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Homilies by Rev. Andrew Collis unless indicated otherwise.

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Lent 4, Year A
South Sydney Uniting Church
March 26, 2017

Psalm 23; John 9:1-41

‘Journey to ever-growing faith’

Our artwork for today (another of the Christ in the Wilderness series by Stanley Spencer) shows Jesus with a scorpion (the allusion is to Luke 10:19), which may be regarded a symbol of danger – a threatening aspect of reality. In the context of news from London this past week (and to racist responses to the news), it can symbolise deathly danger – murderous religiosity and psychopathology.

The earthy Christ figure depicts a life-affirming religiosity – bare-footed, open-handed compassion, commitment to solving problems of injustice, a refusal to submit to bullies and violent authorities. The power of love, we might say. God be with you ...

Musician and activist Nadya Tolokonnikova writes of her experience as a convicted "hooligan" (she spent two years in a prison for protesting Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church): "I would look around and realise how dire my situation truly was, but I would stop and think about how I could improve the lives of people around me. It's only then – when you start to find a solution – that you will feel good again. Even in the darkest times, helping others is power."

"But don't expect change to come right away," she continues. "It takes time to really undo all these [judgemental-tyrannical] narratives that have defined history for thousands of years. And we just have to prepare to fight for it much longer than we probably thought.

"[Bullies and tyrants] think they can smash people. [President] Putin thought that he could break us. But even in jail we still had our minds, our souls, and our happiness. In the end, we never gave up. And that is how you push back against [unjust authorities].

"We must not give them our fear."

Today's Gospel, too, is about bullies, as well as life-affirming religiosity.

Jesus says to certain authority figures: "If you were blind, there would be no sin in that. But since you say, 'We see', your sin remains."

The negative note on which the narrative ends is a reminder that there are two parties on journeys in the story: the positive journey of the person born blind to ever-growing faith; the negative descent on the part of the religious authorities into ever-deeper spiritual blindness and "sin".

What makes the narrative distinctive is the way it brings out the contrast between these two parties in regard to the perception of reality.

Continually questioned about Jesus, the one born blind never goes beyond the evidence; but simply sticks to the facts and draws conclusions only under pressure of the authorities. A journey into ever-deeper faith and understanding of Jesus is a journey into reality in every sense of the word.

The adversaries, on the other hand, who are realising that they are losing their grip on the situation, resort more and more to denial. Their stratagem of summoning and browbeating the parents of the one born blind backfires badly.

In the end, they can only resort to unfounded accusations, personal abuse, and appeals simply to their authority and status. Before expelling the healed person, they exclaim: "What! You're steeped in sin from birth, and you're giving us lectures?"

Even in purely human terms their incapacity to perceive and accept reality is painfully exposed.

On a more spiritual level, they refuse to come to the Light lest their deeds be exposed (John 3:19-20). They who judged the one born blind as a sinner end up, despite their protests (v. 40), blind themselves and encased in sin.

What ultimately emerges, then, is a sense that faith, far from being a flight into unreality and make-believe, actually entails a heightened capacity to see and accept the truth: the truth about oneself (including recognition of one's own proneness to self-deception and selfishness), the truth about the world, and the truth about God's outreach to the world in the person of the Chosen One to draw human beings out of selfishness and delusion to the freedom of divine eternal life.

Is there a truth you are given to see in (light of) this story? … Amen.

Reflection by Brendan Byrne, Life Abounding: A Reading of John's Gospel, Liturgical Press, 2014.

Nadya Tolokonnikova is a Russian artist and political activist and a member of the punk rock band Pussy Riot. The quotations above are taken from an article that originally appeared in the March/April 2017 issue of FP magazine.

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