The Delight of Acknowledging Our Sin

4th SUNDAY OF LENT

Josh5, 9-12 / 2Cor 5, 17-21 / John 9, 1-41

One of the blessings of Lent is learning to acknowledge our sin.  It’s a real grace – a gift.  The gospel we have just heard wants to guide us toward that grace.  The story of the man born blind wants to guide us into the light of Christ – and there, in the light of Christ, it wants to expose our sin.  It wants to expose us to the lies that blind and bind us.

A little background helps to understand what is really going on in this story.  Jesus heals the blind man on the Sabbath.  The Pharisees object this violates the law of Moses.  God rested on the Sabbath after completing the work of creation.  So, the reasoning goes, not to observe Sabbath rest is a refusal to imitate God and therefore is a sin.

But in the gospel of John Jesus explicitly denies that God’s work of creation has been completed.  He denies that God rests on the Sabbath.  For example, when Jesus cures an invalid on the Sabbath – and the authorities object – he counters:  “My Father is working up until the present, and I also work.”[Jn 5, 17]  God’s work of completing creation is ongoing – and it’s being done through Jesus.

In today’s story Jesus completes what is incomplete by curing the blind man.  Jesus completes God’s work of creation by making the blind man into a full human being.

In the gospel the man born blind represents each of us.  Each of us is incomplete.  Obviously we have physical limits.  Even more obviously we have personal, moral and spiritual limits.  Our humanity screams for completion.  The story’s point – the gospel’s point – is that our many limitations do not make up our sin.  Jesus will work with us – he will work within us and among us – to bring to fullness and completion what is incomplete and limited.  For Jesus our incompleteness is completely human – only to be expected.  He knows God will deal compassionately with it.

Sin for Jesus shows itself in how the Pharisees deal with human incompleteness – in how they deal with our obvious moral and spiritual failures.  In the story the Pharisees judge, censure and expel the man born blind.  And that – that for Jesus – is the presence of radical evil in our lives: when we exclude and expel others – others incomplete like ourselves - even as God is working within them to bring them to fuller life.

We said learning to acknowledge our sin is a grace.  For Jesus we receive that grace when we come to recognize the times we choose to exclude others.  In excluding people we are resisting God’s creative work in them.  We sin when we resist God’s life-giving, life-expanding energy at work in people by scorning those very same people – all in the name of some petty self-righteousness.  And we sin when we do the same thing to ourselves.  Self-scorn resists the power of God bringing us new life and energy.

This gospel would bring us to the grace and the freedom of admitting we are all blatantly incomplete human beings.  Now like the Pharisees we may want to fume against that incompleteness in ourselves and in others.  But it is precisely there – where we experience our own undeniable failure and weakness – that’s where God’s ongoing presence and work in us are to be found.  We run from our incompleteness only at the risk of running from where we can find God’s presence in our lives.  Honest self-knowledge brings us into God’s real presence – into God’s here and now presence to us.  For Jesus our shames and our failures become holy ground – our burning bushes where God announces to us “I am.”  “I am with you.”

But Jesus wants even more for us.  He wants the full force of this gospel to explode in our minds and hearts.  He wants us to come to the discovery that God is not a Pharisee.  God does not judge – or censure – or exclude.  God has nothing at all to do with our self-righteous mechanisms for scorning and expelling what is incomplete in others or in ourselves.

On this Laetare Sunday we joyfully call our church Catholic.  Katholikos in Greek means universal, all-embracing.  Our Catholic Church includes and embraces every sort of human incompleteness.  But how could it be otherwise in a church that calls itself the church of Jesus Christ.

It is here – here among our clearly incomplete selves – here within our obviously imperfect selves – here in our all too human church - that we will have the joy of coming to know the God who is not a Pharisee – the un-self-righteous God of Jesus Christ – the God who wants mercy, not sacrifice.  God wants mercy of us – not just our Sunday mornings.

Fr. Pat Earl, SJ