What is truth? We shall hear Pilate put this question to Our Lord on Good
Friday. Our Lord Jesus Christ is himself the Truth, the perfect revelation of the
Father. We are commanded to listen to him. In the Gospel we have just heard
that courageous witness to Jesus, the man born blind, rebukes the Pharisees for
their failure to listen to him. Had they really paid attention to what he had to
say their hearts would have been filled with joy in the discovery of the power
of God working in their midst, revealing the One whom God had sent. They
could then have entered into the work of God, by believing in the One he had
sent.
We learn that the man had been born blind so that the works of God might be
shown forth in him. His healing showed the presence of the power of the
Creator, since he who formed man from the dust of the earth now completes the
work that had been incomplete at the man’s birth. We need the light of this
world to do our daily work, the time is limited, since the darkness of death will
overtake us all. Then no-one can work, no-one can make choices. It is in this
present time that God’s power is visibly at work in healing, but it is more
powerfully at work in drawing the man to faith.
The gift of faith, the grace to perceive spiritual reality, is offered but there is
no constraint to accept it. Indeed, as we see in the case of the man born blind,
there was pressure on him to deny the miracle which had given him sight by
attributing it to an evil power. Hostility to truth cannot be the way towards
faith. The second reading helps us see the characteristics of integrity and faith
that the man evinces. He becomes light in the Lord, refusing to brand his
benefactor as a sinner. That would have an unfruitful work of darkness. He is
thus assuming full responsibility for his life, in complete contrast to the time
when he was lead around by others. Like David, he showed himself to be
prudent in speech.
Just as the man born blind began, at his healing, to enter fully into the
community of Israel, so he also entered into the spiritual gifts that were offered
to him. The sleeper awoke and was enlightened by Christ light flooded his soul,
welling over into the joy of his heart.
These are the gifts we pray for those who are to be baptised at Easter, and ours
in the renewal of the grace of our baptism. Meanwhile we fight against the
negligences of the past, whilst we pray and strive to live in the Spirit.
8 September, Nativity of Our Lady, Patronal Feast of Quarr Abbey and Diamond Jubilee of Profession of Dom Gregory Corcoran
Dom Gregory Corcoran, Subprior Diamond Jubilee of Profession 8 September 1966 – 2026 A little more than sixty years ago, two very young men knocked