On Spiritual Blindness

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.”
Some of the Pharisees who were with him heard this and said to him, "Surely we are not also blind, are we?"
Jesus said to them, "If you were blind, you would have no sin; but now you are saying, 'We see,' so your sin remains.”  
            The Gospel According to John 9:1 and 9:38

 “God sets aside only the proud. The rest of us sinners are all in line.”
  Pope Francis in an Associated Press Interview in January, quoted by Cindy Wooden on usccb.org

Happy Fourth Week in Lent!  Happy Tenth Anniversary, Pope Francis!

Cindy Wooden wrote another article worth our attention on usccb.org summarizing interviews done by various journalists preparing for the Pope’s tenth anniversary last March 13.

Several hundred years before the Book of John was written and almost 3000 years before the Pope, a Hebrew scribe wrote the Book of Job trying to figure out why bad things happen to good people, let alone innocent  babies.  Over forty chapters, Job and his friends closely inspect his righteousness for the hairline sin that could possibly have brought all this calamity down on Job but find none.  In the end, God says, well, I am God, you are not. My ways are not your ways, deal with it!

So who are the proud that the Pope is referring to? Certainly Job and his friends, who felt that following all the religious norms would keep them sinless and thus guard them from calamity. Certainly the Pharisees who were sure that sin had caused the man’s blindness.

But maybe also those of us who can’t find our sinfulness, who give generously, work for justice and think ourselves sinless. Perhaps we lack patience and are not always kind. Or perhaps we become judgmental based on our own sense of how the world should work. We need to find a quiet place and ask God to open our hearts to our own short-comings.