Monday, March 23, 2020

I have gone long periods in which I was unable to offer Mass publicly, as in the months after the surgery to remove part of my pituitary tumor.  For some time afterwards I was not able to stand or even sit up long enough to offer Mass in public.  I could only offer it in my room.  This was very hard.  No priest gets ordained to say Mass only in his room.  Offering the Sunday Mass in private yesterday was hard, too, as I know it was hard for so many of you not to go to Mass.  We are made to worship God, and our worship of him here is our preparation for the eternal worship in heaven.  May our present circumstances whet our appetites to worthily offer God our adoration at Mass and to receive the Body of his Son in our churches one day soon!

I want to continue our discussion of the healing, the enlightenment, of the man born blind, from yesterday’s a Gospel reading.  It would be incomplete if we did not consider what Jesus was telling this blind man to do.  The temple, in which the Lord found this man begging, was built to the north of the old city of Jerusalem.  The Pool of Siloam is located to the south of the city and down a slope.  In order to get to the pool, the blind man would have had to pass all the way through the bustling old town.  Even if someone was assisting him, this would have been very time consuming and arduous.  But the man went, with only the assurance of a man he had never met before to urge him on.  Very many people would have seen him struggling down the streets of the city, and would have been knocked against or tripped over by him.  They would have known him to be a blind man, and his rags would have given him away as a beggar.  And they would have been amazed when this same man came running back, able to see, his eyes wide with sight.  He would be seeing the world for the first time, and he must have felt overwhelmed with the reality of the miracle.  He could have hurried back to his parents in the city to tell them the news of his cure, but he went back to the temple to look for Jesus, to give him thanks.

This should remind us of the story of the leprous Syrian general Naaman, who was told of the power of the prophet Elisha and went to him for healing.  Elisha, rather than heal him on the spot, sent him to wash in the Jordan River.  Having done so, he was healed (the story is told in 2 Kings 5, 1-17).  The Pharisees must have thought of this when they strove to show that no miracle had occurred.  We might ponder their reasons for doing this.  They certainly showed some desperation.  They questioned the man himself, they questioned witnesses, they threatened his parents, they even argued with the man as though to get him to deny that he had either been blind or that he had been healed.  Why not simply glorify the God who shows his mercy in this way?  But the Pharisees were trying to convince themselves and others that Jesus could not be the Messiah, for that was the meaning of the sign he had performed.  This might remind us of how Luke describes their reaction to the preaching of St. Stephen when he proclaimed Jesus as the Son of God, in Acts 7, 56: And they, crying out with a loud voice, stopped their ears.  

In our own way, we do this when we resist the prompting of the Holy Spirit to go to confession or Mass when we already have other things planned, or to pray the rosary or the Stations of the Cross, or to come before the Blessed Sacrament to make holy hours.  We note that the water did not come to the blind man, but the blind man to the water.  Jesus wants us to take trouble to come to him.  He wants us to take part in our own growth in grace and spiritual maturity.