Me vs. The World

Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent, Year A
Do you ever feel like the world is conspiring against you? That just when you get through one struggle, something else just as difficult and taxing rears its head? Or that things seem to keep going wrong? Say you go to the grocery store, get a cart-full of food, only to find out at the cash register that you left all your money and credit cards at home; you pull out your cell phone to call someone at home to bring the money, and the battery is dead; and when you go out to your car to drive home, with the groceries waiting in the cart back at the check-out lane, the car doesn’t start. The world is obviously conspiring against your getting those groceries. Or perhaps it is more serious: Like a family that suffers through a diagnosis with cancer and the chemotherapy that comes with it, only to then to have another family member who loses his job, and then a car accident that leaves a child paralyzed. The stresses and adversity and challenges of everyday life are sometimes enough to make us wonder: why me? What did I ever do to deserve any of the hardships of my life?

I imagine the man born blind could have been thinking much the same thing. First, he has had to deal with the fact of his blindness – but, like most people who are blind, he had probably learned to adjust, to heighten his other senses. And all of a sudden, when this stranger puts clay on his eyes and tells him to wash in the Pool of Siloam, and suddenly he can see for the first time in his life – you’d think that things would start getting better. But they don’t. First, his friends and neighbors don’t even recognize him. Then, the authorities start to challenge him, his parents don’t even support him, and he is expelled from the synagogue. Could life get any worse for this man who had been born blind?

But with each passing obstacle, something else changes. The farther this man is pushed away from friends, from family, even from his place of worship, the more insight he gains about the stranger who had put clay on his eyes, the miracle-worker, the prophet, the Son of Man. We’re all like the man born blind. In a world that seems to be conspiring against us, we search for faith in the midst of our adversities, we long to find meaning even when things don’t go our way. And while we are looking for meaning, Jesus is looking for us, seeking us out, to heal our blindness and show us the way to his light. That’s the lesson of Lent – it’s about a new perspective: rather than looking for meaning when all we can see is tragedy, Lent reminds us that Christ is always looking for us, ready to hold us and heal us bring us to his light. Rather than look for answers or for meaning, Lent challenges us to look instead for Christ, who is already looking for us.