Guide us through the valley of darkness.

Homily.

4^th Sunday of Lent

19^th March 2023.

Part of the counselling process involves sitting down with a client, initially to listen to their story about the issue they have. To allow the client to do this the counsellor has to be non-judgmental, totally open and real towards the client, and show them empathy.  The difference between empathy and sympathy is with empathy the counsellor shows compassion and understanding towards the client, whereas sympathy is more about having pity towards the person and tends to be more about being grateful you don’t have the same problem.

As the client goes through their story, the counsellor relates back to what they had been told to gain a sense of whether they had picked up the story from the client correctly. On hearing the story related back, the client has the opportunity to see if the story is right but they also get to hear their story from another person’s perspective. As the process goes on, the client also gets to see where they have blind spots and are able to look at the problem from a different point of view. In many cases, it can be like a light bulb going on, a Eureka moment where something which had been hard for them to fathom suddenly becomes crystal clear.

Jesus sees the blind man. From birth, he has had no way of looking at the world but has had to use his other senses. His hearing would be more astute and the sense of smell and touch would be heightened to compensate for the loss of sight. The Pharisees are more interested in tripping Jesus up, their focus is on building up evidence against Jesus because they see him as a threat. They are more concerned with finding out who was more sinful, the blind man’s parents or the blind man, simply because for them someone had sinned to cause the affliction.

Still, Jesus’s focus was on how to relieve this man and restore him to full health. He was more concerned with how to help a person in need. When questioned, Jesus’s reply was simply that no one had sinned. The man’s blindness was a way of showing how Jesus had come into the world to do his Father’s will. While the night was not upon him, meaning the time left before his crucifixion, Jesus would work as he was the light of the world. So he made a paste in the dirt, rubbed it on the man’s eyes and told him to wash it off in the Pool of Siloam. As the man did this, light entered through the lenses of his eyes and an image was projected onto both his retinas. A signal would have been sent along his optic nerves to his brain to turn the image upside down so he could see things correctly. It may have taken him a moment of two to adjust to this new sensation. The flood of movement, colour and trying to identify what was happening before him, from the perspective of two eyes, allowed him to sense depth. All of this many of us simply take for granted as being normal. It might be like going to the cinema, the lights go out and we wait in anticipation for the images to explode onto the screen in from of us, so we can enjoy the thrills of a movie over several hours. Our senses through sights and sounds, would be excited by the experience.

However, the Pharisees are left a little like the bystanders outside who may feel the vibrations of audio but do not really understand what they mean and are completely in the dark about what is going on. They have no sense of context and meaning because they are standing in the dark.

Without Jesus, we are like those who remain outside the cinema, lost in the darkness. Jesus is the light of the world, and when the light is shone on us the darkness flees and everything about us is revealed, including the things we are ashamed of. And like the person in counselling who gets to see their blind spots, they now have the capability of looking for solutions to their issues. Yet, they can only do this if there is a light shining in the first place. If we accept Jesus into our lives, he will shine his light on us, he will help us to work through the problems we face, and reveal to us the solutions we are after. Jesus will make things clear for us to see so that we do not stumble and get hurt. He is the shepherd who will guide us through the valley of darkness, leading us towards all things that are good for us. If we push Jesus away, the light will go out and we will be left to blindly stagger in the dark.

Jesus loves us as we are and wants us to be in his presence. Without him, we can easily fall into the wrong path because of the darkness, but with him beside us, the path becomes clearly defined and we can take the right course. We are asked to wake up from our sleep, rise up from the dead and Christ will shine on us.

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