Our physical sense of sight is a wonderful gift.  The gift of sight opens up for us a beautiful world of light and knowledge.  With our sight we behold beauty and we are able to wonder at the marvels of creation.  As we gaze on the world around us we gain access to knowledge, both through reading and contemplation.  Our sight receives the light and reveals visible truths to us.  It would certainly be a tragic and impoverishing handicap to be born blind and never have experienced the world of sight.  Living in darkness there would be much of life that was unavailable to us.

     A few people are born without the gift of physical sight but all of us are born into a kind of darkness, the darkness brought on by sin.  As Jesus points out to his disciples about the man born blind in John’s gospel, this is not our own personal sin or the personal sins of our parents, but it is a condition of the brokenness of the world, a condition known as original sin.  Original sin separates us from God and doesn’t allow us to see the deeper truths of life, those truths that can only be grasped in faith.  All of us are born blind in this way.  All of us are born with a spiritual blindness that only Jesus can heal for us.  Without the gift of faith we live a very limited life, only being able to see the appearance of things.  Our sight is limited to a small spectrum of light.  The things that we are able to see are material things.  Without faith we have no spiritual vision and are unable to know the things of the spirit.  We might hear about spiritual truths from others but we would have no direct experience ourselves of life’s deeper spiritual realities.

     In the gospel of John, Jesus encounters a man born blind and offers to him the gift of sight.  He gives him this new gift of sight through an anointing and a washing in water, or baptism.  The sacrament of baptism is the cure that Jesus offers for the spiritual blindness from birth of original sin.  When the man born blind is anointed with the clay that Jesus makes and washes in the pool of Siloam, his eyes are opened and he is able to see clearly.  What happens to this man physically happens to all of us spiritually in the waters of baptism.  In the waters of baptism our spiritual blindness is washed away and a new world of seeing and knowing is opened up to us.  The waters of baptism wash away the mud of original sin and give us a new way of seeing, the gift of seeing through faith.  Faith allows us to see beyond the appearance of things into the very heart of existence and gives us access to hidden truths and divine realities.

     As we grow in our gift of sight which is faith, we come to know in a deeper and more insightful manner the eternal truths of our faith.  We are able to see Jesus in a new light and come to know the truth of his divine identity.  The man born blind gradually grows into deeper and deeper insight into the identity of Jesus.  At first he knows Jesus as a man that healed him, then he comes to see him as a prophet, finally he comes to believe that he is the Son of Man, the Messiah.  He is able to see as God sees for as Samuel tells us in the first reading today, “Not as man sees does God see, because man sees the appearance but the LORD looks into the heart.”  With the gift of spiritual vision that faith gives us we are able to see beyond the appearance of things and look into the heart of life and reality.  Faith opens us to the revelation of truth that comes from God and gives us life, eternal life in his presence.  We need to learn to trust this way of seeing and knowing that will lead us to God.  Paul reminds us that the light of faith “produces every kind of goodness and righteousness and truth” and will help us to know what is pleasing to the Lord.

     One of the deepest forms of blindness comes from our pride when we think that we know and can see and yet we are blind to the truth of things.  We say that we can see but the sin of our pride keeps us in the dark and we remain in the darkness of our sin.  Lent allows us to enter into a time of scrutiny in our lives in which we may acknowledge our blindness due to sin and seek healing from the Lord.  With our elect who are preparing for baptism, we celebrate today the second scrutiny and ask for an exorcism from the darkness of sin and evil that keeps us blind to the Lord’s presence, love and mercy and we ask for new sight, new faith and new spiritual vision that will allow us to walk in the way of the Lord as his disciples.