THIS WE KNOW
Author: Fr. Michael Byron
March 22, 2020
It’s not hard to resonate this weekend with a gospel story
that is all about bewilderment and confusion and disruption of order. That’s
where we are today.
Think about all the things we knew – or thought we knew – a month
or so ago… Things that were just part of the presumed rhythm of life. If I’m a
student, I’m going to school. If I’m a worker, I’ll be at my job. If I’m an
engaged Catholic, I’m going to church. If I want to be with friends for an
evening out, we’ll meet up at a restaurant and see a show. If I’m retired, my financial
situation is relatively secure. If I want to visit a loved one in a senior
living residence, I will. And if we run low on toilet paper, I’ll go to the
store and get some more.
That’s some of what we knew to be the enduring conditions of
our world. And none of them is true now. And what may yet come in days and
weeks ahead? Only the foolish would say “I know”.
This weekend, we live in a time of maybes, and I’m not
sures, and what ifs and that’s a very unsettling kind of experience. Even
people of great faith can admit that. And in fact we should do that, because it’s an opportunity for us to ask the
question about just what or whom it is that we place our faith in. Who or what is deserving of our
final confidence and our ultimate hope? Clearly, as we now understand, it is
not the daily routine, or the stock market, or the politicians, or the wisdom
of science and technology. And it is not religion or church practiced in a way
that we think of as unchanging or unchangeable. Right now we are doing
Catholicism in a form that would have been unthinkable at Christmas time. Even
this is not worthy of what we call “faith”.
Faith, when it is genuine, involves a radical trust in
nothing and no one other than God, as revealed to us in Christ. That has always
been true and always will be, but for many of us it is clearer now. Faith is
not, and has never been, something that is capable of human control or
manipulation. Perhaps we haven’t always completely understood that. Now we do –
or at least now we can. That’s the
good news here: because faith is all about God, it can never disappoint us or
fail us. To recognize that is to move from blindness to sight. Today’s gospel
is all about that. Again this week St. John presents us with a very long
dialogue between Jesus and a group of perplexed religious people. Last week it
was the woman at the well and her Samaritan townsfolk. They were perplexed and
confused, but they were honest in their search for God.
Today we have a different sort of religious group, the
Pharisees and Synagogue Officials, who are equally perplexed about the healing
of this man born blind, but quite a bit less honest in their search for the
real God.
They wouldn’t have admitted to that, of course. In fact they
would and did take great offense at the very suggestion of it. Because they
were the blind ones. Maybe they weren’t so much dishonest as they were very
honestly wrong. Blind. And that wouldn’t have been so bad if they had at least
held open the possibility that they could be wrong. But there was none of that
opinion among them.
They knew that God would never cure anybody on a Sabbath
day. They knew that Jesus was a sinner – without ever having met him. They knew
that this formerly blind man had no standing to teach the religious authorities
anything about God. That’s what they regarded as “faith”. And it was all wrong.
And they couldn’t see it – because they wouldn’t. It was an enthusiasm for
rules and customs and presumptions. That’s not faith.
They knew so much that, unlike the Samaritans last week,
today’s gospel does not end with joyful conversion and salvation for the
outsiders. Instead it ends in condemnation from Jesus, and judgment for the
religious know-it-alls inside the Synagogue.
“If you were blind, you would have
no sin; but now you are saying ‘we see’, so your sin remains.”
Jesus is saying, in effect that true faith is never to be
equated with “human certainty”. There are some things about God of which we can
be certain. But to be honest is to admit that those things are fairly few. They
are rock solid, but few. God is love. God is our hope for salvation. God is
mercy and forgiveness and justice and judgement and passion for the poor and
sick and outcast – all true. But beyond that, we believers had better tread
carefully with our claims to certitude. Because God, has also disclosed himself
to be the up-ender of human “knowledge”, including and sometimes especially
religious knowledge. God is creative, transforming, ever consoling mystery, and
that is good news for every seeker except for the one who imagines him or
herself to be in final control of their life. All that is true all the time. To
believe that is true faith.
At this moment in our Church and world, suddenly the
blinders have been taken off by the reality of the COVID-19 virus. We now have
a new opportunity to reflect on what is worthy of faith – real faith – and what
is not. Christians should not be content to know that someday the markets will
come back and our 401Ks will heal and the bars will open back and we’ll be able
to watch Twins baseball again.
That’s all great and probably true. But our consolation must
come from something far more sturdy and true: i.e. that God is God, and only
He, and that truly to know this means never to cave in to fear of despair. This
is faith.
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