Sunday of the Blind Man—a sermon

Beloved of God, in the Paschal cycle of the services of the Church on this Sunday we are commemorating the healing of the blind man which we read of in the Gospel of St. John.  In the kontakion of this Sunday, which is read during the hours, and is sung both during the Matins and after the small entrance at Liturgy we heard the prayer: “Blinded in the eyes of my soul, I come to Thee, O Christ, like the man blind from birth and cry out to Thee with repentance: Thou art the all- radiant light of those in darkness.”¹ 

Why does the Church instruct us to say, “Blinded in the eyes of my soul”.  And a few weeks ago on the Sunday of the paralytic we speak of being paralyzed in soul through sin.  But we have come to belief in Christ as the Son of God, and the Saviour of the world.  We are attempting to live a Christian life so why does the Church tell us to say we are blinded in soul or paralyzed in soul? 

Well, let’s consider a question which can give us an answer. The question I have in mind is, “What is salvation?”  Is it that our Lord Jesus Christ died for our sins on the Cross so now we are saved from eternal condemnation? “For the Orthodox Church, salvation is more than pardon of transgressions. It is more than being justified or acquitted for offenses committed against God. According to Orthodox teaching, salvation certainly includes forgiveness and justification, but is by no means limited to them.  For the Fathers of the Church salvation is the acquisition of the grace of the Holy Spirit.  To be saved is to be sanctified and to participate in the life of God—indeed to become a partaker of divine nature.”²

So we do not say we are saved as something which is completed but we are in the process of salvation: a growth in the likeness of God, a participation in divine life, in the life of God, in the uncreated energy of God.  To the degree of purification we reach, divine life is manifested within us.          

In the book of Genesis we read: God said, Let Us make man in our image, after Our likeness…So God created man in His Own image, in the image of God He created him.  “For Orthodox anthropology, the term ‘image’ has a different meaning from the term ‘likeness’.  ‘Image’ may be seen as the potential inherent in man for sanctification, while ‘likeness’ refers to its perfection.  Or in other words, one could say ‘image’ implies ‘potentiality’, whereas ‘likeness’ implies ‘actuality’.

“Man was not originally created in a state of completed perfection.  He was, however, endowed with the unique freedom to choose either to live in pursuit of achieving his full potential, or else to digress toward the desecration and defacement of his true dignity as man.  Only through proper use of God-given freedom can man cooperate with divine grace in restoring the image of God within him and attain to the likeness with God for which he was created.”³

This is the path we should all tread upon if we are active members of the Church.  We can all, each one of us ascend more into the likeness of God so we are all in a certain sense blind because there is something more for each of us to see, that is, to learn, to experience to know, something more to be revealed.  There is a hymn in the service for St. Anthony the Great which speaks of this process or struggle—this hymn is actually a general hymn used for monastic saints. It is as follows: “Preserving intact the image of God within thee, and establishing thy mind as ruler over the destructive passions through asceticism, thou didst attain to the likeness of God, as far as is possible; for in manfully compelling nature, thou wast diligent to subject the worst to the better, and to subjugate the flesh to the spirit. Hence, thou didst prove to be the summit of monastics.”⁴

And one of the fathers in the Philokalia—Diadochos of Photiki—speaks of attaining the likeness of God in a different way, he writes of this in a really awesome fashion. He affirms that the being in image of God is an immediate gift in creation and it is renewed in baptism. However, concerning the likeness to God he writes:     

“Our likeness to God requires our cooperation.  When the intellect begins to perceive the Holy Spirit with full consciousness, we should realize that grace is beginning to paint the divine likeness over the divine image in us.  Artist first draw the outline of a man in monochrome, and then add one color after another, until little by little they capture the likeness of the subject down to the smallest details.  In the same way the grace of God starts by remaking the divine image in man into what it was when he was first created. But when it sees us longing with all our heart for the beauty of the divine likeness and humbly standing naked in its atelier, then by making one virtue after another come into flower and exalting the beauty of the soul ‘from glory to glory’ (IICor. 3:18) it depicts the divine likeness in the soul.”⁵ 

This state is very exalted, and advanced, and beyond our experience.  However, although it is above us, it helps us to be humble.  And so, now I believe we can understand why the Church tells us to pray: “Blinded in the eyes of my soul, I come to Thee, O Christ, like the man blind from birth and cry out to Thee with repentance: Thou art the all-radiant light of those in darkness.”  Amen.

 

1 Pentecostarion of the Orthodox Church, The St. John of Kronstadt Press, Trans. Isaac E. Lambertsen, p. 202

2 Orthodox Spiritual Life according to Saint Silouan the Athonite, St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, Harry Boosalis, p. 18

3 Ibid., pp. 29-30

4 The January Menaion. Trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery, p. 154

5 The Philokalia Volume One, trans. G.E. H. Palmer, Phillip Sherrard, Kallistos Ware p. 288