Fr. Thomas Matus, OSB Cam


In the Lenten gospel reading from chapter nine of John 9:1-12  [about the man born blind], we read how our vision of God’s light in our world, our environment, our everyday existence can become obscured.  Jesus comes as an enlightener who heals our spiritual sight and gives us a new consciousness of our world and its possibilities. We are free to contemplate reality as it is, not as people tell us it is.

Jesus—healer, enlightener, and liberator—did not give this man his sight by saying something to him but by physical contact with him. Jesus, the Word made flesh, reached down to the earth, made mud with his own saliva, and blessed the blind man’s eyes with the mud. It was this gesture with earth and saliva that made the man see.

John the evangelist was always thinking about the sacramental contact that his faith community had with Jesus, but at the same time, John pointed beyond the outward ritual. The community practiced baptism, which was also called “enlightenment”.  New believers were introduced to spiritual contact with the ascended Jesus through signs that they could see, touch, and taste. There was no literal ceremony with earth and saliva, but all the signs of faith-contact with Jesus came from the earth and flowed with the fluids of the human body.     

Unfortunately, Christianity has too often been reduced to talking and thinking, and the body has been left out of the conversation. Spiritual vision or contemplation was understood as an intellectual activity that takes our eyes off the earth and turns them exclusively to invisible things. The result has been the inability to see God’s presence in what is visible and tangible; we were blind to the Spirit’s shining light in matter and in our bodies. So we became like the man blind from birth. We are beginning now to recover the sense of the earth and the body as both the problem and the solution. That is, the wounded earth and our wounded bodies, seen in a new light, become the way toward healing, enlightenment, and liberation, for ourselves and for the earth.

One detail in the gospel reading is important in this connection: Jesus tells the healed man to go and wash in the pool of Silóam, and the evangelist adds: “which means Sent.” This is a bit obscure but the best interpretation seems to be that the former blind man, healed and washed in the pool, is himself “sent.”

The first Christians understood their ritual enlightenment through baptism as the beginning of their mission—they were sent to reach others with the healing light they themselves had experienced through sacramental contact with Jesus. Today our consciousness is becoming more cosmic, and we experience our faith as a being sent toward the earth, a mission to the earth, in order to heal it and to bring to light the Spirit within it.     

The prophet Samuel discovered that the future king of Israel, David, was the youngest son of Jesse.  The boy is described as being “ruddy, with beautiful eyes.” The term “ruddy” is used in Genesis to describe the reddish earth that the human body was made out of. David has the color of earth; he is earthy, an “earthling,” and so is Jesus. His eyes are beautiful, because he can see and can make others see.

Let us connect the boy David with Jesus, the healer and liberator. Our own contact with him, through faith and through the material signs of bread and wine, sends us to our fellow earthlings and to the earth.

Let us pray, as we offer the Eucharist, that we may bring healing light and liberation to all.