Homilies & Thoughts

A difficult thing happens, and the human heart begins its familiar work. It starts searching for a cause, a guilty party. Someone must have done something. Someone must deserve this. That instinct appears almost immediately in the Gospel. The disciples see a man blind from birth, and before they see a neighbor, they see a problem to be explained. Before they see suffering, they begin assigning fault.

Jesus refuses that path. He says, “Neither he nor his parents sinned; it is so that the works of God might be made visible through him.” With that sentence, he turns the whole scene. He pulls his disciples away from blame and toward mercy. He teaches them, and he teaches us, that suffering is not an invitation to sit in judgment. It is an invitation to let God act.

Noon is a harsh hour. The sun is straight overhead. Shadows shrink. Nothing is softened. At Jacob’s well, a woman comes carrying her water jar and, without knowing it, carrying something heavier: a life she has learned to explain and excuse. Her history is no secret in that town. And Jesus’ knowledge of her is not a surprise. What surprises is the change in her: in the presence of Jesus, she begins to see herself clearly.

Despite biblical precedent, a mountain is an odd place for a revelation. The air is thin, the ground uneven, and the climb tiring. Jesus chooses height and solitude, as if he wants his friends to feel, in their bodies, how much they rely on him. Then the veil lifts. The apostles glimpse a beauty too intense for ordinary eyes, the kind that makes knees buckle and words fail.

And beside him stand Moses and Elijah. They are often described as the law and the prophets, a way of saying that Israel’s whole story points toward Christ. Which is true. Yet the scene also speaks to the human heart. Moses and Elijah look like us.