Light a Candle

Fourth Sunday of Lent Year A

The popular adage “it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness” may seem to be a cliched expression, a naive suggestion to put on rose-coloured glasses and pretend that all the messiness in this world do not exist. But like all other cliches, there is always a certain modicum of truth in this. All Malaysians should understand this - that we have a cultural tendency to complain and gripe about all and sundry. From politics to economics, from school to work, from food to accommodations, from church to family. Even though there may be a basis in reality to all our grievances, we seem to be blind to anything which is good. And though we may at times admit the good, we choose to minimise its value, “good just isn’t good enough”, and then proceed to exaggerate the negative side of things.

In our lengthy gospel for today, we encounter various characters who have a blinkered vision of life. From our Lord’s disciples who see the blindness of the man born blind as punishment from God, to the neighbours of the man who cannot accept the reality that things have changed for the better, to the Pharisees who only see the healing as a violation of the Sabbath prohibition, to his own parents who are more worried about public opinion than to rejoice that their son’s vision has now been restored. None of them are able to see anything positive about this astounding miracle of our Lord. Only the blind man could have a valid excuse. It is obvious that he couldn’t see because he’s physically blind and yet at the end of the story, he is able to initially recognise Christ as a prophet and then as the mysterious messianic figure of “the Son of Man”. In fact, it is this blind man who makes this profound confession of faith long before Thomas does at the end of the gospel: “Lord, I believe”, and then proceeds to “worship” the Lord.

Perhaps, what is needed is the ability to see as God does. As God had to remind Samuel when he seemed to have overlooked David, the youngest son of Jesse, because he was considered to be the most unlikely candidate due to his youthful age and physical weakness, “God does not see as man sees: man looks at appearances but the Lord looks at the heart.” This statement has less to do with the irrelevance of appearances than it has to do with the reminder that our judgments on any matter should go much deeper than superficial appearances. Samuel saw the runt of the lot, but God saw in David a hero who will slay giants. Samuel saw his physical weakness, God saw his spiritual potential for greatness.

That too is a choice set before us. Just as the way of seeing is a choice we must make, joy too is a conscious, chosen response to God's grace and hope, despite the surrounding, often difficult, circumstances. We can rejoice in the face of our struggle with sins and sufferings because these painful realities are not the final word. We can rejoice because though we were born with original sin, just like the man in the gospel was born blind, there is One who can and has removed the scales from the eyes of all those who believe in Him. We can rejoice though we may be considered weak, others see us as weak, but in Christ we are strong, in Him we can overcome the greatest obstacle before us. We rejoice because we were blinded by sin, but now our Lord has given new sight through faith. So it is not naive to believe in this: “it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.” We rejoice because as St Paul reminds us in the second reading, we were once in darkness, but now we are children of the light.