In this season of Lent, we are called into repentance and reflection to prepare ourselves for the Resurrection from the dead for Life Everlasting on Easter Sunday. On the fourth Sunday in Lent, repentance is a kind of enlightenment, or seeing through appearances, exchanging blindness and denial for recognizing the light of the world. With the shepherd David and with the man born blind, we are anointed, by oil or by mud, to follow God’s call for the sake of God’s world.

Our Old Testament reading for this week, 1 Samuel 16, gives us the story of the anointing of David to be the king.  God opens Samuel’s eyes to see beyond appearances, saying “Rise and anoint him, for this is the one”, then sends the Spirit on David ‘mightily from that day forward’.  As David is anointed king, he is appointed to great responsibility and great power David will go on to rule God’s people as king.  From his lineage comes the birth of the Messiah.

Our Gospel reading from John 9 brings us to the man born blind.  This story of Jesus making mud and sending the man to wash in the pool of Siloam to receive sight brings up themes of what is sin, who is a sinner, healing, miracles, and revealing Jesus as Messiah. The reading ends with Jesus and the Pharisees having a conversation about blindness, not of physical vision but a spiritual blindness, that is, the inability to see the desires and works of God through Jesus.

For the man born blind, his healing came in part because of Jesus’ actions towards him, but also his healing came through his own agency.  His healing only happened after he followed Jesus’ instructions to wash the mud from his face in the pool of Siloam.  Healing was not a passive miracle that happened to him. Healing was something that this man born blind took an active role in making happen. 

For the crowds watching this miracle happen, they became so entrenched in figuring out who sinned, the man or his parents, that they were unable to see the miracle itself.  Instead of seeing the healing miracle and giving glory to God, they instead go around asking the man, his parents, and the man again for all the details.  They become so preoccupied and distracted with identifying the sin that they completely miss the miracle and the identity of Jesus as Messiah.  At the invitation to become disciples of Jesus, they drive the man born blind out.

The Pharisees’ attention turns to whether they themselves are blind, a spiritual blindness.  They ask Jesus if they are blind or not.  Jesus’ answer is spiritual, not physical.  He points them toward examining what they do not see, their blindness to seeing the Son of Man right in front of them, their failure to see and follow God’s will for the sake of worldly power and worldly laws. The story makes clear that their refusal to see makes them the blind ones.

Psalm 23, a favorite go-to psalm for countless people across generations, gives us a reminder of God’s presence as a shepherd who guides, restores, comforts, protects, and provides in abundance.  God’s presence with us is through the good and the bad, and working for the best for each one of us. [You can hear an echo of David’s anointing by Samuel as the psalm declares “You anoint my head with oil, my cup runs over”.] 

The Epistle, from Ephesians 5:8-14, comes back to reflect the themes from our other readings: exposing to the light what is in darkness, removing the secrecy to make everything visible in the light, and instruction to walk as children of the light.

We are called to walk as children of the light even in the face of the injustices of the world, the lack of humanitarian care towards another, the battles being created and raging across the world. The light in which we walk exposes the darkness of an authoritarian Christian Nationalist voice that defaces Jesus’ message, and, interwoven in all of this, the darkness of the continuing attack on our planet’s ability to sustain life abundantly into the future. 

Where the Pharisees questioned Jesus, “we are not blind, are we?”, we are given the opportunity to ask ourselves the same question. To what are we spiritually blinded? Where are we failing to see another as a child of God because we are so intent on calling out their sin?  What have we allowed to stay hidden in darkness because we are unwilling to allow it into the light to become visible?

In an era in which we have all been brought into a culture that seeks to divide and dehumanize the other, we are most likely guilty to some extent to being spiritually blind to our neighbor, seeking to call out how our neighbors are wrong and have sinned, instead of being able to see a miracle in our midst.  

Like the man born blind who received sight by the actions of Jesus and participated in that miracle by his own agency, we are given the same opportunity. In our repentance, we are called to respond with action.  We are called to participate in the healing of our planet in peril.  We are called to be actively working with Jesus, looking for Jesus’ action in our lives and responding to his call to participate in our healing the healing of Creation.

Like David, chosen and anointed by God  to care for God’s people in his place of authority as king in God’s ways of justice, mercy, and lovingkindness, we too are each called and anointed by God to act in caring for God’s world: to care for all of creation with the power and authority we have been given, with justice, mercy, and loving kindness.