Homily for 30th Sunday of Ordinary Time
The gospel miracles are also parables, teaching aids employed by Jesus. The images of darkness and light, blindness and vision, are very prevalent throughout the Scriptures. The blind man of today's gospel, like blind people everywhere, inhabits a world of darkness. His disability cuts him off from the rest of humanity. He is sitting by the side of the road on the edge of the city of Jericho, we are told. He is totally dependant on the material assistance and the physical guidance of other people. Sitting by the side of the road, he recognises his helplessness and calls out to Jesus: 'Son of David, have pity on me. Let me see again'. Jesus says to him: 'Go, your faith has saved you.' Immediately his sight returns.
That blind man is symbolic of humanity. This language has a common currency. We use it in our everyday speech. We often refer to a person as "having a blind spot", or of going down blind alleys; He or she fails to see the entire picture, and, as a result, acts or behaves in a morally deficient manner. Our blindness can take on many forms. Left to our own devices, we are morally blind. If we have no moral or ethical reference point outside our own needs and greeds, blind selfishness takes over; we line our own pockets at the expense of our fellow man. This sort of blindness gives rise to widespread injustice.
Another familiar malady arising from moral blindness is fundamentalism and fanatacism. So convinced is a person or a group or an organisation of the rightness of their own cause that they are oblivious to the rights and indeed in many cases of the humanity of their supposed adversaries. Examples of this fanaticism could be multiplied. The most spectacular example, in our day, was of course September 11 in New York. Blind fanaticism made them indifferent to even their own humanity.
Yeats' famous poem, The Second Coming, captures the fanatic heart with great power. He conveys the accelerating anarchy generated by the fanatic heart. :
Turning and turning in a widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
the blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
the ceremony of innocence is drowned
The best lack all conviction , while the worst
are full of passionate intensity.
But not all our fanatics wear long beards and speak in strange tongues. Some speak in a Texan drawl or in South Armagh accents. We too can be blind to the identity of the real fanatics. Indeed we don't have to go to the Middle East for examples of such blindness. We have more than our share of home-produced examples. Instead of rational, informed debate we witness closed minds spinning around in circles. The end product of such blindness is, as we know to our cost, death and suffering.
People are deprived of what is rightfully theirs because our blindness has placed ourselves at the centre of the universe. If we are selfish or blinded by our own cares and desires, it will be impossible to see other people as our brothers and sisters. My own comfort and welfare becomes my only guideline.
However, as Jesus pointed out in today's gospel, faith leads to sight, to clear vision. Each of us will have different ways in which our eyes need opening. It could be that we need to see ourselves in a more truthful way. We may need to recognise our sins in a clearer light. But for a very many people their deepest need is the exact opposite: they need to see themselves more truthfully as children of God, loved by him and pleasing in his sight. Many of us are blind to our goodness, to what God's grace has already achieved in us. We should recognise these graces and, like the man in the first reading, give glory to God daily for them. We can also be blind to the lies that surround us, the false values that are so often paraded as desirable goals.
The gospel then is the torch that God has handed to humanity. Only with the help of its searching beam can we view humanity, our world and our selves in a proper perspective. The experience of recent years alone has taught us that when that torch is ignored civilisation comes crashing down.