Ukrainian Catholic ChurchAustralia, New Zealand and Oceania
Homily by Fr. Simon Ckuj on the Sixth Sunday after Easter
May 5, 2024
As we move towards the end of this Paschal season and approach the Lord’s glorious Ascension it is important that we keep the joy and the light of Pascha in our lives. Our spiritual vision remains far from perfect, but our Risen Lord has given us all that we need to become radiant with His brilliant and holy light.
O Christ our God, spiritual Sun of Justice, by Your pure touch, You enlightened the eyes of him who from his mother’s womb was without light. Enlighten the eyes of our hearts and make us children of the light and of the day, that we may cry out to You in faith: How great is Your compassion toward us, O Lover of Mankind, glory to You!
(Aposticha from Vespers)
How often have we stood in front of the kitchen pantry looking for something that we could not see, yet upon returning, we see that it was right in front of us! How often have we looked for keys often to find them in the most obvious place? How often can we look at something and not actually see it? If that is true in everyday life, it is even more the case in how we see or don’t see God. We often take our eyes, our sight for granted, but it is not only with our physical eyes that we see, but with the eyes of our soul.
Christ’s actions to restore sight to this blind man are filled with symbolism. First, he mixes earth with saliva and anoints his eyes with mud. This gesture recalls the passage from the book of Genesis where the story of man’s creation is narrated, and God breathes life into a figure of dust (Gen 2:7). Jesus in curing the blind man reminds us that He is carrying out a new creation. The man, blind from birth, needs to be reborn and so Jesus tells him to go and was in the pool of Siloam. When he obeyed Christ’s command to wash in water, he cleanses his eye and his soul. This is a symbol of the water of Baptism which makes us capable of seeing with the light of faith.
With this miracle, Jesus manifests himself, and He manifests himself to us as the “Light of the World”. The man blind from birth represents each one of us, who was created to know God; but due to sin has become blind; we need a new light; that of faith, which Jesus has given us.
Five weeks ago, we began our celebration of Pascha in the darkness of midnight. Then the brilliant light of the Saviour’s resurrection, gave us hope. Humanity had wandered in a spiritual blindness because of being enslaved to sin and death. Like the man born blind in, our capacity to participate in the blessed holiness for which we were created was deformed because we were enslaved to the fear of death and cast out of Paradise — held prisoner by the darkness of the tomb which extended to the depths of our souls.
In contrast to that darkness, we celebrate in this glorious season of Pascha, that the light of Christ shines even from the grave and extends to the darkest dimensions of our lives. To be radiant with the light of the Resurrection is what it means to know God. To know Him is not merely to have religious ideas or emotions about Him, but truly to share by grace in the life of the Holy Trinity. It is to have the eyes of our souls cleansed, to have our minds illuminated so that we can move from darkness to light.
The miracle carried out by Jesus gives rise to a heated debate because Jesus has done it on the Sabbath, violating, according to the Pharisees, the precept of the Law. Seeing the light lit in the blind man, the Pharisees, incapable of opening themselves to the truth, immerse themselves further in darkness, determined to deny all evidence. They deny that the man was really blind from birth and resist admitting that Jesus has done it. It is the drama of interior blindness which can affect many people, ourselves too, when we hold on to our personal opinions or ways of acting without a sincere opening to the truth, which can be demanding and require a change in the direction of our lives.
In contrast to this, the blind man starts traveling along a road of faith. At the outset he knows nothing about Jesus. Then, astonished by the gift of sight, he will say at first to those who ask him that “he is a prophet”. Later, faced with the insistence of those who interrogate him, he replies simply that if Jesus has been heard by God it is because “if anyone is a worshiper of God and does his will, God listens to him”. Finally, when Jesus opens his eyes to faith saying that the Son Man is he who is speaking with him the blind man exclaims: “’Lord, I believe’; and he worshiped him.”
As we move towards the end of this Paschal season and approach the Lord’s glorious Ascension it is important that we keep the joy and the light of Pascha in our lives. To do this we must follow the example of the man born blind. Our spiritual vision remains far from perfect, but our Risen Lord has given us all that we need to become radiant with His brilliant and holy light. That happens when we know and experience Him from the depths of our souls, which requires offering ourselves to Him through humble obedience in our daily lives. That means joining ourselves to His great victory over death by opening even the darkest and most difficult areas of our personalities and relationships to His healing light. There is no way to do that without living as our Lord taught us, which means turning away from all that obscures His light in us, from all that keeps us captive to the darkened ways of sin.
Let us pray in these last days of Pascha. “Enlighten the eyes of our hearts and make us children of the light and of the day, that we may cry out to You in faith: How great is Your compassion toward us, O Lover of Mankind, glory to You!”
