(Source from 40 Days & 40 Ways Daily Meditation for Lent – Year A)

You were darkness once, but now you are light in the Lord; be like children of light.

Today’s Gospel reading narrates Jesus’ cure of the blind man in the Temple, and the stubborn blindness of the Temple authorities, in preparation for the new light at Easter, symbolised by the paschal candle.

In our advance on the Sundays of Lent through the story of Israel we have reached the formation of the kingship in Israel. David is revered as the founder of the dynasty which will issue in the Messiah, the Anointed King of the House of David. He is revered also as the founder of the liturgy, for he bought the land on which the Temple was to be built, though he was not allowed to build it himself, being a ‘man of blood’. He was revered also as the author of the Psalms, since, in one of the other stories of his rise to power, he was the musician who soothed his predecessor Saul in Saul’s moods of black despair. There is also the story of David and Goliath. These three stories of his rise are 81 difficultly inter-compatible, and clash also with the stories of his separate anointings as King of Judah and King of Israel. Stories of the youth of a hero are often historically shaky. What a king! Brave, charismatic, charming, but also unscrupulous, cunning and grossly indulgent to his own family. Should he be dismissed as an oversexed bandit, or is his repentance greater than his sin of adultery with Bathsheba and his murder of her husband?

The point of this story is that God chooses whom he will. Primogeniture was powerful in Israel, but God is not bound by it in his choice. The younger Abel was more pleasing than the older Cain. Jacob wrested the blessing of succession from his elder brother Esau by not fussing too much about the truth. Joseph rescued his brothers from famine. God chooses his own messengers, and they are not always the most obvious people.

The Letter to the Ephesians, which provides the second reading, is one of the later letters of the Pauline corpus. No longer dealing with the problems of the Law in Christianity or the fractious community at Corinth, it takes a wider view of the lordship of Christ. Here it quotes an early Christian hymn of Christ as the rising sun, which prepares us for the Gospel reading about Christ as the light. The sun has always been a traditional image of God, as it gives warmth and life on earth, and enables us to see, understand and relax! Already in Zechariah’s canticle, the Benedictus Jesus is heralded as “the rising sun to give light to those who live in darkness and the shadow of death”. So traditionally also churches are built to face the rising sun in the East, and, especially in the Eastern Greek Church the Sacrament of Baptism and Confirmation is known as photismos or enlightenment’, as the light of Christ comes to shine on the new Christian.