Kent Beausoleil, S.J.

Homily – Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 22, 2009 ‘Expect the Unexpected’

A book that I come back to and read again from time to time is Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. In a chapter called seeing she writes of the experiences of blind patients, who through a new surgical procedure, have their sight restored. Blind all their life they look at the world from a fresh perspective. She writes that the newly sighted offer insights and excitement as they speak well of the world as their new vision is pure sensation unencumbered by meaning. She speaks of a twenty-two year old woman who after her bandages were removed, gazed for the first time at the world around her and repeatedly exclaimed, ‘Oh God! How beautiful!’ Ms. Dillard concludes that we sighted people can be blind as well. We can be blind to the beauty of the spiritual reality of God’s loving force in the world. She calls us to let go of perceptions that no longer work, that no longer serve. She concludes we need to let go of these false perceptions and expectation, to launch into the deep, and then we shall see truly. She calls us, just as our readings and gospel do this morning, to new vision, to expect the unexpected.

Too often we live with a mistaken perception of ourselves and our world . A perception that becomes an expectation. We perceive ourselves as never good enough, as somehow fundamentally flawed, as incomplete, and that is what we have come to expect from ourselves. In not believing in our God given goodness we end up doing everything in our power to push away what we truly need, we end up pushing away love’s real possibility. Instead of seeing and believing in God’s love for us, and resting in that love, we fill our lives and hide behind materialism, alcoholism and ‘drugism’, addicted to work, or co-dependent in relationships as we believe in other’s and not our own goodness, fulfilling these false perceptions and expectations of self and remain blind. We look at the world around us and perceive the darkness, the violence, the terror, the depressed economy, the war, the oppression and discrimination, and come to make this perception the expectation. We throw up our hands and say ‘well that is just the way the world is’ there is nothing I can do about it. Here too we remain blind. Yet our souls and our world cry out for intimacy, for union, for communion, for justice for more light and less darkness. We need to, in faith, then expect that which is unexpected.

The Word of God calls us today to expect the unexpected – to expect the good, to receive the light, rather than to expect lack and darkness. The Lord calls to Samuel, when searching for someone to annoint, ‘hey Samuel, expect the unexpected’. The Lord looks on the heart, sees with pure spiritual truth, and not with human judgment, so expect the unexpected. Realize the power of God’s love manifest in your hearts God cries out to us. Realize, the power of your baptism, your own anointing, your own birth into new life as children of God. God cries to us arise children, you are the ones, the ones I love. Paul, as well, says expect the unexpected. You expect darkness, and are mistaken. "Once you were darkness but now you are light in the Lord. Always grow, not in darkness, not in the ways of the world and what the world teaches, but grow in the Lord. As children of light, as children baptized for the good, we are called to expose the darkness and bring it to light ‘for anything that becomes exposed to the light is light’. If we let the power of darkness in our heart and in our world this becomes the power that has force and will remain in force. If we let the power of God’s love and the light of Christ be the power that showers down on us then that is what is made manifest. We must "Awake, O sleeper", expect what we do not expect, "and Christ shall give us light".

According to Sandra Schneiders, the preeminent Johannine scholar, the Gospel of John is filled with stories and characters, of contrasts and connections, that move the reader and hearer to deeper faith. In John’s gospel we are invited to come and see, to see and believe, and finally to believe and share the good news with the world. The story of the man born blind is just such a story of faith and movement to belief, of seeing, believing, and of taking a stand. We, as well as the blind man, are called to expect the unexpected. Now, what one expects in this world which our gospel presents, is judgment, a judgment that will ultimately lead to inclusion or shunning from the worshiping cultic rituals of the temple for the boy and his parent’s. The pharisees question and judge. The parent’s disown any responsibility for the son claiming he is of age to think and be on his own. Only the boy believes in the light, actually names Jesus as the light, and is healed of blindness. The boy sees, believes, and is sent to share the good news. Everyone else in our story remains spiritually blind.

That suffering comes from sin is what the world expects. Yet, sin is not the final power, the revelation of God which is Jesus overcomes sin and suffering, if we just turn to the light and believe. What is unexpected then is that love and healing are the final and ultimate power of our merciful God. So the message here is to see the light of Christ in our lives with new eyes, believe in God and our own goodness, and bring God’s justice and mercy to a world that still lives in blindness. As Schneiders concludes in her Gospel of John focused work, Written that You May Believe, ‘the reader is of course supposed to identify with the man born blind. But do we, perhaps, recognize something of ourselves in the parents who confessed Jesus in private but become sophisticated evaders when that confession has consequences for our reputation or job or safety? Even worse, are we religious authority figures whose first allegiance is to the institution and who are willing to suppress the prophets among us when their testimony to their experience (of Christ) calls that institution or our position into question" (Schneiders, 161).

We are a people baptized into the light of Christ. Yet, we are a people whose faith is called forever to move closer to the light of Christ, and to move away from what the world expects of us. We are called to move away from what our own blind expectations may be, and move more and more to testify to the experience of Christ in our lives, the ways we have been healed of our own blindness. We have journeyed with our elect this year and relive with them their journey of faith from darkness into light. Their presence lead all us, those already baptized, to further faith in Christ. As they journey to the font of their faith’s full lived sacramental reality this Easter we to realize the journey of all of us to full life in Christ. Our faith is never perfect and we are forever called to the light, to new vision, to deeper faith. Like the blind man, we are still growing in our faith, still coming to understand what it means to be enlightened by Christ.

Yet in our faith, we have in some ways come to believe, and we as children of God, as members Bellarmine parish, testify in our words and deeds, in our care and concern, in making God’s love real in our heart’s and in our world, to the glory of that light revealed. In our love, we witness to the unexpected revelation of a love so true, that no darkness, no worldly expectation, can snuff out its light. We are called this day to a see with new eyes – to in faith, let the Lord wipe away the mud from our eyes, to let the oil from the horn of anointing wash over us, and to really and truly expect a love unexpected.

Peace

Fr. Kent A. Beausoleil, S.J.