“Not as man sees does God see ” With this statement from the First Book of Samuel, the trajectory is set for the encounter between Light and Darkness. What comes is the unexpected, and for many unwelcome, identifications of those who claim to see but don’t, and those who own their darkness before God and are given or are restored to sight!
In John’s Gospel today we are called to hear and “see” according to the will and the power of God. The man born blind has for his entire lifetime been exiled to the margins of the community, where he would beg for the meager means of existence, and be subject to the sometimes sympathetic but sometimes malicious chatter of those around him. Jesus truly “saw” this man, and just as he would embrace his own cross as the instrument of healing and forgiveness for the world, he embraced this man’s blindness as a moment in which the glory of God should be revealed and celebrated.
After he has been given sight, those who have known him for his lifetime can’t even agree that it is the same man, but to their question if it is he or not, he replies simply, “I am.” From the time of Moses to the person of Jesus, and in this moment captured for us by John, those two simple words declare the very being, the presence, and the work of God.
What are the shadows that move us to the margins of God’s presence and work? What are the lights that we have adopted and adapted for ourselves that create for us a reality as workable but as deceiving as that of the Pharisees in today’s Gospel? Jesus doesn’t judge them so much for the fact that they are spiritually blind as for the fact that they will remain obstinate in their blindness, and be content to bring down others in their wake! The humility, the sincerity, and the gratitude in the man born blind make us want to echo him “I am.”