As children of light (Giovanni 9, 1-41)

Biblical reflections by Fabio del Zaccheo Della puglia Group

In 1977 someone sang "We are children of the stars, silently together we feel, we meet and then get lost over time, wrapped in shadows we love each other"After years of research, scientists also come to the conclusion that almost half of our body has a cosmic origin and is a matter that comes from very distant galaxies.

We like to imagine that each of us is like a stellar Dust. the sky and the earth, the divine and the human, the above and the below, the eternal and the mortal, the light and the darkness, the breath and the meat, all wrapped in a cosmic dialogue between visible and invisible matter, impatted with the spit in one substance: life.

Astrophysics speak of galactic winds that bring much more cosmic material in the space than we can calculate. We like to imagine that this wind and this breath is truly the "pneuma", what we call the Holy Spirit.

Apart from what our faith leads us to believe or not believe, all this certainly leads us to conclude that our origin is much further away, that our genesis is less local than we can imagine.

And in this IV sunday called "in laetare", Saint Paul in the second reading (Ephesians 5, 8-14) reminds us that we are"as children of light"Wake up, you who sleep, rise from the dead and Christ will illuminate you ”.

What is This iV sunday in which the priest is pinking, if not on sunday of hope and approaching light? what is This rosy nuance, if not a more soft and delicate violet that makes us glimpse the dawn of a different day?

What is this pink color, if not a softer declination than that fuxia so violent and waved among the clothing of the LGBT rights parades, if not an exasperated request for hope and freedom?
What is this day that we live today if not the day to take courage and come to light, wake up from a sleep and open your eyes from a suffocating blindness?

What is this pink page of the Gospel of John (9, 1-41), if not a hymn to light? Jesus amazes us because he who is the word, today he speaks to us little but acts a lot: passing, he sees, acts and exhorts, disappears and returns only at the end of the episode.

Gesu 'passing Sees

Passing he sees a blind from birth and does not judge him: Jesus who defines himself “Light of the world"He doesn't say much, but acts with mud and saliva, and invites the blind man to wash with water.

Jesus Acts

The mud, the earth, the dust remind us that "the Lord God shaped man with soil powder and blew in his nostrils a breath of life and the man became a living being"(Genesis 2, 7). So the blind man returns to life, returns to its origin, to its genesis, its nature as earth and sky, of that cosmic material that restores the dimension of"living": Jesus returns to him the dignity of man.
The blind man has no name and in that blind man is enclosed a world: men, women, old, children, white, black, homosexual, transsexuals, all together under his light.

Jesus passes into the world, walks between us without judging and restores the dignity of being what we are.

Saliva is what is most attributable to man's biology. In these difficult days, in which we are prevented our contact, in which we are prohibited any possibility of relationship, in these days when the saliva, breath, the breath seem to be the easiest way of transmission of a deadly virus, just today the saliva of Jesus becomes the transmission of life, the passage of his DNA: earth powder turns into light powder. His saliva is healing, his saliva becomes a necessary passage from darkness to light, from blindness to sight.

Jesus Urges

"Goes to wash you in the Siloe swimming pool which means sent"And so that the awakening to the new life, the transition from the shade to light, can only come through a purification. The element of the water of the Siloe swimming pool reminds us of the baptism in which we are all called and" sent "to be king, priests and prophets.
And how “The waters returned and added the wagons and knights of the whole army of the pharaoh"(Exodus 14, 8), so we are called to purify ourselves, to get rid of slavery, to make our faith from romantics disciplined, to accept our blind condition by absurdly in order to really see.

Jesus urges us to walk a little alone in our research, to walk on the streets without seeing, to walk in the dark on the bridge of our life, with mud and saliva in the face: Jesus urges us to trust him only in him, who can free us from our fears, from our feelings of guilt, from our pharaohs, from our conditions of wounded men and wounded women.

Jesus Disappears

And here jesus Comes out of the stage and the blind man remains Alone. it is a act of Responsibility what jesus entrusts to the blindness: there is no one except a crowd of pharisees who accuses the blind man, so his suffering from birth becomes under everyone's eyes a fault, a shame to serve.
The Pharisees also question his parents who answer "He is age: ask him"now it's his problem, he can see it alone".

In a society where our Church often also tells us "tells us"Have you been born in sins and teach us?", In a society that often shouts us"Isn't he what he was sitting asking for alms?", in a community that forces us men and women LGBT to sit, to keep silent, to suffer, not to react, in a reality that often gives us only surrogates of happiness, as if we deserved crumbs of love, precisely in all this Jesus passes, sees, acts, urges.

But the suffering-color combination does not fall into the logic of Jesus, therefore it goes away and decides to leave us alone because growing, rising, going from dark to light involves having to make decisions: being in the world in full freedom, living with your head held high, becoming aware that our human dimension belongs to a larger system, in which to establish new coordinates from blind and no longer as a blind man.
Hence the need to rediscover a solitude understood as a relationship between oneself and one's faith, between "I" and "God": a quarantine of the individual who becomes a mirror of a planetary urgency.

Jesu Returns

“If you were blind, you wouldn't have any sin"as children of light"And see for real.