Homily for the Fourth Sunday in Lent (Laetare Sunday), March 15, 2026. Gospel of St. John 9:1-41. Theme: We Are Each the Man Born Blind
Sometimes those of us who came to faith after having gone through a lot of bad “stuff” (to put it politely) wonder, “Why?” Why did we wait so long? Why did the light not begin to shine until after so many years of wandering and wondering? Or why didn’t I just accept the faith that my family tried to pass on to me which would have saved me so much grief? The disciples asked Jesus pretty much the same type of question when they first encountered the Man Born Blind in today’s Gospel. They were also asking, “Why?” And Jesus’ reply to them is pretty much the same that He would say to us about our lives, “...It’s so that the works of God might be made visible.”
This doesn’t mean that we were intentionally put into bad situations just so God could end up looking all great and powerful! What He means is that even the wrong turns and bad decisions that we made in our lives can be used by God to bring us out of the darkness and into the light. And you know, the Man Born Blind also had other dark issues to deal with besides lack of vision. For example, even though he was living on the street as a beggar we learn that he has local parents whom people knew. That's why the Pharisees were able to send for them. And then when we hear them speaking about their son they sound cold and detached from him. It seems as if there was no love lost there. Finally, there seems to be uncertainty about his age because the parents are called to come and testify in his place. Now in Judaism a boy was considered a man with legal rights around age 13 , so it seems that our Blind Man’s age was hard to tell by appearance. So he may very well have been but a young teenager. The poor guy! His own parents apparently kicked him out of the house, abandoning him to live on the streets! Talk about dealing with baggage and issues! And I’m sure that like the disciples and like us, he also asked God, “Why?” and wondered if good would ever come his way.
Back in the days before Jesus entered our lives, we were like the Man Born Blind. We were also afflicted with lack of vision, but it was of the spiritual sort and we wondered if good would ever come our way. And just as the man’s physical disability made him open to the hope that Jesus could help him, so also our personal forms of darkness made us reach out in hope for the healing touch of the Lord. Situations such as addiction with its repeated cycles of recovery and relapse, or the pain of failed relationships with its broken hearts, or the financial situations that made life a stomach-turning rollercoaster…or whatever stuff we were dealing with, became ways in which Jesus was able to walk into our lives and begin to light up our world. And then once we opened up and allowed Christ in, our spiritual vision started to come into focus. And then the more we experienced how much better our lives became because of Jesus, the more we wanted to know Him. It was as if the lyrics to the beloved hymn, "Amazing Grace” began to ring true in our lives, “I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see!”
Like the Man Born Blind, after we experienced the healing touch of Jesus our understanding of Him went through a deepening process, which is still happening in our lives today. The Gospel shows us that once the man was healed he went from Sight to Insight to Faith in his relationship with Christ. At first, when he was going just by Sight he described his Healer as “that man called Jesus”. His knowledge of the Lord was very surface-level and incomplete. This is probably where many of us were when we first met the Lord. Perhaps we knew the main highlights about His life from Bible stories, but was that pretty much it. Up to then in our lives we were looking at Christ only with ordinary Sight, much the same way that we would have looked at any admirable figure.
But then the man was brought into a situation where he had to think more deeply about who this Jesus was and what He had done for him. He begins to see that He was more than just “that man” and declares, “He is a prophet…God is with him!” The man is progressing from Sight to Insight, which means that the light is getting a bit brighter. I bet most of us also found ourselves in a similar situation. What I mean is, we were pretty sure that there was something more to this man named Jesus than met the eye, because our lives started getting better, but we weren’t exactly sure what that "something more" might be. There was something different about him that attracted us and so we began to learn more about Him. We were moving on from Sight to Insight as we started praying, started reading the Bible and started attending Mass again.
But it wasn't until the Man Born Blind stood up and boldly spoke out about Jesus that we went from Insight to Faith. The light of Christ then began shining so brilliantly within him that he exclaimed, “I do believe!” Then he bowed down and worshiped Jesus. So you see, all the “stuff”, all the bad news of his former way of life ended up becoming good news that brought him to this New Beginning and Fresh Start in life! And you know, it’s a very real possibility that if we had never gone through all our “bad news”, then we too might never have ended up finding the Good News of and about Jesus. So, are we now ready and willing to go follow the Man Born Blind further and go public in our relationship with Christ? Are we open to becoming intentional disciples who stand with Jesus no matter what the cost? Are we willing to embrace life as authentic Christians and be done with a half-baked, half-hearted approach to our faith? These are the kind of questions that the Gospel of St. John wants us to ask ourselves once we come to realize that we are each the Man Born Blind.
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