In our fast-paced overly entertained culture the phrase “cut to the chase” is often used. What does it mean to “cut to the chase”? It means, let’s just get to the action, no explanation and no context needed and none wanted. This can be the case in preaching when the urge to go right to the Gospel reading takes over. This is especially true when, like today, the Gospel reading is a long one.
Of course, the Gospels are the heart of Sacred Scripture because “they are the principal witness for the life and teaching of the incarnate Word,” our Lord Jesus Christ1 Certain depictions of the Sacred Heart aside, it’s a bit weird to think of a heart without a body. Jesus has a context that is neither incidental nor accidental.
During Lent, readings from the Old Testament lay out salvation history from beginning to the promise of the New Covenant.2 Unlike Ordinary Time, during Lent, pains are taken to harmonize the epistle reading with the Gospel. Our reading from 1 Samuel shows that throughout salvation history God doesn’t choose according to human criteria. Instructing Samuel in his choosing among Jesse’s sons who would replace Saul as king, God tells the prophet:
Do not judge from his appearance or from his lofty stature…The Responsorial Psalm is also a reading. Our Psalm for this Mass with the celebration of the Second Scrutiny, is Psalm 23. Even in a time of increasing biblical ignorance, this Psalm remains the best known of the one hundred and fifty inspired compositions.
Not as man sees does God see,
because man sees the appearance
but the LORD looks into the heart3
“The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I shall want.”4 Perhaps the best way to understand this might be: “Because the Lord is my shepherd, I have everything.” Jesus + nothing = everything. This is what each of the three people who figure prominently in our readings for the three Scrutinies demonstrate in different ways.
Before it is anything else, true faith is a matter of the heart. As Romano Guardini insisted: “In the experience of a great love, all that happens becomes an event inside that love.”5 Now, this sounds “intellectual,” but it isn’t. It is descriptive of experience. All someone needs to understand this is to have been in love. A familiar quote, usually erroneously attributed to G.K. Chesterton, provides some clarity: “Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.”
“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind,” Jesus is asked by His own disciples.6. Now, this question cuts to the chase! Just as God vindicates Job contra his well-meaning but catastrophically wrong friends, turned accusers, with a few words, Jesus obliterates this immature and even pagan understanding of God.
“Neither he nor his parents sinned,” declares Jesus, destroying their grave error, “it is so that the works of God might be made visible through him.”7 In his Letter to the Romans, Saint Paul, takes this theologically farther:
creation was made subject to futility, not of its own accord but because of the one who subjected it, in hope that creation itself would be set free from slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God8
Jesus healing the Blind Man, by Brian Jeke
It is crucial to understand that sending His Son as Savior and Redeemer was not God’s Plan B, which went into effect when Plan A failed as the result of the ancestral sin. God only ever had one plan; there is no Plan B. At the beginning of the Easter Vigil, during the singing of the Exsultet, the Church, referring to fall, proclaims:
O happy faultThis is so fundamental that to get this wrong by thinking human beings can frustrate God’s plan, forcing God to double-clutch, leads to the heretical and self-defeating idea that you save yourself by being really good and that you can be really good by trying really hard. This is the road to futility, not salvation.
that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!9
I ask you, apart from being born blind, what did the man in our Gospel do except testify to the truth of what he experienced after the fact? The answer is simple: he humbly let himself be healed. My friends, your blindness, as well as mine, is so that the works of God might be made visible through us. You are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. This is the Good News!
As He did with the Samaritan woman last week, Jesus reveals Himself to this poor, blind beggar. Thus showing what Msgr Luigi Giussani observed: “The real protagonist of the history is the beggar: Christ who begs for man’s heart, and man’s heart that begs for Christ.”10
Amazing Grace is a great hymn for the First and Second Scrutinies. The Samaritan woman was lost, alienated from her community, and then found. The man born blind was blind but now sees. Let’s not lose track of the irony that, in the end, it is only the man born blind who truly sees. The light by which he sees is Christ. This is the backward and upside-down theo-logic of the Gospel. This is the wisdom of the Cross, which is foolishness to those who are blind.
In one of the intercessions for you, dear Elect, which we will pray in a few minutes, we ask God “That, contemplating the wisdom of the Cross, they learn to glory in God, who confounds the wisdom of this world.”11 This is the same wisdom expounded by the Lord in today’s Gospel:
I came into this world for judgment,The purpose of your election to the Easter sacraments is to confirm that though you were formerly blind, you now see by the light of Christ. After your baptism, you will be presented with a candle, lit from the Paschal candle, which is a symbol of Christ. The candle is presented with these words: “Receive the Light of Christ.”
so that those who do not see might see,
and those who do see might become blind12
My dear Elect, today these words from Ephesians are addressed to you:
Awake, O sleeper,
and arise from the dead,
and Christ will give you light12
1 Second Vatican Council. Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation [Dei Verbum], sec 18.↩
2 “Introduction to the Lectionary,” sec. 97.↩
3 1 Samuel 16:7.↩
4 Psalm 23:1.↩
5 Romano Guardini, L’essenza del cristianesimo [The Essence of Christianity], Morcelliana, Brescia, 1981, p. 12.↩
6 John 9:2.↩
7 John 9:3.↩
8 Romans 8:20-21.↩
9 Roman Missal. The Easter Vigil, sec. 18.↩
10 Luigi Giussani. Speech before Pope John Paul II in Saint Peter’s Square for the Meeting with Ecclesial Movements and New Communities, 30 May 1998.↩
11 Order of Christian Initiation for Adults, sec. 167.↩
12 John 9:39.↩
13 Ephesians 5:14.↩
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