Homily for the Sunday of the Blind Man in the Orthodox Church

 

 Acts 16:16-34; John 9:1-38

  Christ is Risen!

 On this last Sunday of Pascha, we celebrate that the Risen Lord has brought us from the spiritual darkness of sin and death into the brilliant light of His heavenly Kingdom.  Even as Christ restored sight to the man born blind in today’s gospel reading, He illumines our darkened souls.  That is how the Lord enables us to know and experience Him as “partakers of the divine nature” by grace. 

Before the God-Man’s healing of our corrupt humanity, grave spiritual blindness was the common lot of the children of the first Adam, who were enslaved to the fear of death as the wages of sin. When the Lord spat on the ground to make clay for the man’s eyes in today’s gospel reading, He showed that His healing is an extension of His incarnation in which He has entered fully into our humanity as those made from the dust of the earth.  The blind man regained his sight after washing in the pool of Siloam, which is an image of baptism, which illumines us and restores our spiritual sight.  The man did not really know Who the Lord was when he first encountered Him, thinking that He was merely a prophet.  After the restoration of his sight, the Savior revealed Himself as the Son of God; then the eyes of the man’s soul were illumined to know Christ in His divine glory. “He said, ‘Lord, I believe.’ And he worshiped Him.”

In today’s reading from Acts, there is another man who knew darkness all too well.  The Roman jailer was ready to kill himself when an earthquake opened the doors of the prison and broke the chains of the prisoners.  Knowing that he would be executed for failing to keep the prison secure, he was about to take his own life with his sword.  He was in the pit of despair when St. Paul assured him that the prisoners had not escaped.  Then “the jailer called for lights and rushed in, and trembling with fear he fell down before Paul and Silas, and brought them out and said, ‘Men, what must I do to be saved?’’’ Through this extraordinary experience, the man became aware of his spiritual blindness.  The apostles responded, “‘Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.’”  Then the jailer was baptized along with his whole family. After washing the apostles’ wounds, the man took them to his home and served them food.  He “rejoiced with all his household that he had believed in God.”  Like the blind man in the gospel reading, the jailer gained the vision to know Christ in His divine glory.

To say that these men were shocked and disoriented would be an understatement. The good news that “Christ is Risen!” is even more extraordinary than a man blind from birth gaining his sight or a jailer finding that his prisoners are secure after an earthquake. The Savior’s resurrection is not simply a religious teaching or point of history.  The blind man had thought that Christ was a prophet who had worked a great miracle of healing.  The jailer was a pagan Roman and there is no telling what he knew about the Lord before asking Paul and Silas what he had to do in order to be saved.  The Lord changed their lives radically and in ways that they could neither predict nor control. He will do the same for us when the eyes of our souls become radiant with the brilliant light of His resurrection.      

When Christ was asked whose sin was responsible for the man being born blind, He answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be made manifest in him.”   Becoming the self-appointed judges of others, even those who commit the most heinous deeds, will only darken further our spiritual vision.  The Risen Lord has illumined even the tomb itself, making it an entrance into eternal life.  Our participation by grace in the joy of His resurrection is not a reward for morality, legality, or religiosity; it is no more a matter of getting what we deserve than was the healing of the blind man or the deliverance of the jailer.  We stand in need not of greater justice, but of infinite healing mercy.  If we are truly sharing in the life of Christ, the light of His mercy will shine brightly through us, providing a sign of hope in our darkened world.        

  In order to gain the spiritual clarity to do that, we must mindfully turn away from all that would keep us in the dark and enslaved to sin and the fear of death.  Because the eyes of our souls are not yet fully transparent to the light of the Lord, our spiritual vision is distorted.  We do not yet see or know God, our neighbors, or ourselves clearly, but in ways that are deeply corrupted by our passions.  That is why we must struggle to become fully receptive to the brilliant divine energies of our Lord through the healing found in the sacramental and ascetical life of the Church.   As those who were born spiritually blind and have been illumined through the washing of baptism and the anointing of chrismation, we must remain vigilant against the persistent temptation to fall back into the comfortable ways of corruption.  There is so much within us that would prefer to hide in the darkness rather than to be illumined in God.   That is why we must pray daily, fast and confess regularly, serve our neighbors (especially those we find it hard to love) at every opportunity, and refuse to worship any of the false gods of this world (especially those we find most appealing).

Note that the blind man did not respond to Christ’s instructions with questions and reservations driven by anxiety about the future course of his life.  He simply obeyed, washed, saw, and then moved forward to encounter challenges he could never have anticipated.  The jailer, terrified to the point of taking his own life, simply asked how to be saved once he realized that the captives had not escaped.  Their examples remind us not to allow anything to distract us from attending to our one essential calling of opening the eyes of our souls to the brilliant light of Christ.  The question of the jailer, “Men, what must I do to be saved?” is not a one-time question with an easy answer, but concerns the eternal journey of becoming radiant with the divine energies of our Lord as we become more like Him in holiness. The Savior has conquered death in order to illumine every dimension of our darkened souls with the light of heavenly glory.  We must offer every aspect of our existence to Him for healing and transformation, no matter how great the personal struggles we may face in doing so. 

As we conclude this season of Pascha, we must mindfully resist the constant temptation to live as those obsessed with the fear of death.  Such fear is at the root of the conventional wisdom that encourages us to hate and condemn those we perceive as threats to our vain hopes for gaining whatever we prize most in the world; doing so, of course, inevitably leads to losing our souls.  Above all, we must never distort the way of Christ into an idolatrous cult that worships at the altar of any earthly kingdom, faction, or agenda—regardless of what religious, moral, or cultural label it bears.  There is no surer path to darkening our souls than embracing the spiritual blindness of serving the false gods of this world, even as we think we are being righteous.  The Savior’s kingdom remains not of this world.  His Cross alone is “a weapon of peace and a trophy invincible.”   

Our Lord, Who died as the innocent victim of violence at the hands of corrupt religious and political leaders, calls us to become living witnesses of His victory over even Hades and the tomb in the world as we know it.  Nothing can keep us from doing so as we become radiant with holy glory other than our own choice to persist in blindness.  As we prepare to bid farewell to the season of Pascha this year, let us persist in the struggle to enter as fully as possible into the new day of the Savior’s resurrection as we turn away from darkness in all its forms and embrace the Light of the world from the depths of our hearts. Let us live accordingly in a world that so desperately needs the healing that shines from the empty tomb, for Christ is Risen!