Christ Healing the Blind, El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos)
approx. 1570, Oil on canvas
"I am the light of the world" , we heard Christ say to His disciples today. And today's Gospel passage is dedicated to this very thing, to the light of the world which is Christ and which Christ gives. That is why we see Him today giving a man born blind both physical and mental light. And precisely because it is a total, psychosomatic intervention of the Lord, the passage essentially tells us about the creation and renovation of man by the resurrected Christ.
"I am the light of the world" . As in the story of Genesis, one of God's first commands is to let light shine (Gen. 1:3), so in today's passage, one of the Lord's first words is about light. And just as in the story of Genesis God takes soil and creates man (Gen. 2,7), so in today's passage, Jesus takes soil from the earth and heals the man born blind. And so, the evangelist John, with this subtle symbolism, wants to point out to us that the resurrected Christ is the continuation and completion of creation, he is the end and its deification. It is not simply a source of light like the sun, but a light above it, an uncreated light that mediates creation and becomes its life, enlightens man internally and externally and judges the world. In the event of today's miracle everyone is judged, the passage tells us. That is why we see that the evangelist John creates such an extensive narrative, in order to show in successive scenes that in the face of the light of the world, everyone is inevitably forced to take a stand.
The first people who stand in front of the healed man are the "neighbors and those who consider him the first" , those who daily saw him begging near them ( "sitting and approaching" ). They amaze. They ask questions — "is he the blind man we knew, or is he not"? He assures them, but they don't seem entirely convinced. Their attitude is that of curious people. They stand, wonder, admire somewhat, discuss and discuss again... They remind people in front of the newspapers hanging in the kiosks: they read headlines, wonder about the content of unseen articles, monologue, catch up with each other, but in the end everyone will continue on their way. Basically, they don't care. Everything that happened touched them on a superficial level. Inside they remained untouched. After their questions, their tracks are cut to the cut.
The second ones who stand against the fact are the Pharisees. They are not indifferent, but angry. At first they try to deny the miracle, but when they find that they cannot - the parents of the healed man leave no room for improvement - they turn against Christ: "this man is not with God, because he does not keep the Sabbath" . They do not deny the miracle, they deny the light of the world. The provisions of the Law are more important to them. They are the guarantors of the Law, so any transgression of it is a challenge to their authority. If the light of the world is superior to their own Law, then they themselves remain meteors. The denial of Christ is for them a one-way street. They want to maintain their position, power and prestige.
The third parties placed against the incident are the parents of the blind man from birth. In their attitude there is no indifference or denial, there is fear - "fear the Jews" . They know the miracle, their child was healed. But they do not have the courage to witness the light. What they were before they cannot let go to join something new.
These reactions of the world towards the light, the evangelist tells us like successive waves. And in the waves the healed former blind man fights: he stands as a witness to the miracle against the indifferent; he defends the light against the deniers; he does not adopt the phobic attitude of his own people, but bravely faces the possibility of his expulsion from the Synagogue ( "if "Confess Christ, you will be expelled from the synagogue" . However, he does not seem to be aware of Christ in the first place. Something is building in him progressively. His course seems to be a course of gradual advance: first, he calls the Lord "a man called Jesus"; then, he insists "that he is a Prophet" ; in the end, when Christ meets him again, he claims to believe in Him as "Son of God" .
Modern Christians, all of us, usually wonder which of the above categories we belong to, what is our situation. Are we indifferent? Maybe naysayers or phobics? Or is our life a testimony to the light of the world? It is most likely that we are something of all these. Sometimes less, sometimes more. Some this way, some other way — people's lives are not one-sided, everyone's spiritual state goes through fluctuations and changes. However, as much as such a question is important for all of us, perhaps it is worth more, that today's Gospel reading becomes an occasion to think about two things: that the light to man is given by the resurrected Christ himself and that we have no other than him choosing from standing in the mindset of blindness. Against the light that is He, we are nothing, something less than nothing, like the blind man of the circumcision who lacked even the organ of the eye. We have been called, even with our minds, to know that He is the light' and we have been called to be His messengers, just like the blind man of today's passage ( "he bathed in the pool of Siloam, which is interpreted, sent" ). But our life is still on course. Sometimes we fall into indifference, sometimes we refuse to stand before Him without our "prestige" and "position", without the false defenses of our "power". Sometimes we fear what change our wholehearted acceptance of Him can bring to our lives. So if today's passage should make us think about something, it is the necessity of the attitude of blindness: to stand before Him naked and defenseless, with the awareness that He is everything, the light inside and outside us. Let's stand like blind people, believing "in spite of hope upon hope" (Rom. 4:18), with what comes unseen, open to the unexpected, capable of surprise, steadfast in patience.
All these words are beautiful, one might say, but how do they turn into action? How does one renounce oneself, to be left in the light of Christ, who is the new creation of the world? The answer to the question is all that the Christian's life strives to be within the Church. If we struggle to put our lives in order, from the simplest and easiest (say, food, through fasting), to the most complex and difficult (the keeping of our minds from all vain calculation), it is because the experience of the Church teaches that this is how we learn ourselves to stand before Him naked and surrendered. If we struggle to make the needs of our neighbors our center and become burdensome for their own burdens, it is to keep our lives immersed in willful blindness before Him. If we strive to revolve our daily life around fixed points of prayer (morning and evening), it is to make ourselves feel our own darkness and crave His light.
With the attitude of blindness we receive the light. That is why a saint of our Church used to pray "Lord, enlighten my darkness". He had an attitude of blindness. But he knew that it is the vessels of blindness that deserve the light.
