“…I am the light of the world” (RSV, John 9:5)

Our Lord spoke these words as he prepared to heal a blind man in Jerusalem and in speaking them he turned the miracle into an acted parable. The man in question had been born blind and Our Lord gave him his sight, by anointing his eyes with clay and sending him to wash them clean in the nearby pool of Siloam.

That blind man is symbolic of the state of inner blindness in which you and I and everyone else were born into this world. That blindness is both intellectual and spiritual, being an ignorance both of God himself and of the state of our real selves in his sight.

Suppose that, like Tarzan in the story, you had been lost in the jungle in your infancy, and had been nurtured and brought up by the creatures of the wild. You would know nothing about God: your reason might lead you to speculate on the cause of life around you, but you would probably get no farther than did primitive human beings and attribute it to the sun.

You would be entirely ignorant about the purpose of your creation and equally ignorant of all God has done, in the Person of Jesus Christ, to make possible the final fulfilment of that purpose, namely, the eternal enjoyment of God’s visible Presence.

Those truths, and many others, which are so familiar to us now, have not come to us by instinct nor by reason. They have been revealed by Our Lord Jesus Christ and communicated to us through his Church.

Truly Christ is our Light and without him we should be blind indeed, living in a state of darkness – for the knowledge of God does not develop naturally within the human mind and soul.

We can get some idea of this blindness by picturing ourselves as suffering from total loss of memory after an accident, so that every single thing we had ever learnt from the New Testament – every name and place, every incident, every saying, and everything connected with the Christian Faith and the Christian Church – was blotted out of our minds, so that even the very name of Jesus was new and meaningless.

Besides this darkness of ignorance, there is also at our birth, the darkness of evil in our hearts. Everyone is born with the seeds of evil in his or her innermost being, dormant and almost unsuspected to begin with, but nothing can stop them from growing and bearing fruit within a very short time indeed. For there is no natural development of good within the human heart – quite the reverse.

The fractious self-centredness of the baby kicking violently in his or her pram changes by clearly discernible stages into the calculated selfishness of the adult. For age, so far from removing that selfishness, serves only to give greater opportunity for its fuller and wider exercise. What begins as a tendency away from God, ends only too often in his total exclusion. If self takes up all the room there is in a person’s heart, what place is there left for God?

But Our Lord Jesus Christ can cure that spiritual blindness also – however hopeless the situation may seem – so long as there is the desire within the heart for him to do so. Our Lord always requires our co-operation. Thus he did not heal the blind man immediately but told him to wash in the pool of Siloam. It was not until he had done so that he was able to see.

But here, as so often, Our Lord offers us more than we really want. He will not rest until our spiritual blindness is completely cured, until we have a sharply defined clarity of vision, whereas we often prefer to be given short-sight instead.

When the light of Christ streams into the soul, it lights up everything in it, and if our spiritual perception is keen we shall perforce see all the unlovely things in our character almost as clearly as he does.

But do we always want this? It is very nice to have Our Lord as our Friend and Guardian, to know that he is always at hand to turn to in trouble or in need. That is a great comfort and we would not be without it: but we are not nearly so ready to accept him as the high and holy One, or to think realistically about his flaming, dazzling sanctity in comparison with which the true state of our souls becomes plain indeed.

No, we turn to him for comfort, but for comparison we prefer Mr A and Mrs B so that we can assure ourselves that we are as good as the one and perhaps better than the other.

A flock of sheep may look white and clean while grazing together in the fields, but that appearance is an illusion. When seen against a background of freshly fallen snow, they are suddenly revealed as soiled and grubby.

One thing alone makes us reluctant to see Our Blessed Lord as he is, and ourselves as we are, and that is our pride and our self-esteem. And the only way to get rid of that is to have the humility and the honesty to recognise and admit that we fall far short of what we are meant to be, and not to pretend otherwise, either to Our Lord in our worship or to ourselves in our daily life.

If we should happen to be satisfied with ourselves as Christians, then that self-satisfaction in itself is the clearest evidence of our spiritual blindness, blotting out our vision both of our real spiritual condition and of the true character of God.

Then our prayer must be that of Bartimaeus, that other blind man in the Gospel: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” (RSV, Mark 10:47). And when Our Lord asks, “What do you want me to do for you?” (RSV, Mark 10:51a) we know what to say in reply: Lord, that I may see (Mark 10:51b).