1 Samuel 16:1b,6-7,10-13a; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41
The Gospel according to John is one of the most theologically complex writings of the New Testament. Quite often, we, like the characters of the different stories of that gospel totally misunderstand what Jesus is trying to say or do. It is only when we are willing to enter into a dialogue with him that many of us finally gets it and have our conversion moment in result of it. Today's gospel passage is again an example of it.
For many of us, together with the disciples of Christ and the Pharisees, treat sin as a moral category, primarily defined in relations to a concrete and precise actions. This is what we know. If we take the Catechism of the Catholic Church in our hands we will find many paragraphs, to be exact from 1846 to 1876, there dedicated to the topic of sin. Those paragraphs clearly explain to us that:
· sin is an offense against reason, truth, and right conscience.
· It is an offense against God.
· It is an utterance, a deed, or a desire contrary to the eternal law.
· There are great many sins which can be distinguished according to the objects, to the virus they oppose, or to the commandments they violate.
· They are mortal and venial sins.
· Mortal sin turns us away from God.
· For sin to be mortal its object has to be of a grave matter, and the Ten Commandments are very helpful to us to define it. It requires our full knowledge and consent of what we do.
· Venial sin wounds our relationship with God but do not completely destroy it for the matter or our actions or desires were not so grave, or we did not have full knowledge or complete consent of what we have done.
But what we find in today's gospel reading, and generally in the gospel according to John, is that sin is treated as a theological not moral category. Let me try to explain this to you.
The gospel according to John was written at the end of the first century. It was written in and to a community that was expelled from the synagogue. Johannine community was labeled as heretics by the Jewish leadership of that time. For example, one of the daily prayers of the Jewish people of that time, I have to say to our best knowledge since many Jewish Prayers book had been severely censored in the Middle Ages, was saying: "For the apostates let there be no hope and let the arrogant government be speedily uprooted in our days. Let the Nazarenes (Christians) and the Minim (heretics) be destroyed in a moment and let them be blotted out of the Book of Life and not be inscribed together with the righteous. Blessed art thou, O Lord, who humblest the proud."
Johannine community struggled quite a bit trying to define their identity as Jewish and followers of Jesus. It seems almost an impossible task . So the Gospel according to John invites them to:
1. Reevaluate the criteria by which one defines sin and by which people are judged. For John, sin is fundamentally about one's relationship with God, and the decisive measure of one's relationship with God is one's faith in Jesus. Believing in the revelation of God in Jesus is the base for judgment, salvation and sin. Judgment is based not on what people do, as the disciples and the Pharisees assumed in today's gospel, but on one's embrace of God in Jesus. From the Johannine perspective, it is not the Christian community responsibility, just as it was not the Pharisees' who labeled the Christians as heretics, to judge anyone's sins, because the determination of sin rests with God and Jesus, and the individual and is determined by faith, not actions. The Johannine Gospel is thus the most radical example of salvation by grace (I would say relationship with God) anywhere in the New Testament.
2. The Johannine understanding of sin and judgment invites the Christian community to reexamine its understanding of salvation and redemption. This gospel quite explicitly relocates the offer of salvation to Jesus' life and moves away from a narrow focus on Jesus' death: Jesus incarnation, not the expiation of his death, brings salvation from sin.
The Gospel of John invites Christians to recognize the transformative power of love of God which is manifested in the incarnation and to shape their lives accordingly. To reject Jesus is to reject the love of God in Jesus and so to pass from the possibility of salvation to judgment. Therefore, the Pharisees' announcement of their sight, when in fact they have not seen God in Jesus, marks their sin and the "blind" man's embrace of Jesus as the Son of Man marks his salvation.
OK, than where does this leave us?
I think today's gospel reading is inviting us to ask ourselves some very deep questions so we will know if
· we are still blind or can truly see,
· if we live in sin or have accepted God's gift of salvation.
And I believe to do it, first of all, each one of us has to answer the most important question of all which is:
Do I see God in Jesus?
Do I truly embrace God in Christ, who is present according to our Church's teaching, in our community(in each one of us who is baptized), in the Word of God proclaimed here, in Eucharist which we celebrate here and in the other sacrament of our Church?
Do I truly see God in Christ?
Perhaps our inability to see God in Christ might be the primarily reason why some of us are not accepting the gift of God's salvation. Not living our lives according to the Ten Commandments only a secondary one. Perhaps our most frequent prayer directed to God should be a prayer asking God to remove our blindness so we can see His Son in our community(in each one of us who is baptized), in the Word of God proclaimed here, in Eucharist which we celebrate here and in the other sacrament of our Church.
3 comments:
I know that I will have to read this a few more times to really comprehend all the layers of your homily. But for me I need to hear more than the trite answers so many are willing to spite out at a moments notice. As evidenced in your homily the answers are far from easy and for us to have those answers we have to truly look at ourselves and actions and be willing to see the true answers. Kitty
Part II
You call the gospel of John the most radical example of salvation by grace, but I consider it one of the most explicit and beautiful examples of God in action. The synoptic gospels and other NT writings present the paradox of works and grace and their interactive salvific value. We are responsible for what we do, and we are judged (not saved) by our obedience to faith, more commonly called works (Rom 2:5-8, 2Cor 11:15; Col 3:24-25; 1Pet 1:17, Rev 20:12-13). Yet it is God who is ultimately responsible for our salvation; it is his loving ‘deed’, the offering of grace, that saves. We are saved only by his grace, not by our faith or works. We respond to the destiny chartered by God. Romans 3:24 perhaps says it best: “they are now justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith”. While we are justified through our faith and works, there is not a single verse in the NT that says we are judged by our faith (see citations above). From a biblical perspective, that would seem to contradict your statement that “Judgment is based not on what people do …… but on one’s embrace of God in Jesus.” One can believe to their very core that Jesus is Lord (God in Jesus), but unless that belief yields obedience to that faith, it is of no value. James 2:17 makes that clear: “So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” Similarly, “You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone” (Jam 2:24). So when you state that “the determination of sin rests with God and Jesus and the individual (I agree) and is determined by faith, not actions,” I would have to question that conclusion. And what of 1Cor 13:13: “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” Why does love trump faith according to Paul?
So while I agree that John attaches a theological stigma to sin, he does not claim exclusivity for its definition nor does he contradict the clear teaching of the role of faith and the obedience of faith to the recognition and acknowledgment of Jesus as Messiah. Although most Protestants continue the mantra of Luther; namely, salvation by faith alone, and overwork the book of Romans to make that claim, they tend to forget that Paul uses the ‘obedience of faith’ as the book-ends to Romans (Rom 1:5; 16:26). Our religion is not one of either/or but rather both/and. The whole of scripture must be interpreted both in context and continuity with the inspiration of all scripture authors, guided by the Holy Spirit. God does not contradict Himself.
2. Although Jesus did not come to condemn the world but to save it (Jn 3:17), his ministry and gospel message create a decision of judgment for all, whether to accept or reject Him as the Son of God. Humans of humble heart who recognize their weaknesses (sins) and seek Jesus for forgiveness are given the grace to overcome their blindness and achieve salvation. Those who remain obstinent to the recognition of their sins and refuse belief in Jesus are the spiritually blind, through their own free will and conscience. Those who recognize their blindness and seek Jesus to remove their sin are given sight, whereas those who say they can see but reject Jesus as savior from sin remain in their blindness.
In my opinion, a complete exegesis of Jn 9:13-41 should also include Jn 10:1-21, because there is no indication of a temporal gap between these 2 putative chapters. Because Stephen Langton created the chapter divisions in 1205 that we use today, as all previous Greek manuscripts contained strings of letters with no spaces or punctuation, it is likely that his separations were not perfect . The continuity of Jn 9:13-41 and Jn 10:1-21 seems evident for two reasons.
a) The Jews in Jn 10:21 ask “Can a demon open the eyes of the blind”; hence, a clear indication that they knew Jesus healed the blind man of Jn 9 and likely were there for the verbal exchange that transpired about blindness (Jn 9:13-41).
b) Jn 10:1 opens with the literary device of Amen, amen (or Verily, verily; Very truly; etc. depending upon translation), used only by Jesus in the gospels. This literary maxim is used 25 times in John to highlight the Lord’s strongest points in a discourse. Here, unlike all other uses, it appears to open a discourse on the good shepherd which has yet to take place; i.e., it seems out of place in the chapter. Because of this anomalous opening to the good shepherd discourse, it is more likely that Jesus is continuing his confrontation with Jewish leaders who have elevated themselves as unknowingly blind shepherds of the nation of Israel. Due to their spiritual blindness (Jn 9:13-41), Jesus continues to challenge their claims of being spiritual shepherds to the Jews, and yet they reject his miracles and proclamation as Messiah and the Son of God. Jn 10:22-42 occurs at the Feast of Dedication, a few months later, and is a more reasonable place for Jn 10 to begin.
I hope that you can find the time to provide a few more theological homilies to challenge and expand our religious education and training on the role of Christ in our lives.
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