As one sent only for today

 ‘… We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day…..’ (John 9:4)

John 9:1-41 (Year A: Fourth Sunday of Lent Sunday 26^th March 2017)

What? A blind man presents himself to Jesus in the presence of his disciples.  Who sinned? Who was to blame?  You see (pardon the pun), the condition like poverty must have been someone’s fault. And to such a condition may be added plenty of other conditions known to modern humanity from divorce to expulsions and exclusions. Who was to blame? There must be someone to blame.  It didn’t just happen: it had a cause in the bad behaviour of someone or their parents.  If we are honest with ourselves we might even spot traces of such warped thinking in our own minds.

There are none so blind as those who refuse to see is a well-known saying.   The worst type of spiritual blindness is that whereby we cannot see what others plainly see about us. Yet, what others see may be a distortion or, even, untrue.  Perception is a slippery surface. The ‘Johari Window’ conceptualised by Luft and Ingham is used to distinguish

1. What we know about ourselves and what others know
2. What we know about ourselves but others do not know
3. What others know about us but we do not know
4. What is unknown to us and others at the same time.

The last piece of the window is particularly significant. What are the intra-personal and inter-personal ‘unknown unknowns’?  Only God can show us if are open to such a discovery. The ‘unknown unknowns’ that nobody can see might include some or all of the following:

• A hidden capacity and talent that has remained submerged and unknown for decades
• An unknown illness or underlying condition
• An unknown fear, resistance or phobia about something
• A framework of thinking and assuming that is well formed but out of sync with the truth and goodness within us
• And much more besides.

Isn’t the human soul a mystery! And isn’t life a tragedy when the heights of scientific discovery, poetic skill and love were never uncovered, known, put to use or realised for the good of others?  How many lives have either been cut short or stultified over eons of times?

The story of the healing of a blind man speaks to us today.  ‘As long as it is day’ suggests two things: today is the only certainty we have and our opportunity to walk in the light any day including tomorrow is therefore time bound.  Sometimes, religious folks worry about the ‘day after today’ as in ‘life after death’. They might be advised to take Jesus’s example and attend to ‘life before death’ and live in the Light that Jesus offers us in the here and now. That way death will lead to life, blindness to sight and the ‘night will be as clear as the day’.

Each of us has a part to play in this world. We are sent for a purpose. And we are called back for a purpose. All is revealed in the fullness of time. In the meantime, we only have today – the light of today. Let us do the works God has given us to do today and leave this world a more beautiful, a more compassionate, a more just place.