Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

In our Office Gospel today, Jesus and his disciples encounter a man born blind. And the disciples ask Jesus, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

It’s pretty clear that the disciples assume that human dis-ability is a result of personal or generational sin—there’s literally no other option for them. There’s no sense that the experience of blindness is a not-uncommon variation of the human experience; no sense that the disciples can appreciate how blindness might have shaped this man’s life in ways they might recognize as good or remarkable or worth celebrating; no sense of the fullness of the man’s life or an understanding of that life as a kind of giftedness; no sense that there’s anything about this man that isn’t reducible to their understanding of his situation: he’s blind, blindness means suffering (because, in part, for the disciples it would have meant being an outcast), suffering means he’s being punished for some wicked thing he or his family did. The man, somehow, deserved this—not just his dis-ability, but the way the community treats him on account of that disability: he is rightly an outcast, rightly disenfranchised, rightly marginalized.

Jesus, of course, doesn’t share the disciples’ assumptions—which is a way of saying: his understanding isn’t conditioned by what conditions the disciples’ understanding. What irony! That the disciples, conditioned as they themselves are by sin and death, are unable to rightly see or perceive what’s really going on!

Because here’s the most wonderful part of this story: when Jesus responds to the disciples that “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him,” he’s not only saying, “Human suffering, however conceived, isn’t necessarily a consequence of personal sin; just because someone might be in pain doesn’t mean they’re being punished…it might very well mean that they’re just human after all!” But most marvelous of all, he’s saying, “There is no part of this man’s life or experience that cannot reveal the glory of God. Even (and sometimes especially!) the parts of the human experience and the people you reject can bear and reveal a weight of glory that is awesome and transformative!”

Beloved Friend! What good news! Not only are we invited to see the lives of others as illuminated by the Light of the World, but we’re invited to understand our own lives, every part of our own lives—our aches and pains, our yearnings, our suffering, our joys—as capable of revealing the light of God. Even, Beloved, even our sin—not because our sin is capable of bearing glory: it’s not. But because if we give our sin to God, if we confess our sin, God, who is gracious and merciful, will forgive our sin, and that forgiveness will reveal in us the glory and mercy and grace of God. We, too, can be filled with—can shine with—the Uncreated Light of God illuminating every corner and aspect of our lives, banishing from us sin and death, and making of us a herald of a wondrous new dawn, aflame with the light of the Daystar dawning in our hearts!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+