St. Thomas More Chicago

Father Robert Behnke

Rejoice, Jerusalem!  Be glad for her, you who love her….  We have sung these words at the beginning of this Mass of the Fourth Sunday of Lent, called Laetare Sunday from the Latin for that opening word rejoice – rejoice because Lent is now half-complete; Easter is just three weeks away.  These words set the tone for this entire Holy Mass, half-way through Lent.  Let us hasten toward Easter with the eagerness of faith and love.   But the liturgy does not ask us to rejoice; the liturgy commands it: Rejoice!!  The violet, the purple of Lent seems to hear the command, and it for the moment lightens several shades to the color rose in response to Isaiah’s requirement that today we rejoice.  Traditionally, the organ is more joyful, a bit of floral decorations can be permitted, all in anticipation of Easter—all on this one Lenten Sunday of rejoicing.
Today’s lengthy Gospel of the healing of the blind man portrays one man’s particular reason for rejoicing…I was blind, and now I see….  This man, born blind, was in absolute, total, complete darkness, until he met Our Lord.  This Gospel does not tell of the healing of a man gone blind, as we find in the other Gospels, but of a man blind from his birth.  What's the difference?  I can imagine losing my sight, although it's hard to begin to appreciate the courage it would require to live with the loss of something as easily taken for granted as eyesight.  But how does a person born blind experience the world?  How do they imagine things known through the other senses, but never seen, upon which they have never been able to look?
That this man in the Gospel is born blind is no peripheral detail.  He has not lost a capacity for light; he did not have it from the beginning.  He does not deal with light, darkness, shadow and reflection.  He has lived in total darkness all his life.  Our Lord does not restore sight to this man: He will grace him with a new gift, with a capacity he has never had.  This miracle is not a biblical type of restoration of our human nature; it foretells man’s total re-creation.  Without life in Christ, every man--no matter how rich, how poor, how smart or how ignorant, no matter how young or old, sick or healthy, worldly successful or abysmally failing—without Christ, every man is in total darkness, because life without Christ then has no meaning, no ultimate purpose, no final goal.  But with life in Christ, whatever darkness may rule over one’s life at this moment is darkness but for a time.  Whether a man’s darkness takes the form of sickness, alienation, poverty, loneliness—with life in Christ, those darknesses are but shadows that will ultimately evaporate in the brightness of the illumination that envelopes the life of a man who lives in Christ.
Life in Christ for one who receives Christ’s light is nothing else but the very life of God Himself.  Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a man born blind….  Life in Christ is altogether and totally unique, because it is the very life of God.  That life of God comes to us in the sacraments; the sacraments are the certain and sure channels of God’s life—the means of sanctifying grace.  God’s life comes first in baptism.  But that very life of God is not a still life.  St. Paul reminds us today…for light produces every kind of goodness and righteousness and truth….Take no part in the fruitless works of darkness; rather, expose them….  And in another place, St. Paul says…Be ye, therefore, imitators of God, as very dear children, and walk in love, as Christ also loved us and delivered Himself up for us….
The man born blind owes his new being not to his parental origins, nor to his pedigree in the Law of Moses, but to the sudden unearned gift of his encounter with Our Lord.  He recognizes Our Lord not just as the Source of his own sight, but more importantly, as the origin of all light, the Source of everything that there is.  Now, knowing Who Jesus really is…he worshipped Him….
Our first parents in the garden had their eyes opened, and with this clear eyesight they saw how far they had fallen from God; they saw their nakedness and were ashamed: those who live still in this complete darkness passed down from Adam and Eve can have their eyes opened in a new way, just as did the man born blind, or just as did the disciples at Emmaus when they recognized Our Lord in the breaking of the bread in the evening of the first Easter.  Our world seems often still imprisoned by the darkness of Satan and sin.  Satan loves to envelop man with his total darkness because, as each man is created in the image and likeness of God, when man moves from light into darkness by way of his personal sin, man then becomes corrupted once more by the darkness of Satan—the image of God in man is then given the cast and pall of Satan’s ugliness.  Satan would love for us to believe that his darkness is forever, and so to give in and give up.  His works of darkness—of war, domestic violence, street violence, economic violence, violence aimed at marriage, the violence of abortion—his works and pomps of darkness surround us and can tempt us to throw in the towel and trudge—drag ourselves—onto his train.  But the train of Satan is headed in only a single direction—towards hell; that’s where Satan wants us to spend eternity—in his darkness—in total darkness.  Let us not be taken in, for at the very start of his Gospel, St. John writes…and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness grasped it not….
Last week an Indiana PBS television station ran a documentary on how the gangs have taken over the city of Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, since the earthquake a year ago.  If you ever wanted evidence of the reality of darkness, you should go to Port-au-Prince; you’d be highly unlikely to leave unscathed by the devil’s darkness.  The earthquake destroyed most of the city’s prisons, and so nearly 6,000 hardened criminals simply walked out of jail.  There are few records of prisoners, few files, few photographs.  The prisoners were, and are again if recaptured, packed 300 to a single cell; they can’t lie down, they can’t even sit.  Imagine your frame of mind and state of soul if you had escaped from such a place.  There is a team of just seven policemen who drive around the city and pick up men who they think look like prisoners they recall from before the earthquake; most of the time both their memories and whatever official records exist prove faulty, and so most suspects end up being released.  And of course no one admits to being an escapee.  And also, of course, the police fear for their lives; their personal lives must be secret, because they are hopelessly outnumbered.  There is no government structure, and just about every politician has a gang connection.  An American official and the police chief both stated that what is needed is jobs, industry, some kind of possibility of work to give Haitians the dignity of self-reliance.  But there is no sound governmental structure to make that happen.  Millions of dollars to rebuild Haiti have been contributed from all over the world, but much money is being held back because it seems there is no structure of order to handle this money in a responsible manner.  It is truly a mess of darkness.  Satan has got to be thrilled.
But the very end of this documentary featured a native-born Haitian who has constructed a walled-in and secured power plant which, if it gets operating at full capacity, could supply Port-au-Prince with 15% of its total power requirement.  Considering that there’s not really now any reliable source of power, that’s quite a resource.  The owner—I did not catch his name—as I said, is a native-born Haitian.  In the initial crime wave after the earthquake, his wife was kidnapped; she was returned after ten days and after a payment of a huge ransom; I know this happens often in Port-au-Prince; I have Haitian-American friends some of whose relatives in Haiti have been kidnapped, and ransomed, and never heard from again.  The police say…if you see the kidnappers, call us….  The wife of the power-plant owner was lucky; she was returned.  Obviously, though, she was traumatized, and so she has gone to New York with their children.  But the husband has remained behind for now.  When the reporter asked him why, he spoke about his love for his homeland, and then he said the words that I am frankly quite surprised that any public broadcasting station allowed to be broadcast; he said…every day here I have an opportunity to touch Christ…every day here I have an opportunity to touch Christ….  And so…the light shines…now…in the darkness, and the darkness grasped it not…the darkness will ever try, but…the darkness…will have…grasped it not…it never shall.
We have received the capacity for living life in Christ—life in God--at our baptism, when the Lord filled us with the light of His supernatural life.  But this capacity in us weakens through sin: we easily may become more accustomed to darkness than to this new divine light, and then it is that Satan does his cartwheels.  But this Sunday we rejoice in the nearness of Easter; so each year we pass through this holy season of Lent, when we open ourselves to the healing touch of Our Lord, Who is…the light of the world…, and prepare once more to see the world anew in the blazing furnace of the new fire of Easter—a light lit in the darkness of a tomb two thousand years ago; a light that, even by Satan, is never able to be put out.  And that is precisely why, today, in the middle of Lent, the Church rejoices.