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“I am the Light of the World” – A Homily on the man born blind (Jn 9:1-41) from Fr. Roch . . . As there is physical pain when we are exposed to the sudden brightness of daylight, so there is an even greater pain when we are exposed to the light of Christ . . . If we lived in a cave for a long time and then one day we decided to get out of it and face the sunlight, the light would hurt our eyes. We would seriously consider moving back to the cave to live in darkness, or in the semi-darkness of a fire or flashlight. We would never learn about the beauty of a meadow in the bright sunlight, we would never see the blue sky and the sharp contours of mountains and rocks and the smiling faces of human beings. We would see nothing of what is visible in the sunlight. As there is physical pain when we are exposed to the sudden brightness of daylight, so there is an even greater pain when we are exposed to the light of Christ. And it is so easy to defend ourselves against the blinding rays of his light. We are tempted to train ourselves to hear his words very selectively, to hear only what is pleasant, only what is heartwarming – his Father’s forgiving love, for instance. We can easily get used to not hearing the words that would reveal to us what we are ashamed of: the real motives of our actions; the semi-dark mixture of sincere and false motives, the mixture of our selfishness, greed, and resentment, together with a certain amount of good will and half-serious efforts of doing God’s will. The semi-darkness of our soul, this mixture of purity and impurity, this ineffective or half-way effective good-will, combined with our egotism, likes to hide in a shadow. We love the shadow, we love a life lived in the shadows. The light of Christ could uncover our real self, but we fear that light and we run away from it. We might even prefer blindness to seeing ourselves in the broad daylight; if we are blind we do not have to see who we really are. We just cannot live with the full reality of ourselves. Today’s Gospel challenges us to admit our semi-blindness and to desire the light who is Christ. If we do not desire now the light from Christ, if we prefer to remain in the semi-darkness of rationalizations and excuses, at the end we still have to face the blinding light of the Judge. Then there will not be any cave left into which we could withdraw, there will be no pleasant distraction in which we can take refuge. The blinding light of the judge will hurt us immensely, and we may not be able to learn to love the light then if we had hated it through all our life. It is true that if we today dare to face the light of Christ who is shining in our conscience, if we today face ourselves in the light of Christ, it will be painful at the beginning. It will be painful because we have to recognize all that is opposed to him, we have to allow his words to pass judgment upon us. But this light has a healing effect. It will burn away all that is trash, all that is false, all that hates the light in us, and we will then discover, beneath the dirt and trash in our souls, the beautiful image of God that we really are; we will discover that our deepest desires are for light and not for darkness. Then we want to see the infinite Truth, infinite Goodness, infinite Beauty, infinite Purity, we want to be exposed to the consuming light of God’s holiness. We want to be on Mount Tabor, we want to see the shining face of Jesus, which shines brighter than the light of the Sun. I read in Simone Weil that there is an old Eskimo myth about a crow and the darkness of the night. The crow was sitting in the darkness and the daylight failed to come. But then the crow began to desire the light, and lo and behold, the daylight dawned upon it. A deep truth is hidden in this story. God gives us the grace to desire the light of truth, of goodness, of purity, of sincerity, of generosity – the light that penetrates every fiber of our being, the light that acts like radiation therapy that burns out all the cancerous cells in the hidden recesses of our soul. If we have a desire for the light, that is a sign that God wants to send this light to us. Not necessarily his direct rays; that might be blinding. But his light may reach us through our fellow human beings: the inner beauty and goodness of our friends, family members, and children can all mediate the light of Christ to us. And so can the criticism of others. If, for instance, we do not know what is still impure in us, if we only suspect that there is something wrong with us, if we are not sure how we can improve our lives or where we should struggle, let us ask that God may show us through the criticisms of others, spouses, parents, friends, even our own children or students. Most likely, God will be eager to honor such a prayer and will provide the criticisms we are waiting for. And since we asked for it, chances are that we will not completely reject it, but learn from it. There is a popular Hungarian epic poem in which the hero, a simple shepherd boy, goes down to the nether world of the witches. He enters the country of the witches and darkness envelopes him all around and the witches attack him. However, he manages to smash to the ground one witch after another. And as one witch dies, the night becomes a little less dark. And as he destroys them one after another, daylight returns and the sun begins to shine. If we could just uproot one fault, one sin every week, our soul would bathe more and more in daylight and then we would be more prepared to be exposed to the blinding light of our eternal Sun, Jesus Christ. Amen.
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