The climax of the Jewish disputes with Our Lord has been reached with the stunning revelation that Abraham was not on the side of those disputing with the One talking to the Jews now, and that the One talking to the Jews now is the same I Am Who had talked to Moses from the burning bush. The coming Messiah was not only very close to God: He was God. From now on the disputes become sporadic, almost disjointed and no longer sustained. The battle lines had been drawn, the war to the death had been declared, the outcome was predictable.

          But one important question still had to be settled: the origin of the blindness of the Jewish leadership. By way of introduction St. John once again regales us on a magnificent setting surrounding the healing by Our Lord of the man born blind.

As he went along, he saw a man who had been blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “Neither he nor his parents sinned,” Jesus answered, “he was born blind so that the works of God might be displayed in him. As long as the day lasts, I must carry out the works of the one who sent me; darkness will soon be here in which no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” As he said this, he spat on the ground and made a paste of the spittle and anointed the man’s eyes with the paste, saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). So he went and washed and came back seeing. The neighbours and those who had seen him before as a beggar, said, “Is not this the man who used to sit and beg?” Some said, “It is he”; others said, “No, but he is like him.” He said, “I am the man”. They said to him, “Then how were your eyes opened?” He answered, “The man called Jesus made a paste and anointed my eyes and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash’; so I went and washed and received my sight”. They said to him, “Where is he?” He said, “I do not know.” They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. Now it was a sabbath day when Jesus made the paste and opened his eyes. The Pharisees again asked him how he had received his sight. And he said to them, “He put a paste on my eyes, and I washed, and I see”. Some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, for he does not keep the sabbath”. But others said, “How can a man who is a sinner do such signs?” There was a division among them.

So they again said to the blind man, “What do you say about him, since he has opened your eyes?” He said, “He is a prophet”. The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight, without first sending for his parents to ask them, “Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?” His parents answered, “We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind; but how he now sees we do not know, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is of age, he will speak for himself”. His parents said this because they feared the Jews, for the Jews had already agreed to expel from the synagogue any one who should acknowledge Jesus as the Christ. This was why his parents said, “He is of age, ask him”.

So for the second time they called the man who had been blind, and said to him, “Give glory to God. From our part we know that this man is a sinner”. The man answered, “Whether he is a sinner, I do not know; one thing I do know, I was blind, but now I can see.” They said to him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” He answered them, “I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples too?” At this they hurled abuse at him: “You can be his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.” The man answered, “Now this is an astonishing thing! He opened my eyes yet you do not know where he comes from. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if any one is a worshipper of God and does his will, God listens to him. Never since the world began has it been heard that any one opened the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing”. They answered him, “You were a sinner through and through since you were born, and you are trying to teach us?” And they threw him out.

Jesus heard that they had driven him away, and having found him he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” He answered, “And who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?” Jesus said to him, “You are looking at him, he is speaking to you”. He said, “Lord, I believe”; and he worshiped him. Jesus said, “It is for judgment that I have come into this world, so that those without sight may see, and that those who see may become blind.” Some of the Pharisees near him heard this, and they said to him, “We are not blind, surely?” Jesus said to them, “Blind? If you were you would not be guilty; but now that you say, ‘We see’, your guilt remains.”

          The first thing to be noted is that, in this extract of St. John’s Gospel, the answers to the Jewish harassments are being supplied by a young man with a very astute and incisive mind. Young, because his troubled parents said of him that he was ‘of age’ which is usually not said of a grown-up man. We can imagine that, with his eager brain, this young man had implored his parents to read to him the great stories of the Old Testament and how, in the isolation of his blindness, he had meditated on the great feats of the Holy Prophets and of all the others who formed “that great cloud of witnesses”, too numerous to enumerate, whom St. Paul eventually would include in his Letter to the Hebrews. One story in particular had stuck in his mind, the story of that imposing Syrian general, Naaman, whom the great prophet Elisha had cured from his leprosy. In fact, it is hard for us not to be drawn to the core element of these two occurrences, one in the Old, the other in the New Testament.

          One day there appeared at the door of Elisha’s humble dwelling this mighty Syrian general by the name of Naaman to seek a cure for his leprosy. That he was an upright man comes out clearly in the story from the love and affection his servants had for him. But here is one such case where an irresistible force met up with an immovable object. With all his imposing pomp, the general expected that the renowned prophet would come out and cure him there and then from his complaint. But Elisha knew that the great man was called to a higher cure as well, and for that humility, trust and obedience are essential. So he did not come out to meet his new arrival but sent word to him to go and wash himself seven times in the Jordan and he would be cured. Hearing this, the mighty general got into a rage and was prepared to call the whole deal off and return to his own country.

          But now see how the blessing of having devoted and loyal servants manifested itself the second time. From the way they address him, (they call him ‘father’), we get an impression of their love for this upright man; and from the way he responded to their urgent wish to see him cured, we see how the grace of God is now working in this soul.

But his servants came near and said to him, “My father, if the prophet had commanded you to do some great thing, would you not have done it? All the more reason then, when he tells you, ‘Wash, and be clean’?” So he went down and immersed himself seven times in the Jordan, according to the word of the man of God; and his flesh was restored like the flesh of a little child, and he was clean. Then he returned to the man of God, he and all his company, and he came in and stood before him; and he said, "“Behold, now I know that there is no God in all the earth but in Israel”. [2 Kings, 5:13-15].

          Jesus knew how keen and eager was the mind of this young man, how the lessons of the Old Testament had not been wasted on him, and, like Naaman, how close he was to faith in the Kingdom of God. So, in parallel to Elisha’s command, he told him: “Go and wash in the Pool of Siloam”. And for the first time after that he saw the faces of his father and mother, distraught by fear because of what the Jews had done to them. And in the rare display of courage that followed then, he eventually met up with Jesus, and like Naaman became the recipient of a much greater healing, the one we receive when we are sent to be washed in the waters of Baptism ...

          But there is a second parallel to be considered between this Gospel account in the New Testament and the cure of Naaman in the Old. In the earlier case we see a renegade coming up to corrupt the perfectly innocent interplay between the natural understanding of the newly converted Naaman and the supernatural insights of his gift of Faith in the One True God. Naaman had accepted his bodily healing from the power of the True God alone, a lesson strongly reinforced in the mind of Naaman by the absolute refusal of the prophet to accept any reward for what he had not wrought. In the Gospel story we see an identical corruption worming its way into the same innocent interplay between the natural and the supernatural in the heart and soul of this newly converted young man, but now the Son of God Himself takes over.

          Gehazi, Elisha’s servant, was dissatisfied with the frugality, the humility and other-worldliness of the prophet’s life compared with the riches, the power and the authority wielded by the army commander in his. He wanted some of what appealed to him so strongly in one world without giving the impression of having left the other. To facilitate the quest for what ‘the world’ has to offer, he painted a false picture of his master before the Syrian general, thereby running the diabolical risk of destroying in the mind of the newly-converted Naaman the pure form of true religion.

Gehazi, the servant of Elisha the man of God, said, “See, my master has spared this Naaman the Syrian, in not accepting from his hand what he brought. As the Lord lives, I will run after him, and get something from him.” So Gehazi followed Naaman. And when Naaman saw some one running after him, he alighted from the chariot to meet him, and said, “Is all well?” And he said, “All is well. My master has sent me to say, ‘There have just now come to me from the hill country of Ephraim two young men of the sons of the prophets; pray, give them a talent of silver and two festal garments’.” And Naaman said, “Be pleased to accept two talents.” And he urged him, and tied up two talents of silver in two bags, with two festal garments, and laid them upon two of his servants; and they carried them before Gehazi. And when he came to the hill, he took them from their hand, and put them in the house; and he sent the men away, and they departed. He went in, and stood before his master, and Elisha said to him, “Where have you been, Gehazi?” And he said, “Your servant went nowhere.” But he said to him, “Did I not go with you in spirit when the man turned from his chariot to meet you? Now that you have taken the money, you can buy gardens and olive groves, sheep and oxen, male and female slaves. But Naaman’s leprosy will cling to you and to your descendants forever.” And Gehazi left his presence a leper, white as snow ...

          It was a good thing that Elisha followed his corrupted servant to guard Naaman’s Faith. Maybe Naaman was even privileged to see him, shaking his head, thereby indicating that this traitor was speaking on his own behalf.

          And here in the New Testament there was that other whiteness, the one that comes as the beauty of freshly-fallen snow of supernatural grace in a soul that has just professed its Faith in the Son of God. And the young man was privileged that the Son of Man had followed him and was present in his final confrontation with the Jews.

“It is for judgement that I have come into this world, so that those without sight may see, and those with sight turn blind.”

          The profound significance of these words springs to light if the following line is taken into consideration:

Hearing this some Pharisees who were present said to him, “We are not blind, surely”? Jesus replied:

“Blind? If you were you would not be guilty, but since you say ‘We see’, your guilt remains.”

          And as was the case in Gehazi’s days, they left His presence with the blindness of the young man clinging as a supernatural leprosy to the eyes of their souls and to the souls of their descendants for the next 2000 years. And that is the way their modern counterparts in hypocrisy: the Modernists, teilhardians, feminists and all ‘New Age Catholics’, all those who want power in both worlds, have left the presence of His Church ...

The End