2 Cor. 4:6-15;
John 9:1-38
Christ is Risen! Indeed, He 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 He 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 enters 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.”
The good news of
Christ’s resurrection is even more extraordinary than the unprecedented restoration
of sight to the man blind from birth, and it is not simply a religious teaching
or a point of history. Through His
victory over the corrupting powers of sin and death, He opens the eyes of our
souls, enabling us to know, experience, and be united with Him from the depths
of our hearts by grace. In order truly
to confess His resurrection, we must become participants in the eternal life
that He has brought to the world. We must become radiant with the light that
shines from the empty tomb and illumines even the darkest corners of our lives.
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.” The Savior
rejected the common assumption that such a terrible malady must be a punishment
for a particular sin. We simply do not know
why many things happen in this life, but we may always respond to even the
worst circumstances in ways that open our hearts more fully to the light of
Christ. 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, as opposed to others,
deserve than was the healing of the blind man.
We stand in need not of justice, but of the infinite healing mercy that enables
us to behold the glory of God. If our spiritual
blindness is being healed, then we will become radiant with the light of His
mercy, providing a sign of hope to our neighbors in our darkened world.
To gain
the spiritual clarity to do that, we must shut our eyes to all that would keep
us stumbling in the darkness of sin and enslaved to the fear of death. Because the eyes of our souls are not yet
fully transparent to the light of the Lord, none of us has perfect spiritual vision. We do not yet see or know God, our neighbors,
or ourselves clearly, but in ways that are deeply distorted 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. The more that we
are fully present to the Lord from the depths of our hearts, the more we will know
Him and ourselves. 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 the false gods of this world (especially
those we find most appealing). That is
also why we must guard our eyes from entertainment, media, and anything else
that would inflame our passions and keep us enslaved to the darkness of
sin.
The blind man
did not respond to Christ’s instructions with questions and reservations driven
by fear or 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. His example reminds us to cultivate the
spiritual simplicity of obedience. If we
want healing, we must not 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. Doing so is not simply a one-time
experience but requires persisting in the eternal journey of becoming radiant
with the divine energies of our Lord as we become more like Him in holiness. None
of us can ever say that we have completed this infinite calling. The Savior has conquered even death itself to
illumine every dimension of our darkened souls with the light of heavenly
glory. The more receptive we are to His
light, the more we will be aware of the darkness that remains with us. That is not a moment to be discouraged or
paralyzed by fear but instead simply to obey Christ in humility as best we can,
as did the man born blind.
As we conclude
this season of Pascha, we must mindfully resist the temptation to allow the
blindness of a world still enslaved to the fear of death to obscure our spiritual
vision. Those who criticized Christ for daring
to heal on the Sabbath were so concerned with using religion to serve their desires
for position and power that they refused to open their eyes to the Light of the
world. We must be on guard against the subtle temptation to identify ourselves
with the Savior while welcoming darkness into our souls every bit as much as
they did. We may still mouth words about
His resurrection and call ourselves Christians as we wander further into the
dark night of entrusting ourselves to the false gods of this world. If we are making money, possessions, physical
appearance, food, drink, sex, the approval of others, or anything else to which
we have a passionate attachment the driving purpose of our lives, then we are
living as though Christ were still in the grave. If we condemn any set of our neighbors and
hope fundamentally in some arrangement of earthly success that promises to raise
us up above those we love to hate, then we are shutting the eyes of our souls
to the brilliant light of the Lord, regardless of how religious or moral we may
claim to be.
Our Lord died as
the innocent victim of violence at the hands of corrupt religious and political
leaders, and He calls us to become living witnesses of His victory over even
Hades and the tomb in the world as we know it with all its depravity and disappointment.
Nothing can keep us from doing so other than
our own stubborn choice to persist in spiritual 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 redirect the energy and attention that we so commonly invest
in gratifying our passions to repudiating the darkness as we open the eyes of
our souls as fully as possible to the brilliant light of Christ. Let us become radiant with the Light Who shines
brightly from the empty tomb, always keeping the joy of Pascha in our hearts. For
that is what it means to live each day as those who are being illumined by the
One Whose rose in glory for our salvation, for Christ is Risen!
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