Today we celebrate Latare Sunday. Latare Sunday is a day of rejoicing within the otherwise austere season of Lent. t all Sundays in Lent remain celebrations of the Lord’s resurrection, which is why, when calculating how long Lent is, you do not count Sundays.
Today we have a great reason to rejoice: the Second Scrutiny of our Elect. Rather than scrutinize them, we bless and strengthen them to scrutinize themselves. Indeed, for all of us, the season of Lent is a time for self-examination, a time for renewing our practice of the core spiritual disciplines of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, which should be characteristic of our lives as Christians all the time.
Our Gospel for the First Scrutiny, which we celebrated last Sunday at the 9:00 AM Mass, was Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman. In that encounter, Jesus declared himself forthrightly to be the Messiah, the one for whom the woman was hopefully waiting. I think it is easily lost on us how astounding it is that Jesus, a man whom this woman encounters while he sits by Jacob’s well, the one who engages her in a bit of an enigmatic dialog, is the Messiah, the one who will tell her everything.1
We easily forget that it was not intuitively obvious to the casual observer in first-century Israel that this guy from Nazareth, Mary and Joseph’s son, was not only the Messiah, God’s anointed, but the only begotten Son of God in the flesh. Something quite similar is at work in our Gospel today. But before coming to that, it bears noting that David is a messianic figure. Our first reading today serves to demonstrate something Saint Paul describes well:
God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something, so that no human being might boast before God2Jesus, the unexpected, unassuming, and often unwelcome Messiah, is the exemplar of this divinely revealed truth.
Apart from Jesus and the healed man, only some of Jesus’ disciples witnessed this unprecedented healing. While it quickly became evident, despite doubts, that something amazing had happened when this man who everyone knew was blind could now see, the divine origin of the power that healed him was called into question. But, when queried, all the man could say, was this Jesus fellow smeared mud on his eyes and now he could see.
It wasn’t until after his ordeal with the Pharisees that Jesus revealed to the man to whom he gave sight who he is using almost the exact same words he used when revealing his identity to the Samaritan woman. This tells us something deeply important about faith. When the man asks, in response to Jesus’ question about whether he believes in the Son of Man, “who is he that I might believe in him?,” Jesus responded with “You have seen him” and, in so many words, “It is me, one speaking with you.”3
To see Jesus for who he is is to see reality in a whole new way. Or stated another way, to really see Jesus is to really see. One way to understand the man’s washing his eyes in the Pool of Siloam is as a kind of baptism, washing. To see and believe in Jesus Christ is what it means to have eyes to see. We also must have ears to hear and hearts that love him enough to live according to his words. Hope is the flower of faith and charity is its fruit.
Someone who is infused with the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love is someone who nurtures these by praying, fasting, and giving alms, thus living as a child of the light. There is no better segue to the third and final scrutiny, the Gospel for which is Jesus calling his dead friend Lazarus forth from the tomb, than the ending of our second reading, which New Testament scholars think was taken from an early Christian baptismal hymn:
Awake, O sleeper,You see, Jesus did not just give the man his eyesight. He gave him life!
and arise from the dead,
and Christ will give you light4
Friday afternoon, a friend, who is an educator, texted me asking how I might respond to the question “What are people for?” My answer came quite quickly. I texted him that my answer is the answer to the third question from the old Baltimore Catechism. The first question is, “Who made us?” “Us,” of course, refers to human beings. The third question, which contains the answer to the first, is “God made us to show forth His goodness and to share with us His everlasting happiness in heaven.”5
Alternatively, I texted, riffing off Saint Irenaeus of Lyons’ insistence that “the glory of God is the living man, and the life of man is the vision of God,” I texted him that what people are for is to show forth God’s glory.”6
The man to whom Jesus gave sight didn’t glorify God merely by receiving his sight, though this miracle, as Jesus intimates, was wrought on behalf of this blind man so “the works of God might be made visible through him.”7 He glorified God by confessing his belief in Jesus and then worshipping him.8
Mass comes from the Latin word missa, which literally means to be dismissed. Missa is also the root of the word missio, which translates into English as “mission.” And so, at the end of each Mass, all of us are sent forth on mission to proclaim the Gospel.
Just as the Samaritan woman eagerly told her fellow villagers about Jesus, can you imagine the man who was formerly blind not telling others what Jesus had done for him? Rather than apologetics that traffics in proofs and arguments, telling others what Jesus has done for you what it really means to evangelize, to tell others the Good News.
1 See John 4:5-42..↩
2 1 Corinthians 1:27-29.↩
3 John 9:36-37.↩
4 Ephesians 5:14.↩
5 Baltimore Catechism. Lesson One. Question 3.↩
6 Saint Irenaeus of Lyons. Against the Heretics, Book 4, Chapter 20, Section 7.↩
7 John 9:3.↩
8 John 9:38.↩
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