Healing blindness

Gospel: Jn 9:1-41

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/031024-YearA.cfm

Today’s gospel shows how people with disabilities were seen in Jesus’s time. A man’s blindness was seen by the disciples and religious leaders as being caused by the man’s sin or by the man’s parents’ sin. To their society, God caused suffering due to sin. God punished people directly due to their sins.

Jesus came to heal. While Jesus heals the man’s physical blindness, the man’s blindness is also used in the story metaphorically. The gospel writer of John is using the story to show us something about the nature of God. We are all blind. We are all blind to the true nature of reality. We are created to love each other even those on the fringe of society; those we exclude, those who suffer, and those who do not meet our expectations.

We are blind because we don’t give of ourselves to those we perceive as blind. That is why Jesus refers to himself as the light of the world. We similarly need to be the light of the world and overcome our blindness to see the equality between us and to love one another. Jesus brought those who were outcasts back into society. This was not easy for those who excluded them in the first place.

Jesus’s judgment was to change the paradigm. He empowered those who were powerless and showed the powerful the limit to their power. God’s healing is not limited to some, it is provided to all. Even those who are humbled through the encounter with God are elevated by a deeper understanding of equality in the eyes of God.