John 20:11-18 (Matins)
Acts 16:16-34
John 9:1-38
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.... but that the works of God should be revealed ....
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. |
What exactly are the works of God? If we were to call to mind all the Sacred Scriptures, survey the universe from furthest-flung space, and take stock of what it all means, we must come to one conclusion: life. The works of God, and only of God, are life. We may endlessly scan the skies for it; we may spend trillions upon trillions of dollars for more than half a century now listening for it; we may fill our fantasy entertainments with it; but be assured of this: life alone belongs to God. And our beautiful, fragile Earth, on which God has shed His grace, abounds with it .... Earth alone in a sterile void of spinning, dead rocks, which we generously term "the other planets." Other planets? They no more resemble our stunning Earth than a desert of barren stones resembles a coral reef teeming with many-colored, many-shaped, and animate life.
As the Gospel we read this morning begins,
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All things were made by Him; and without Him was not any thing made
that was made. In Him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. (Jn 1:1-4) |
Life belongs to God alone .... and Creation. And in our Gospel passage God's Son declares, in a series of "I Am" phrases, "I Am the light of the world."
The phrase "I Am,"
of course,
refers to God's Name:
"I Am Who Am" (Ex 3:14).
As the Roman Catholic saint
and
doctor of the Roman Catholic Church,
Thomas Aquinas,
commented,
this phrase singles out God as being unique in the Created order.
Created things,
creatures,
have being.
God the Creator
alone is being.
The Vulgate translation,
Ego sum qui sum,
is made of two infinitive
(we might say, "infinite" or "absolute")
forms of the verb to be,
referring only to itself through a relative pronoun,
qui,
a closed system of pure being.
Jesus says in our reading this morning, "I Am in the world,"
which is to say, "I Am is in the world."
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And Jesus rebuked him, and the demon came out of him, and the boy was cured
instantly. Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, "Why could we not cast it out?" |
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Jesus answered, "It was not that this man sinned, or his parents,
but that the works of God might be made manifest in him. We must work the works of Him who sent Me, while it is day; night comes, when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world." |
We cannot really say that the man-born-blind is healed, for he never had sight in the first place. You cannot heal someone's condition — bring it back to health — when it never existed. You cannot repair what never was broken. The proper adjective for this man is not blind, but uncompleted. At this birth, he was not completed. Jesus does not, therefore, utter the command, "Be healed!" as He does elsewhere. Rather, He takes up, once again, the act of creation and completes him:
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.... He spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle,
and He anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay ... |
| "then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground." |
| Behold, like the clay in the potter's hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel. |
Jesus is the Eternal Word of Creation. He is the Agency of the Holy Trinity Who made, and makes, the world. And this is His subject in the story of the man-born-blind. "I Am in the world," He tells the disciples. "I Am the light of the world," recalling Genesis 1:3:
| And God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. |
I find it interesting that people readily accept this mind-bending truth, yet have difficulty accepting the simple truth of God's Being and His Kingdom. When I was a researcher at Bell Labs many years ago, my boss's boss, Arno Penzias, who won the Nobel Prize in 1978 for confirming the Big Bang Theory, told me that he read Genesis 1 as being, "a precise, though poetic, statement of the Big Bang Theory." First there was light. Then there was time. Then, matter and then more complex matter.
Do you know what our proper relationship is to God (I say with the hairs of my arms still standing on end)? Dependence, complete and utter and grateful dependence. For He is our All, our Everything, our Maker, our Provider, our God. He is not a healer, much less a faith healer, as some Christians seem to believe. You do not worship your doctor, or love him with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, because he repaired your knee or removed a deadly cancer. God did not send His Son to live among us because He wanted everyone to be healed. If He had, then be assured that everyone would have been healed.
No. God sent His Son to awaken us from our self-absorbed and hazardous daydreams — our gauzy, hazy world where everything is about us, and we only think of God when we want things or when we reach a point of desperation. This is a "takers" relationship, not a love relationship. Our proper relationship to God is an incommensurable love that proceeds from understanding that every cell of your body and every atom of the beautiful earth and skies is a gift from Him Who made all, and then Who has turned His great and almighty Heart to you because He loves you. "What love is this ... in Mary's lap is sleeping?!"
I must share that I have grown weary of all the reporting on Corona virus curves. The implied premise were as if people do not die .... that this virus has brought death into the world! My brothers and sisters, every day 150,000 people die. Roughly 50,000 die of heart disease every day, 25,000 from cancer, nearly 20,000 from respiratory diseases, every day. Nearly 7,000 people die each day from dementia. Today the daily death rate from Covid-19 is about 5,000.
The lesson of our pandemic is to rouse us from our daydreams: people die. In 1995 I learned that I had Multiple Sclerosis. My brothers acted as if I had been handed a death sentence. I looked around me and saw that the whole world was dying. My brothers were dying. My friends were dying. Everyone born into the world is dying. I said, "We are all riding a train toward death. I knew this all the time. Yes, I thought my 'stop' was further down the track. Now I have learned that it is a few stops closer than I thought. At the end of the day, what is the difference?"
And I must add on a personal note that I received on that day a great gift: of being mindfully, consciously, in a sense urgently dependent on God, the greatest gift in the world. He keeps me alive hour by hour, day by day, as He does each of you, in His wisdom .... whatever that may mean for each of us.
I live and you live in the most intimate relationship imaginable: a life-and-death intimacy. This is God's design. Like Adam and Eve we have the opportunity to choose for Him-Who-Is-Life and His marvelous world. Or, like Adam and Eve, we can choose the alternative, the "other" from God. But since God alone is life, all else is death. Everything except God is death. And Hell is the House of Death, an eternal life-in-death, which is eternal separation from God-Who-Is-Life.
What happens to us in this vale of tears which we call the gritty world,
on which the sun goes down,
does not matter.
Only love matters.
And while He is in the world,
while I Am is in the world,
we have light,
the Light of the World.
This is our Gospel lesson today.
Rejoice in His light.
Rejoice in His love.
He is our All, our Everything, and our God.
And nothing else but Him really matters.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.