Reflection for the Fourth Sunday of Lent

Among the many levels of meaning and the rich imagery throughout St. John’s Gospel, today there is a contrast between physical sight and spiritual sight—a blind man who comes to see and the Pharisees who remain blind. Faith in Christ is a great gift—a supernatural virtue infused in us by God. We must remember that it is a gift—as the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation says, explains that “the grace of God and the interior help of the Holy Spirit must precede and assist, moving the heart and turning it to God, opening the eyes of the mind and giving “joy and ease to everyone in assenting to the truth and believing it.” As such a great gift, we must regard it as something precious and to be safeguarded, and to be taken very seriously in our lives.

The man born blind experiences a great gift of physical sight, but he still does not truly know Jesus in his heart. The ensuing dialogue reveals his progression of faith as he explains to his neighbors that he was healed by “the man called Jesus.” Not long after, in talking to the Pharisees, the healed man says he believes Jesus “is a prophet.” Finally, in conversation with Jesus, he makes an act of faith, giving his assent that Jesus is “the Son of Man.” While the physical healing occurs at the beginning of the Gospel passage, spiritual healing comes to fruition at the end. He sees Jesus and he knows Him.

This man’s experience is not terribly different than our own path of faith. We are dramatically changed through an encounter with Jesus Christ. It takes time to discover who Jesus is and how we can entrust ourselves more completely to Him. It, too, is a process of coming to faith and being receptive to the grace that God offers us so that we can give our lives over and follow Him.

The great failure of every age is to refuse to listen to God. The Pharisees rejected Jesus as having divine origin, and they also rejected the testimony of the man born blind. Many people in today’s world close themselves off to God’s saving action by listening to every other voice but God’s voice. We cannot make ourselves deaf or blind to how God speaks to us in prayer, through the Sacred Scriptures, or our daily life experience and world events. Only when we dedicate sufficient time for prayer and reflection do we learn God’s language and the ways that the Lord speaks to us.

We want to develop hearts that are eager to listen to God—always open and willing to receive instruction, desiring to grow and change. Let’s pray for the gift of faith—that we can entrust ourselves to God even amid difficult and overwhelming circumstances.

Reflection: How are you being invited today to trust more completely in God?

by Fr. Paul Sheller, OSB