Fr. Vincent Munari sx
4TH SUNDAY OF LENT YEAR A (John 9, 11-41) \Some considerations of Fr. Vincent Munari sx\ This Sunday’s Gospel is really interesting. It describes the dialogue of many people: Jesus, the disciples, the Pharisees, the blind man and his parents, with parts of the dialogue assigned to the onlookers. The story starts with a question to Jesus about whom to blame for the blindness of a poor beggar. Jesus answers that trough him the works of God may be displayed. And immediately adds his self-definition: “I am the light of the world”. May be I have doubts on these words; but let me try to give credit to them for a moment. There must be a person or a book or something with the possibility to explain and understand the situation of today on hearth; we continue to see wars and other disasters. The answer is that we have the Bible, the New Testament in particular and the words and actions of Jesus Christ that are in logic relation with what he thought and what he did. From there we can have light, not shadows but real light. Alternatives are only wars, depriving people of their rights, absolute poverty, famine …. We missionaries feel that only following Jesus and his Gospel there will be a change in this situation. The alternative is people who think about themselves, who want for themselves all that is possible to get, who spend a life wanting things and never having enough. Try for a moment to image that this man coming from Galilee, Jesus Christ, is taken seriously: He will be the solution! The first step is this: to stop thinking about ourselves. Today’s gospel is clear: Jesus is the light and we that continue to think about ourselves are projecting in front of us an image that is a shade of the reality. We do not see Jesus who is the Saviour of the world and chose ourselves to be saviours beginning from ourselves. We continue to perform according to what the beginning of the Bible says: God created man in his own image and likeness (Gen. 1, 26); the rest of the story is real and explains the actual situation of sin but we do not like it and so tend to ignore it. In this Sunday, with the second scrutiny, all the church prays for those preparing for Baptism: may they leave the image of themselves and wear the image of Christ who is really the light of the world (John 9, 5).
4TH SUNDAY OF LENT YEAR A (John 9, 11-41) \Some considerations of Fr. Vincent Munari sx\ This Sunday’s Gospel is really interesting. It describes the dialogue of many people: Jesus, the disciples, the Pharisees, the blind man and his parents, with parts of the dialogue assigned to the onlookers. The story starts with a question to Jesus about whom to blame for the blindness of a poor beggar. Jesus answers that trough him the works of God may be displayed. And immediately adds his self-definition: “I am the light of the world”. May be I have doubts on these words; but let me try to give credit to them for a moment. There must be a person or a book or something with the possibility to explain and understand the situation of today on hearth; we continue to see wars and other disasters. The answer is that we have the Bible, the New Testament in particular and the words and actions of Jesus Christ that are in logic relation with what he thought and what he did. From there we can have light, not shadows but real light. Alternatives are only wars, depriving people of their rights, absolute poverty, famine …. We missionaries feel that only following Jesus and his Gospel there will be a change in this situation. The alternative is people who think about themselves, who want for themselves all that is possible to get, who spend a life wanting things and never having enough. Try for a moment to image that this man coming from Galilee, Jesus Christ, is taken seriously: He will be the solution! The first step is this: to stop thinking about ourselves. Today’s gospel is clear: Jesus is the light and we that continue to think about ourselves are projecting in front of us an image that is a shade of the reality. We do not see Jesus who is the Saviour of the world and chose ourselves to be saviours beginning from ourselves. We continue to perform according to what the beginning of the Bible says: God created man in his own image and likeness (Gen. 1, 26); the rest of the story is real and explains the actual situation of sin but we do not like it and so tend to ignore it. In this Sunday, with the second scrutiny, all the church prays for those preparing for Baptism: may they leave the image of themselves and wear the image of Christ who is really the light of the world (John 9, 5).