Homily One on the Fourteenth Sunday of Luke (St. John of Kronstadt)

 

 

Homily One on the Fourteenth Sunday of Luke
(31st Sunday After Pentecost)

Spiritual Blindness

By St. John of Kronstadt

[Jesus] asked him, saying, “What do you want Me to do for you?”
He said, “Lord, that I may receive my sight.”
Then Jesus said to him, “Regain your sight; your faith has saved you” 

(Luke 18:40–42).

In today's Gospel, beloved brethren, it spoke of the miraculous healing by Jesus Christ of a blind man in the city of Jericho. This blind man had a strong faith that the Son of David, as he called Jesus Christ, would surely heal him of his blindness, and when he cried out: "Son of David, have mercy on me!" those passing by him said to him: "Be silent," so he began to cry out even louder: "Son of David, have mercy on me!" And he cried out loudly because the Lord was not close to him, but was at quite a distance.

The Lord stopped and commanded the blind man to be brought, and when he approached, He asked him, "What do you want Me to do for you?" He said, "Lord, that I may receive my sight." Jesus said to him, "Regain your sight; your faith has saved you." And immediately he regained his sight and followed Him, glorifying God. All the people, seeing this, gave praise to God. The greatest miracle! In a word: "Regain your sight," the Lord delivered the man from blindness, making his eyes perfectly clear. "Happy is the blind man; blessed is he that has not seen, and yet believed: for faith has saved him. But here's what is strange: why did people who see, such as the scribes, Pharisees and priests, the so-called intelligentsia in modern language, why did these scholars and nobles among the Jewish people not believe in Jesus Christ as the Messiah, as the God-man, as the Savior of men? For they have seen with their own eyes His miracles; with their own, not just someone else's ears, they heard His divine word?

These questions lead us by themselves to the fact that in addition to physical blindness, there is in many, many people spiritual blindness, unnatural, voluntary blindness, which can be more simply called tyranny and self-darkness. Such voluntary blindness also gives us in our highly enlightened age, the age of civilization and of all kinds of progress, i.e., striding forward and forward. This spiritual blindness also afflicts the common people, immersed in darkness and the abyss of schism, who have closed their eyes so as not to see, and their ears so as not to hear the truth, and especially learned people, even highly learned people, in the opinion of the world, and rich people, carried away by learned delirium and blinded by their own wicked inclinations. They, these scholars, have placed human reason in place of faith and the Church, a mind so short-sighted, darkened by passions, that it "hardly understands what is on earth and finds with difficulty what is at hand" (Wisdom 19:16), and what is in the spiritual kingdom of God, it has no idea of it. They believe in the omniscience and in the power of the human mind, they believe unquestioningly in its researches, although these investigations are very often erroneous; they do not believe the word of God, they speak contrary to it; they reject the obvious truths proclaimed in the word of God (for example, the six-day creation of the world by the word of Almighty God and the creation of man in the image of God; the immortality of the human soul, life beyond the grave; they consider the Church with its divine teaching, divine services, mysteries, hierarchy to be unnecessary, and – who knows what else - which should not be discussed from this point on). What else? Sometimes the obvious historical truth, accepted by the Holy Church, is turned inside out and spoken contrary to the Church and history itself; black is called white, white is black, bitter is sweet, and sweet is bitter. May God deliver every Christian from such blindness! Such blindness often has no cure, because the learned blind are infected with an incurable pride, which does not allow anyone to speak more correctly than they do about what they assert. Such were the scribes, Pharisees, and high priests of Jesus Christ's time. Oh, if only these scholars had come to the humble conviction to which an ancient sage came when he said to himself, "I know that I know nothing." For what is the meaning of all our scientific knowledge in comparison with what we do not yet know, what eye has not yet seen, ear has not heard, and has not entered into the heart of man? Nothing. And what we have learned with our minds is far from being essential to us, and we most often do not possess the most essential of knowledge, possessing, so to speak, fragments of knowledge and even then appearing to be so; and what they have learned, they have learned in the light of the Christian faith, which has broadened the horizons of all human knowledge. But there is still some blindness, besides the blindness of proud learning: it is dislike and hatred of one's neighbor. The Holy Apostle John the Theologian says: "Whoever hates his brother is in darkness, and walks in darkness, and does not know where he is going, because darkness has blinded his eyes" (1 John 2:11).

This blindness occurs in every rank and class of people. It is also terrible blindness! Man hates his own kind, his brother, his fellow member, his fellow citizen, a member of Christ and the Church, who is subject, like himself, to weakness and sins. My brethren! One must hate sin alone, but one must love one's brother, one’s own natural member, one’s fellow member and Christ’s, as oneself, and share with him the blessings of the earth, which the good God has given to all, and not to us alone; in a word, to "bear one another’s burdens, for in this way the law of Christ will be fulfilled" (Gal. 6:2).

O Christ, True Light, enlighten us all with the light of the mind of Your holy Gospel, and dispel the darkness of our minds and hearts, we beseech You by faith. Amen.

Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.