us who’ve been baptized must continually grow into our new identity in Christ: “Walk as children of light . . . and try to learn what is pleasing to the Lord.”

 

In the eighteenth century, the Anglican Evangelical preacher John Newton started out as the captain of a slave ship. But when he encountered Jesus, he knew that his life had to change. Eventually ordained as a priest in the Church of England, he became a leader of the movement to abolish the slave trade, and was a spiritual mentor to the Abolitionist politician William Wilberforce. In his well-beloved hymn ‘Amazing Grace’ he could repeat with total conviction the words of the man born blind: “I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.”

 

The Evangelical Anglican movement to which Newton belonged offered a salutary alternative to the eighteenth-century philosophical school ironically known as the Enlightenment. Particularly in France, but also in England and indeed in the American colonies, the thinkers and writers of this so-called Enlightenment emphasized the autonomy of human reason at the expense of divine revelation and religious faith. Its perspective was that of a rationalist reductionism that narrowed and constricted the human vision of reality.

 

We should always remember, however, that the term “enlightenment” belonged to the Church first—well before the eighteenth-century philosophes got hold of it. In the Christian tradition enlightenment signifies the opening of our eyes to the vast expanse of a new field of vision, infinitely broader and deeper than any secularist philosophy: a perspective that allows us to see ourselves and our world in light of the great cosmic drama of creation and redemption, of time and eternity, of death and resurrection to eternal life. 

 

We pray, then, that God will continue to enlighten our minds with the truth of his Word. Jesus, the Word-made-flesh, is the light of the world. Above all else, today’s readings invite and exhort us to come to his Light.