Blindness of the Soul

Homily for the Thirty-First Sunday after Pentecost

Jesus asked the blind man, saying: what do you want me to do for you? And he said: Lord, that I may regain my sight. And Jesus said to him: regain your sight; your faith has saved you (Lk 18:40-42)

In today’s Gospel, beloved brethren, we heard of the miraculous healing by Jesus Christ of a blind man in the city of Jericho. This blind man had strong faith that the Son of David—for so he called Jesus Christ—would certainly heal him of his blindness, and when, upon his cry of Son of David, have mercy on me! those passing by said to him: Be silent, he cried out all the louder: Son of David, have mercy on me! And he cried out so loudly because the Lord was not close by him, but stood at quite a distance. The Lord stopped and commanded that the blind man be brought to Him; and when he came near, He asked him: What do you want from Me? He said: Lord, I want to see. Jesus said to him: See, your faith has saved you. And at once he could see, and he followed after Him, glorifying God. And all the people, seeing this, offered praise to God. The greatest of miracles! With the single word see, the Lord delivered a man from blindness, making his eyes perfectly clear. — Happy is the blind man; blessed is he who did not see, yet believed: for faith saved him.

But here is what is strange: why did people who could see—such as the scribes, the Pharisees, and the priests, that is, what would be called the intelligentsia in modern parlance—why did these learned and prominent men of the Jewish people not believe in Jesus Christ as the Messiah, as the God-Man, as the Savior of mankind? After all, they saw His miracles with their own eyes; did they not hear His divine word with their own ears, and not with the ears of others? These questions of themselves lead us to this: that besides bodily blindness there is, in many and many a person, a spiritual blindness—a blindness that is unnatural, self-chosen, which might more simply be called willfulness and self-darkening. Such voluntary blindness reigns also in our highly enlightened age, the age of civilization and progress of every kind—that is, of striding forward and forward. This spiritual blindness afflicts the common people as well, who are plunged into the darkness and abyss of the schism, who have closed their eyes so as not to see, and their ears so as not to hear, the truth; and especially learned people, even highly learned in the opinion of the world, and rich people, carried away by learned ravings and blinded by their own vicious inclinations. They, these learned men, have set human reason in the place of faith and of the Church—a reason so nearsighted and darkened by passions that it barely grasps what is on the earth and with difficulty finds what is at hand[1], while of the spiritual kingdom of God it has not even a concept. They believe in the omniscience and the power of human reason; they believe unquestioningly in its investigations, although these investigations are very often erroneous; they do not believe the word of God, and speak contrary to it; they reject evident truths proclaimed in the word of God (for example, the six-day creation of the world by the word of almighty God, and the creation of man in the image of God; the immortality of the human soul, the life beyond the grave; they consider unnecessary the Church with her divine teaching, her divine services, her mysteries, her sacred hierarchy—and, who knows what else besides, of which it is not fitting to speak at this point). And what more? Sometimes an evident historical truth, accepted even by the holy Church, they turn inside out and speak contrary to the Church and to history itself; they call black white and white black, bitter sweet, and sweet bitter. May God deliver every Christian from such blindness! There is often not even a healing for such blindness: because learned blind men are infected with an incurable pride, which does not allow anyone to speak more correctly than they about what they affirm. Such, too, were the scribes, Pharisees, and chief priests who were contemporaries of Jesus Christ. O, if only these learned men would come to the humble conviction to which one ancient sage came, who said to himself: «I know this: that I know nothing.» For what are all our scientific attainments worth in comparison with what we do not yet know—what the eye has not yet seen and the ear has not heard, and what has not entered into the heart of man? Nothing. And what we have learned with our own mind is knowledge far from essential to us, and most often we do not possess the most essential of all knowledges, possessing, so to speak, only fragments of knowledge, and even those only seeming to be such; and what we have learned, we learned in the light of the Christian faith, which has widened the horizon of all human knowledge. But here is yet another blindness besides the blindness of proud learning: it is lack of love and hatred toward one’s neighbor. The holy Apostle John the Theologian says: he who hates his brother is in darkness, and walks in darkness, and does not know where he is going, because darkness has blinded his eyes[2].

This blindness is found among people of every calling and station in life. This, too, is a terrible blindness! A man hates one who is like himself—his own nature, his brother, his fellow member, his fellow citizen, a member of Christ and of the Church—one subject, as he himself is, to infirmities and sins. My brethren! Sin alone must be hated; but your brother, who is of one nature with you, a fellow member of yours and of Christ’s, must be loved and cherished as yourself; you must share with him the good things of the earth, which the good God has given to all, and not to us alone; in a word—bear one another’s burdens, for in this way the law of Christ will be fulfilled.[3]

O Christ, true Light, enlighten us all with the light of the understanding of Your holy Gospel, and dispel the darkness that lies upon our minds and hearts; with faith we pray to You. Amen.