Fourth Sunday of Lent/A
Massimo Palombella
Today’s Gospel (Jn 9:1-41) recounts the story of the man born blind and healed by Jesus.
It is interesting to note the real blindness that emerges in the Gospel passage, namely that of the Jews who are incapable, precisely, of seeing beyond their preconceptions.
In the attitude of the Jews, we can often also recognise our own blindness whenever the educational and cultural baggage of our life prevents us from seeing “beyond”, making us, in effect, blind.
In fact, the culture in which we grew up, the education we received, the beliefs implicitly learnt, for better or for worse have led us and made us capable of making choices, of doing important things even with small and poor motivations. But all this represents something to go ‘beyond’ in order to really see, to personalise life, to really find our unique and special identity.
Our cultural-educational baggage can be a prison, a cage or a springboard, a force to encounter reality as it is, and not as I wish – or have been taught – to be.
Our relationship with the Lord, if it is authentic, slowly leads us to see more and more, that is, to encounter reality, to allow ourselves to be encountered by reality, to abandon survival patterns, to separate ourselves from what we must separate ourselves from in order to be the persons we should and are called to be.
The gradual for today’s celebration is taken from Psalm 121 (Ps 121:1, 7) with the following text:
Laetatus sum in his quae dicta sunt mihi: in domum Domini ibimus.
Fiat pax in virtute tua: et abundantia in turribus tuis.
(I rejoiced when it was said unto me: “Let us go to the house of the Lord.”
Let peace reign within your walls, and abundance in your towers).
The attached music, in Gregorian chant, is taken from the Graduale Triplex published in Solesmes in 1979. It is performed by the Chœur de l’abbaye Saint-Martin de Ligugé. The track can be found on the CD Initiation au chant grégorien published by ADF-Bayard Musique in 2018
A blessed Sunday and heartfelt greetings.
