A man had just sat
down at his desk to begin the working day when one of his associates came
storming into his office. "You
won't believe this," he said. "I was just almost killed outside. I
had just walked out of the deli where I buy my egg sandwich every morning. Suddenly a police car came down the street
with its lights flashing and sirens blaring. The police were chasing another
car. The other car stopped right in front of me. The guys jumped out and began shooting at the
police. I hit the ground and could hear
bullets buzzing over my head. I'm
telling you, I'm lucky to be alive." After a moment of silence the first
man said: "You eat an egg sandwich every morning?"[1].
The point of the
story, and believe it or not there is one, is that we can become so involved in
our own narrow interests that we miss the obvious. This Sunday’s Gospel
illustrates the destructiveness of such narrowness. Jesus had just healed a
blind man, "to let God's work shine forth." But by doing this he
threatened the comfortable ordered life of the Jewish leaders. How could God
possibly be working through someone other than them? If people were to claim
God's work outside of their structure, then their authority was being
threatened. They missed the fact that
God was indeed working. They were more concerned with the minor part. He was
working, but not through them. They focused on the egg sandwich instead of the
whole picture of what was taking place. So, these leaders sought some way to
discredit what he had done. They condemned Jesus for working on the
Sabbath. Even though it was a sign of
the presence of the Messiah that sight would be given to the blind, and even
though the man's parents testified that he was indeed born blind, they refused
to see the presence of God among them. By the end of the reading it is clear
that they are blind.
The Gospel of
John, presents this intricate little drama in its ninth chapter as a call for
us all to allow the Lord to open our eyes. The Temple leaders and Pharisees
were too concerned with themselves to do this. They were not going to have some
commoner from Nazareth upset their lifestyle. We are all tempted to do the same
thing ourselves. We may be pretty settled in our family when we suddenly
realize that our spouse or one of the children has a big problem. Our spouse,
or one of our older children, college age, is drinking way too much for it not
to be a problem. But it is so easy to
close our eyes to this--maybe it will go away. We act as though it is asking
too much for us to give of ourselves to solve the problem. We refused to see
the Lord calling out to us in others. We don't see the whole picture. We are blind to his presence.
God's reality
and our human perception of things do not necessarily match. Neither Jesse nor Samuel the prophet thought
that the future king of Israel would be the most insignificant of Jesse's sons.
No one expected the Messiah to be a commoner from Nazareth. When we focus on
our perceptions of what God should be like or how he should act, we miss his
presence in our lives. Even in times of sickness, we expect God to heal us,
when actually our sickness might be the very way that we draw closer to him. We
expect God to solve our problems when actually these problems help us to keep a
perspective on what really is important in life. By demanding how God should
act, as the Pharisees did, we become blind to his presence among us. Let us
pray together this morning for the grace to take steps from darkness into light
■
[1] 4th Sunday of Lent A, March 30,
2014. Readings: 1 Samuel 16:1b, 6-7, 10-13a; 23:1-3a, 3b-4, 5, 6; Ephesians
5:8-14; John 9:1-41.
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