Scripture Reflection for the Fourth Sunday in Lent:
1 Samuel 16:1, 6-7, 10-13
Psalm 23: 1-3, 3-4, 5, 6
Ephesians 5:8-14
John 9:1-41
“Now you know the rest of the story.”
For years, the broadcaster Paul Harvey signed off his daily radio show with that phrase. He would spend several minutes relating a true story that may have seemed, at the time, obscure.
Sometimes it was about a person from the news, or from history or some seemingly insignificant event that, as we’d find out at the end, was really something monumental. “Now,” Harvey would say, “you know the rest of the story.”
We might say that about this Sunday’s Gospel.
It’s really one of the more unusual miracles we hear about, and it shows us a side of Jesus’s ministry that we don’t often consider – the realization that even an astounding healing can come at a cost.
Scholars tell us that this account about how Jesus healed a man “blind from birth” is the only time the gospels mention a disease or a condition that a person was born with. Not only that: it’s a story with an abundance of characters – from the blind man to his parents to the Pharisees. What occurs sends ripples through the community.
And there is more – what comes after the healing, the rest of the story. There are aftershocks, consequences, questions.
With most of these kinds of encounters, Jesus simply performed the miracle – helping the blind to see, the lame to walk, the lepers to be cleansed and then moved on. The person who was healed disappears and is never heard from again.
But this time, it’s different. We learn reactions; the man is summoned, interrogated, ridiculed. This encounter with Christ even prompted people to question just what Jesus had done and what sort of man he might be; after all, he had dared to perform a miracle on the sabbath!
All that prompted an extraordinary response from Jesus. As he did so often, Jesus went in search of someone who was rejected, the scorned, the marginalized. He didn’t abandon him or leave him alone. He had one more miracle to perform: bringing the fullness of light, of understanding, to the one who had been in darkness.
Christ sought the man who had received sight – to help him see even more clearly what had happened and just who had healed him. “I came into this world,” Jesus told him, “so that those who do not see might see, and those who do see might become blind.”
It is a powerful proclamation, and it stands before us right now as a challenging meditation for these last weeks of Lent.
How is our own vision? Do we see Christ at work in our lives? Or are we blind, distracted by the petty aggravations and obligations of the world?
During an audience, Pope Francis once said that this episode asks us to consider – and reconsider our own faith. Think about the questions Jesus asks at the end of this Gospel – and then think how they pertain to us. “Do you believe that Jesus is the Son of God?” Pope Francis asked. “Do you believe that he can change your heart? Do you believe that he can show reality as he sees it, not as we see it? Do you believe that he is light, that he gives us the true light?”
During these 40 days, we’re called to redirect our hearts to these questions and to seek Christ’s light, remembering the flame that was passed to us at baptism and anticipating the explosion of fire that will come forth at Easter.
This week, this Gospel gives us “the rest of the story.” But it also asks us to think more deeply about our own narrative. What will be the rest of our story?
Deacon Greg Kandra is an award-winning author and journalist, and creator of the blog “The Deacon’s Bench.”
