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6th Sunday of Pascha - The Sunday of the Blind Man

What must I do to be saved?

John 9:1 38

2011

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Christ is risen. Christos aneste. Christos voskrese.

We won't be saying that for very much longer because Ascension is this week. The day before Ascension is the Leave Taking of Pascha, and then we no longer say "Christ is risen." But Christ is risen in our hearts.

I want to explain to you the beginning of this story about the healing of the blind man. And then let's look at it as a primer, basically, on how to be saved, on the things you need to do or the things you to not do in order to be saved.

It says: As Jesus passed by, He saw a man that was blind from his birth. This "passed by" is a code word. It's the same thing that was said when He went to the man who was left half dead on the side of the road in the parable of the good Samaritan. This passing by is indicating two things. One, of course, is incarnation because He wouldn't pass by unless he became a Man. He wouldn't come to us as a Man unless He became incarnate. And He became incarnate for the purpose of healing us. Also, our Lord purposefully came to this man who was blind. Not by happenstance, but by design. And the same thing happens with us: The Lord passes by, all the time, coming to our life when we need Him, which is basically always.

And the disciples asked about this man because he was blind, and they had the idea that he must be somebody who sinned. So they asked: Was it his sin or the sin of his parents? And the Lord said: It wasn't either one, but it was so that the glory of God should be manifest.

A few days ago, we read in the Gospel that, don't judge according to appearance, but judge according to righteous judgments. We can't know about such things. You can't make decisions about why someone has been struck with a disease or why a tornado fell in one city and not in the next, why one person was murdered and another person lived to old age. We can't make those decisions. We don't have that understanding. God knows.

So we should be careful not to judge according to appearance or according to prejudice. That's what this is teaching us.

Then He says something that's very interesting, because it is really not related to what the apostles said directly. The Lord does this a lot. When somebody asks Him a question, He either does not answer the question at all but answers another one, or He answers that question but then goes deeper.

And here the Lord is going much deeper. He says, "I must do the works of Him Who sent Me while it is day. The night cometh when no man can work." And, of course, the man is blind and, therefore, it is always night for him, so the Lord is playing off this a little bit. But what He's saying is that, "Now is the time for repentance. Your life is like the day, and the night is your death. You cannot do any work after your death, so the time for repentance is now."

That's what He is teaching him. There is no "later." There is "now." You shouldn't put off repenting. You shouldn't put off praying. You shouldn't put off getting yourself right. Because this is the time to do it. Because "now" is "the day."

Now He's speaking of it for Himself. But by extension, He's really teaching us that "the day" is the time for us to understand, because after the end of our life there is no repentance. There is either sorrow or joy but no repentance.

And then He says, "As long as I am in the world, I am the Light of the World."

Now, He's always in the world, so this means He is always the Light of the World. And again, this is playing off the man being blind. Now, He's speaking to us here, so we must also be blind. We must recognize that we have blindness, and the only cure for this blindness is the Light of the World.

And then after He had said these things, He spat on the ground, and He made clay. And made balls of clay, actually, and thrust them into the sockets of the man's eyes. Our Services show that we know that this man was actually born without eyes, not just blind but without eyes.

Then He tells the man to go and wash in the Pool of Siloam, which means "sent." And of course the washing in the pool is indicative of baptism. Baptism is necessary for cleansing and for healing. And so the man washed and he came away seeing.

Now we can get into how this story tells us what we must do to be saved. We've already covered a couple of things. Of course, Jesus must pass by. Without His incarnation, without His teaching us and giving us an example and His words being preserved for us at least some of them that He said verbatim, but the rest of His words being preserved in our Holy Tradition without His arising from the dead and ascending into Heaven and descending of the Holy Spirit, we could not be saved.

And also a personal meeting with Christ is necessary, because when Jesus passed by, He came directly to the blind man just as He comes directly to us. So we must have a personal relationship with our Lord. There is a canon in your prayer book; I don't know if you have seen it. It's the Canon to Sweetest Jesus; and over and over again, we say "Sweetest Jesus." It's very beautiful.

And then what else must happen to be saved? Well, the Lord tells him to go wash. We must be baptized. And with baptism comes healing, remission of sins and healing, but only the remission of those sins that we have sinned up to the point of baptism, not the ones afterwards. And this is where the most important part, really, of salvation comes in.

Some people make a mistake and think that they say salvation is wholly dependent upon God, that God decrees who will be saved and who will not be saved. This is not true. God wants all to be saved. He tells everybody to go wash. And many do. But some among those who wash do not do the rest. And "the rest" is to struggle to keep the Commandments.

And this man shows this struggle. Remember, he was a blind man, and the whole society thought he had sinned, so therefore he was not well thought of. He was begging. He was probably hungry many times, cold many times, overheated many times. Had very few friends, if any.

And then he came away saved. So he could, after restoration, by a ritual washing by the priests, be restored to the synagogue. But he was instead brought before the synagogue, before the rulers who had already agreed that they would cast out anybody who said that Jesus was the Christ, that is, that He was the Messiah, because they didn't want any Messiah coming around on their watch because they had the power and they wanted to keep it. They were dishonest; they were unscrupulous; they did not love. They didn't care that a man had just been healed of a lifelong disease and that he would be restored to the community. That was unimportant to them. It would be like squashing a bug. He didn't matter to them at all.

So they wanted to use him as a scapegoat, and they questioned him. Who opened your eyes? And he said, "It was a man called Jesus; He made clay and told me to wash and I came away seeing." And they asked him other questions, and it's clear from their line of questioning that they had no interest in the truth at all. They only wanted to find a way to accuse Jesus.

Now, Jesus had made this clay on the Sabbath day. According to Jewish law, you are to do no work on the Sabbath day. You would eat food that had previously been prepared or eat only cold food. You wouldn't do anything. You wouldn't farm. You would only go to the temple for prayer and keep the Sabbath. In this way, without doing any work at all.

And so the Pharisees, in their blindness, in their rage, wanted to say that making little clay balls and putting them in the man's eyes so that he could see, was breaking the law of the Sabbath against work on the Sabbath.

Well, in an earlier place or in another place, the Lord rebuked the Pharisees when He had healed on the Sabbath day. And He said, "Which one of you, if you have an ox or ass on the Sabbath day, will not lead him out to water or if he falls into a ditch will not take him out of it?" Of course, of course, we'll take care of our animals, and of course if someone is hurt or injured we would take care of them. This is not work. This is mercy. This is love. It is never wrong to do good. Ever.

And the Jews, that is, some of the Jews, some of the ruling elite, were so blind and so power hungry, that they did not know about mercy.

And in another place He says, "You tithe mint and cumin and rue, and yet you are not concerned with the weightier matters of the law: Justice and love and mercy."

So this man was questioned over and over, and he started to develop this understanding of Christ. Why did he develop it? Partially because the Jews were asking him these leading questions, and also and absolutely because of his courage. Because he didn't back down. He wasn't afraid to answer them. He wasn't afraid to say: Well, He must be a prophet if He healed me.

Now, to be called a prophet was a very great thing. He knew that they would be angry if he said that. So they asked him again. They brought his parents. His parents were afraid, so they passed the responsibility of speaking about this matter to him. They didn't want to be thrown out of the synagogue.

I tell you, there are parallels in our society right now. If you have open eyes, you can see that freedom is being constrained in our society. Freedom to believe the truth is being expunged from our society. Perhaps we think we are free, but there are aspects of our society even now that are not free, and certainly in many places of the world it is not free. We know of, let's say, anti blasphemous laws in, for instance, Pakistan. You can not even speak of Jesus as being the Christ in Pakistan. That could be considered to be a slur against Islam, and you can be put to death.

Well, now, in our world sometimes you cannot speak the truth. It can be a slur against whatever sin people want to commit, and you could be fined or fired. It is happening now in our midst; you best be aware of it. And you best be aware of it you cannot back down about the truth. You must be like this blind man and not be afraid to be cast out of the synagogue, that is, judged by worldly powers.

This man did have a bit of humor at one point when they had been questioning him so much; he understood that this must be God because, first of all, the vehemence of the Jews and, second of all, God's wisdom filling him because he was an open vessel because of his courage.

If he didn't have the courage, he wouldn't have understood this and he wouldn't have been healed. His eyes would have been healed, but he still would have been blind because his healing was a dual healing, first of his body, then of his soul.

And the healing of his soul came through this questioning by the Pharisees and the wisdom of God filling him as he stood up with courage and honesty.

And so as they continued to question, he said, "It's never been known that a man who was born blind has been able to see. If this Man were not of God, He could do nothing." He was saying, He is of God, and of course that made the Pharisees very angry, and he was cast out. But he showed us, by this questioning, that you should look at closely I'm not going into absolute details; I've gone into detail about it many times in other homilies. But if you look at his courage and his honesty, you have to have those things, brothers and sisters.

God will not give you honesty. He will give you courage. He will help you have courage. But if you're not innately honest, if you don't order your life according to the truth, God will not help you. You have to live honestly. When we live without honesty, we are living like the devil because the devil is the great slanderer. And slander of course is a lie, so he's the great liar. Be honest.

And God will help you with courage. But you're going to have to muster some of it yourself. It's not just going to be bestowed upon you as if God waves a wand and you have courage. This is not like the Wizard of Oz. It is where courage comes from conviction and from honesty and from desire, and then God will help you and, yes, He will help you to be courageous.

These are the things we need to be saved. God will provide courage and wisdom, but we must provide character. We must provide honesty. We must provide desire.

Now, I have had many people ask me: I don't even desire to stop sinning. And then I ask them the question: Do you desire to desire? Do you want to want to? And invariably, I get the answer yes. Sometimes people say, "I'm not even sure if I want the want to." Well, maybe if you want to want to want to. It might sound silly, but it is not silly.

We struggle against sin. Sometimes we don't struggle very much. But if there is in your heart the desire to become righteous, God will help you. But if you do not desire it, God will not help you. It's as simple as that.

So go as many iterations as you want of wanting to want to. Beg God to help you to have desire. You must provide the beginning, though. God will not provide all of the desire. He will not provide all of the courage. You must present Him something, even if it is small, and He will multiply it.

This man presented to God his courage, and God gave him wisdom, and even before seeing Him for the first time he really knew that He was God. And then when he was cast out of the synagogue, the Lord found him and told him who He was. And the man worshiped Him.

This is the path for us too, brothers and sisters. Of course, when we see blindness in the Scripture, we have to understand that we also have blindness. When we see a person who is lame, we must understand that we are also crippled. When we see sickness, we know that we also are sick. You always read the Scriptures understanding that it applies to us in some way.

Well, if we are blind, then we must also follow the way this blind man followed. We have already, most of us, been baptized. Let us follow his way of courage and of conviction and of integrity. God will provide the wisdom. And God will help you.

May God help us to have good character. And then when we beg God for help, He will help us. Amen.

Priest Seraphim Holland 2011

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