With Opened Bible
Fourth Sunday of Lent
“The man called Jesus made clay and anointed my eyes and told me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.” (John 9:11)
The first reading for this Sunday concerns David's election as king of Israel. He was anointed with holy oil to be under the protection of the Most High and to fulfill his duty to protect his people. This reading connects to the idea of divine election. God chooses and consecrates through holy oil.
Speaking of holy oil, the Bible teaches us that it was used to consecrate people and objects serving the Lord. From the very first pages of the Bible, we find Moses receiving the recipe for holy oil for the consecration of priests and objects of worship (Exodus 30:22-33). Later, this same oil would be used to anoint prophets (1 Kings 19:16) and kings. (1 Samuel 15:17; 1 Kings 1:34)
In this Sunday's Gospel, Saint John does not present us with the anointing of a king, a prophet, or a priest, but with that of a blind man. And Jesus did not use oil, but clay that he himself prepared with his saliva. (John 9:6) In doing so, Jesus reminds us that he is the one who recreates the sick man, crushed by the yoke of sin. This gesture takes us back to the creation of the first man, taken from the earth. Jesus opens the blind man's eyes to spiritual realities and salvation.
The blind man today is you and me, who have lost our sense of God and spiritual things. We are sometimes blinded by the sin of pride, preventing us from seeing and contemplating the greatness of God in the sufferings of our time.
There is blindness worse than physical blindness: spiritual blindness. This blindness cannot be treated by medicine or the spectacular advances of science, but by the grace of God in Jesus Christ. Through holy baptism, we receive the anointing of the Holy Spirit, which not only makes us children of God but also opens our lives to the realities of heaven. Blind people have always existed and will continue to exist even at the end of the world. But the question remains: are we blind to the realities of heaven and to the suffering that surrounds us today? If so, our healing and salvation can only come from Christ. He is the one who opens the eyes of the heart and mind, the one who recreates us.
