Ephesians 5:1-2; 8-9; 13-14 (NRSV Updated Edition)
Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. [...] For once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Walk as children of light, for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true. [...] [E]verything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says,
Rise from the dead,
and Christ will shine on you.”
~
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%209%3A1-41&version=NRSVUE
~
"In this story [...] we watch a revolution in the understanding of sin, and a revolution that takes place around the person of Jesus, but is actually worked out in the life of someone else. The structure of the story is the same as is to be found time and time again in John: that of an expulsion, or proto-lynching, one of the many that lead up to the definitive expulsion of the crucifixion, which is also the definitive remedy for all human order based on expulsion. The revolution in the concept of sin consists in the following: at the beginning of the tale, sin was considered in terms of some sort of defect that excludes the one bearing the defect. At the end of the tale sin is considered as the act of exclusion: the real blindness is the blindness which is not only present in those who exclude, but actually grows and intensifies during the act of exclusion.
[...]
"We can go further with this Johannine approach to sin. There are indications present in chapter 9 that more is intended in this story than a merely casual description of a particular incident regarding sin. The question of the sin as being related to the origins of humankind is hinted at in Jesus' use of clay in his restoration, or fulfilment, of creation, as well as in the insistence that the man was blind from birth. The relation of this story to something original is understood by the former blind man himself, who reckons that never (ek tou aiônos) has such a healing taken place. In the light of John's irony this means much more than that a particularly spectacular miracle has taken place, such as has never taken place before. It also suggests that there has been present a blindness from the beginning of the world that only now is being cured for the first time. Furthermore, when Jesus speaks, at the end, about judgment it is clear that he is not concerned with a particular local incident, but about a discernment relating to the whole world (kosmos). Here we have a highly subtle teaching about the whole world being blind from birth, from the beginning, and about Jesus, the light of the world coming to bring sight to the world, being rejected precisely by those who, though blind, claimed to be able to see."
- James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong, pp. 121, 122-3
~
"Last week we saw Jesus offering living water and we saw the effect on the Samaritan woman as she was turned herself into a bearer of Living Water. Today we have a look at Jesus as the Light of the World and as the Criterion for the world that, he's come as the Judgment, or the Criterion, for the world, by which we may know and see things. ... But if he was more than a prophet last time, here he is doing something even more striking because he is demonstrating that he is the Creator. And the relationship between Creator and humans that is central to John's Gospel, and to our understanding of the gospel, is beautifully brought out in this passage.
[...]
"He spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man's eyes. Now apparently behind the Greek here there are Hebrew or Aramaic references to ground, Adam, earth [...] So what is he doing? He's fulfilling Adam, he's making Adam whole, the notion that as humans we are all in one way or another incomplete, and that what Jesus is doing, what the Creator does coming into our life, is not simply rescue us from, as it were, an evil creation but say, “No. Creation was wonderful but it somehow got trapped in something less than itself. I am here to make it whole.”
[...]
"“The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, ‘Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?’ Some were saying, ‘It is he.’ Others were saying, ‘No, but it is someone like him.’ So they're still used to him being a non-person in their midst, about whom people talk but who does not himself talk - he has no agency. But now he keeps saying, “I am the man.” But in Greek of course what he says is a phrase which usually only Jesus gets to say, he says 'egō eimi' - “I am.” The other person who gets to say 'egō eimi' is Jesus. When Jesus says “I am” it's a reference to the Lord, it is God, it's the Creator. So here we have the created one at last standing up and being a human being, able to be the image of 'I am'. We know that Jesus is 'I AM' in the big sense. [The man born blind] is what it looks like as a human to being gradually brought into agency and life.
[...]
"So Jesus, bringing to life as a disciple another sign of who he is, the Creator bringing the fullness of creation into the light in such a way that that creation becomes fully human, develops agency, and is able to recognize the Lord in what he makes. And at the same time those people who are frightened of loss of authority, prestige, power, ganging up against this person and actually becoming blind, not actually able to see the Creator in their midst.
"This is, if you like, a wonderful, dynamic account of the creation, because we normally think of creation as something separate from the cultural process of becoming fully ourselves. And yet, in the Christian understanding it's precisely the notion that we are all on our way to being fully created, but that our being fully created requires the work of the Lord, who requires us to be forgiven so that we can learn our way out of the entanglements of our blindness, our belonging to false structural forms of goodness over against despised others. So that eventually we can stand tall and say, “As an image of God, I am.”"
- James Alison, from video "Homily for Fourth Sunday in Lent 2023 A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8-xp-uRnE0)
[Source of quote from James Alison's The Joy of Being Wrong, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for Lent 4A, see: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/lent4a/]
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