4th Sunday Lent A - Homily 3

Homily 3 – 2011 

In a couple of weeks we shall remember Good Friday when the religious leaders of Judea killed Jesus. What challenges me is that they were the religious leaders.  Some of the chief priests may not have been all that religious, perhaps.  Power can corrupt, after all.  But most of the leading Pharisees, though they get a bad press in the Gospel narratives, were conscientiously religious men.  How could they do it? How could good men do it? How could they be so blind?

One answer is to deny that they were good men.  A problem with that, however, is that similar instances of blindness seem to happen quite regularly, even in our enlightened world.  For example, how could many good bishops consistently try to keep under wraps the sexual abuse of minors by some of their priests? What happened to their spontaneous compassion for the victims? I have been up in Mildura this past week.  I read in the local paper that a teenager there had just committed suicide.  Friends I was with told me that he had been bullied at school because he was gay.

Blindness affects us all on some issues at some times.  Today’s Gospel put such blindness down to sin – not the conscious breaking of some commandment, but the unrecognised power working in people that leads them to do destructive things and even to feel virtuous as they do it.  

It is interesting to note some of the dynamics of this sin-driven blindness.  At the start of today’s Gospel story, even good disciples accepted unquestioningly that the man born blind was a sinner.  They had no evidence at all, but everyone knew he must have been: Who sinned – this man or his parents?

For the Pharisees, there was no question.  Without any evidence, they simply labelled the former blind man a sinner, and felt justified to discount his logic, and then to drive him out.  If they no longer saw him, he would no longer challenge them.  They did something similar with Jesus.  Jesus had not observed the Sabbath.  For them, that was evidence, incontrovertible evidence, that Jesus, also, had sinned.  That Jesus had enabled a man blind from birth to see was irrelevant – inconvenient, but ultimately irrelevant.

Labelling people is a great way to discount unwelcome evidence. as is pushing awkward people to the edges or out of sight.  Look at the way our society labels inconvenient people.  People escaping often unbelievable trauma are called illegals, or queue jumpers.  Case finished! We avoid the embarrassing facts of their humanity, of their former suffering, of their sometimes indomitable courage to risk death in order to seek a better life.  Their arrival might inconvenience us.  Then, again, it might not.

Our language has a whole raft of words to label people who are born with a homosexual orientation.  We have labels for most people whom we disagree with.

In the Church, we have conservatives or progressives.  Classifying them that way, we are then free to ridicule them, attack them, or vilify them.  I am guilty of that myself.  I do not spontaneously relate to the humanity of those I judge to be destroying the Church.  I not only struggle to love them first, but feel justified in relating to them in the negative way I do – despite the fact that Jesus said that the non-negotiable requirement of discipleship is not necessarily to agree with everyone, but is certainly to love them – to love even your enemies, and to pray for those who persecute you.  What destroys the Church? Disagreements? Or the violation of the primary commandment to love?

As Jesus said to his eventual murderers at the conclusion of today’s Gospel passage: Since you say, “We see”, your guilt remains.  Under the insidious grip of the power of sin and blind to its very existence, without second thoughts, they labelled, rejected, cast out and eventually killed the one who was God incarnate – convinced all the while that they were doing the right thing.  Such is the frightening power of sin.