Darkness is Light with Love of Thee

The narrative of John’s account of the man born blind presented in the Gospel of the Fourth Sunday of Lent flows towards a dialogue between Jesus and the healed man. The importance of this dialogue consists in being a model of conversion, which entails personal encounter with Christ, confession of faith in him and comes to the climactic point of surrendering oneself in the act of worshipping him (cf. Jn 9:35-38). Worship pertains to the core of what is at issue in this incident recounted (as in others in the gospels), namely, the Pharisees severe critical rejection of Jesus for breaking the Law of the Sabbath, which forbad doing work on that day of rest in order to be dedicated to the worship God. Jesus’ act of compassionate healing, thus, showed the purpose of worship being intrinsically related to fostering human worth; it also showed up the Pharisees’ attitude of spiritual blindness in preferring a rigidly narrow interpretation regarding what they considered worship to be.

In commenting on this passage of John’s Gospel, Jean Vanier says: “The authorities are imprisoned in (confined by) an ideology – an intellectual theory cut off from reality and experience… We refuse to accept others because we are closed up in our own ideas and certitudes. Jesus came to liberate us from ideology.” (The Gospel of John, The Gospel of Relationship, p.56.)

Furthermore, this attitude of spiritual blindness indicated exactly the opposite of Jesus’ intention of expressing God’s loving goodness. It missed the point of this entirely through presuming to pre-judge his intention by failing in an all too limited human way to perceive beyond or into the external action’s significance. The crucial importance of this finds expression also in the first scripture reading of this Sunday, which states that whereas human beings judge by mere superficial appearances, God sees the heart. The secret of discovering the deep joy of living requires learning to read God’s loving design of goodness etched into the whole of creation. This learning demands a contemplative serenity, or as William Wordsworth puts it:

While with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things. (Tintern Abbey)

This learning to see properly and truly implies a process of patient discernment of the good that can come even – and at times especially – in the midst of adversity and suffering. John Milton discovered the useful service he could offer through experiencing his ordeal of blindness. He expressed this in the famous line at the end of a sonnet:

They also serve who only stand and wait.

Waiting can seem like an interminable dark night of knowing that we don’t know. But, as Blessed John Henry Newman put it, “Darkness is light with love of Thee.” By learning to wait in love our sense perceptions and our motives become purified. We have to turn to Christ, “the Light of the world’ (Jn 9:5), who, as depicted in the lovely painting below, stands at the door waiting for us to open the door to him, since the latch is on the inside. He’ll then illumines the inner eye of our hearts enabling us to perceive God’s design of goodness at work in others and throughout creation. To realise this we have to go by the way of living through life’s tortuous paradoxes. T.S. Eliot put it this way:

be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. (East Coker)

 This life’s little day of waiting can be regarded as lingering in the shadows of the wings before making a debut on the floodlit stage of the great drama conceived by God. Or again, it may be compared to being a dress rehearsal preparing us to move steadily in the dynamism of paschal hope towards what St Augustine at the end of his Confessions described as the eternal Sabbath. By waiting prayerfully now in faith, hope and love the blindness of our limited outlook is healed, while the darkness of sin-caused confusion becomes dispersed. By celebrating the Paschal Mystery of Faith we gratefully praise God calling and enabling us to participate already, though yet not fully, in the joyous light of the Virgin Mary and the saints who behold and live in God’s Presence. As St Paul put it:

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love. (1 Cor 13:12f.)

Our whole life becomes transformed in the light of worship, as the blind beggar’s life was in his encounter with Jesus, as seen above, that wonderful encounter through which he discovered he was loved by him who looked with compassion on his condition.

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William Holman Hunt, The Light of the world - St Paul's Cathedral London.