Sunday Homilies with Fr. Mike Schmitz - 3/19/23 Prototype: Fault

Episode Date: March 18, 2023

Homily from the Fourth Sunday of Lent. We need to stop asking "who is to blame?" and start asking "What can God do with this?" The disciples ask Jesus whose fault it is that the man was born blind. So many of us have a tendency to ask the same question: "Whose fault is this?" While that is a natural question, it is not always a helpful question. There is a better question that we can ask. Mass Readings from March 19, 2023 : 1 Samuel 16:1, 6-7, 10-13 Psalms 23Ephesians 5:8-14 John 9:1-41

Welcome to Sunday homilies with me, Father Mike Schmitz. I hope today's homily inspires and motivates you, and I also hope that it leaves you hungry for the one who gave everything to feed you. If you want to get this in other Sunday Mass resources sent straight to your inbox, sign up at ascensionpress.com slash Sunday, or by texting Sunday to 33777. You can also follow or subscribe on your podcast app for weekly notifications. God bless. The Lord be with you.

A reading from the Holy Gospel according to John. Chapter 9, verses 1 through 41. As Jesus passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, Rabbi, who sinned? This man or his parents that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither he nor his parents sinned. It is so that the works of God might be made visible through him.

We have to do the works of the one who sent me while it is day. Night is coming, when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world. When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made clay with the saliva and smeared the clay on the man's eyes and said to him, go and wash in the pool of Saloam, which means scent. So he went and washed and came back, able to see. His neighbors and those who had seen him earlier as a beggar said, isn't this the one who used to sit and beg?

Some said it is, but others said, no, it just looks like him. But he said, I am. So they said to him, how are your eyes open? He replied, the man named Jesus, made clay and an anointed my eyes and told him. told me, go to Salome and wash. So I went there and washed and was able to see. So they said to him, where is he? He said, I don't know. They brought the one who was once blind to the Pharisees. Now Jesus had made clay and opened his eyes on a Sabbath, so the Pharisees also asked him how he was able to see. He said to them, he put clay on my eyes and I washed and now I can see. So some of the Pharisees

said, this man is not from God, because he does not keep the Sabbath. But others said, how can a sinful man do such things, and there was division among them. So they said to the blind man again, what do you have to say about him since he opened your eyes? He said, he's a prophet. Now, the Jews did not believe that he had been blind and regained his sight until they summoned the parents of the one who had gained his sight. They asked them, is this your son whom you say was born blind? How does he now see. His parents answered and said, we know that this is our son and that he was born blind. We do not know how he sees now, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him. He is of age. He can speak for himself. His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews, for the Jews had

already agreed that if anyone acknowledged Jesus as the Christ, he would be expelled from the synagogue. For this reason, his parents said, he is of age, question him. So a second time, they called the man who had been blind and said to him, give God the praise. We know that this man is a sinner. He replied, if he is a sinner, I do not know. One thing I do know is that I was blind, and now I can see. So they said to him, what did he do to you? How did he open your eyes? He answered them, I told you already, and you did not listen. Do you want to hear it again? Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples too? They ridiculed him and said, you are this man's disciples. We are disciples of Moses. We know that God spoke to Moses,

but we do not know where this one is from. The man answered and said to them, this is what is so amazing, that you do not know where he is from, yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if one is devout and does his will, he listens to him. It is unheard of that anyone ever opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he would not be able to do anything. They answered and said to him, you were born totally in sin and you're trying to teach us? Then they threw him out.

When Jesus heard that he had been thrown out, he found him and said, do you believe in the son of man? He answered and said, Who is he, sir, that I may believe in him? Jesus said to him, you have seen him. And the one speaking with you is he. He said, I do believe, Lord, and he worshipped him.

Then Jesus said, I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see might see and those who see might become blind. Some of the Pharisees who were with him heard this and said to him, surely we are not also blind, are we? Jesus said to them, if you were blind, you would have no sin.

But now you are saying we see, so your sin remains. The gospel of the Lord. So you may know this, that a couple of weeks, well, at the beginning of Lent, we started a series, and the series is called Prototype. What you might not know is, you know, the last two weeks we haven't been here. Sorry, I haven't been here. Two weeks ago, I was planning on being here, but two Sundays ago I had my mom's wake and her funeral the next day, and so wasn't able to be here.

And then last weekend, I was supposed to be here, but the plane I was on was late in taking off, so it was late in landing, and I missed the mass again. So kind of a little recap of what we were supposed to have done here the last two nights or last two Sundays is, is this reminder, of course, that Lent is the season, It's not the season necessarily that we're supposed to be better, not a season we're supposed to be just be good or get rid of bad habits or lose some weight. The whole point of Lent is that at the end of Lent,

we're supposed to be like Jesus. Right? At the end of Lent, we're supposed to actually, we're supposed to look like him. That's not only the whole point of Lent, that's the whole point of Christianity, right? Not just to be slightly better, but to actually be like Jesus.

So there's this book that we've been kind of looking at a little bit, at least referencing. It's called the imitating. of Christ. It's the second most best-selling book after the Bible and right ahead of Harry Potter. And in that book, The Imitation of Christ, it explains us that at the end of our lives, the whole

goal is to look like our rabbi. That's why Jesus is the prototype. He's the one who's to model ourselves off of, because if he's our rabbi, then we're his disciples. And so, what we talked about this was, remember the schools we talked about maybe the first couple Sundays, is that if you were a Jewish kid, about six years of age, six years of age,

you would go off to a school called Betzafer. Metz-Fer from six years old. to 10 years old, you would learn the first five books of the Bible, right? So Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, numbers, Deuteronomy, you would learn every word. You'd actually memorize all the words in those five books. And at 10 years old, if you were a good student, but like, not great, the rabbi would say, okay, now go and learn the trade of your father. And you'd go and learn the trade of your father. But if you were the best of the best, you'd go on to the next school. And the next school is called Bet Talmud. And if Atalmud, from 10 years old to 15 years old,

you'd learn the whole rest of the Bible, right? You'd actually memorize every word of every book from Genesis to Malachi. Imagine that. As a 15-year-old, knowing the entire book, that was Betelmood. And if at the end of Betelmood, you were a good student, but not great, the rabbi would say, okay, now go learn the trade of your father. And you'd go off and learn his trade. But if you were the best of the best of the best, then it was your job then to go to the next school. The next school is called Bet Midrash. And in Bet Midrash, it was your job to find a rabbi and you be his disciple. Now, this is really important. Why is this important? It's important because at this point you're 15 years old, and you know all of the words of the Bible.

You know the stories, you know every little, you know everything, except for the most important thing. You don't know how to live this. You know the whole story. You know all the words. But the big question is, how am I supposed to actually do what I've been told to do? So you find a rabbi and you watch the rabbi. You watch how the rabbi interacts with people. You watch how the rabbi treats his family. You watch all of these things.

And the idea is that rabbi is the prototype. and just to imitate the rabbi. So at the end of your life, you look like him. And in fact, you know, this is Jesus. When he gathers his disciples among him, what does he say? He says, you want to be my disciple, take my yoke upon you and learn for me. So what's a yoke? Yoke is a farming implement, right?

So it's a tool that goes around the neck and shoulders of a beast of burden as they go to work. Now, sometimes if we hear that, okay, Jesus saying, take me yoke upon you, learn for me. We might imagine Jesus is like taking off his yoke. Hey, put this on. You go to work now. typically it wasn't a single yoke typically it was a dual yoke so there's two animals that pull so here's jesus when he says take my yoke upon you and learn from me it's an invitation to basically here's his head and neck right through the yoke the invitation is put your head and neck through his yoke

basically you can picture this if you can see that they be side by side looking out at the world the same way that's what it is when jesus says take my Ioke upon you learn from me. Basically look at the world the way I look at the world. So that's why the very first week we talked about how does Jesus face temptation? Then we looked at how does Jesus pray? Then how does Jesus see people like the woman at the well? And today, if Jesus is going to be our prototype, if he's going to be a rabbi,

if we're going to follow him, we're going to look at the world the way he looks at the world. We're going to look at how does Jesus, our rabbi, how does our prototype look at suffering in the world? So the Gospel of John we heard today, actually, you heard the, entire ninth chapter of Gospel of John. Kind of long. Good. It's great. I want to highlight, I want to focus on the first three verses. That's it. Just those first three verses of the entire chapter nine. Because what happens is in those first three verses, what happens? Here's the disciples. They see a man born blind and they ask Jesus a question. The question is,

rabbi. The question is born blind. No, this is so important. On one hand, this question is so normal, it is so natural for a disciple to ask the rabbi. Why? Because remember, these disciples, they know the whole Bible. And they know what the Bible says about sin. They know what the Bible says about suffering. In fact, there's these books called wisdom books. And there's kind of the three main wisdom books. There's the book of Proverbs, the book of Ecclesiastes, and the book of Job. And they all say something kind of different about life. So Proverbs is, it's kind of like, here's how to have a good life. And what Proverbs says is, okay, how to have a good life. Do good, get good. Do bad, get bad. It's really straightforward. It's kind of one of those things.

just like, you want good? Well, then do good. You want to be cursed? Then do bad. And that's kind of the secret of Proverbs. But then along comes to Ecclesiastes. And the author of Ecclesiastes says, okay, yeah, yeah, I know that. But I also know that life isn't fair. And I've also seen people do good and lose everything. And I've seen people do bad and get everything. So which one is right, right? Is it true that you do good and get good? Or is it true that you can do good and lose everything. And the answer is they're both right. They're both true. Because we know this, right? Sometimes you make good choices and things go well. And sometimes we do everything right and everything still falls apart. So the disciples show up and they're looking at this guy and they're saying,

okay, rabbi, which one is it? Like how do you see it? We want to see things the way you see them. We want to be like you. You're our prototype. And I think this is fascinating because the disciples don't simply just ask the question. So why is this? this is the case that he's blind? They ask something else. They ask the question, who's sinned? Basically, what they're saying is, here is suffering. Whose fault is it? Here's pain. Who is to blame? That's where we're going to say today. Like this temptation every single one of us has. What is it in us that when we experience suffering, when we experience pain, we want to find someone to blame? Our big question is like, again, whose fault? It makes sense on one hand, right? It's

kind of self-interested. You see the guy who's born blind and like, okay, if this is someone's fault, I want to be able to avoid that in the future. That just makes complete sense. But the disciples are asking this because they know this truth of life, is that choices have consequences. And we have to remember this. We cannot forget this. There are consequences to our choices. There are consequences to my choice. There are consequences to other people's choices. I mean, we know this. I mean, think about the tragedy of like something like, alcohol syndrome. Like here, here's a child that is born with certain defects that they'll experience and wrestle with and struggle with their entire life. You can look at that and say,

whose fault is that? There's an answer. It's their mom's fault. Because during their pregnancy, she drank alcohol. So there's an answer, right? Because choices of consequences. There is someone to blame there. Other people's consequences, other people's choices have a consequence in our lives. Our own choices. I mean, so I graduated in 93, so I'm really old. And the year after I graduated, there's a kid in the class after me, just an incredible. I loved this guy. He was so full of life. He was fun to be around.

He just quick to laugh, quick to smile, quick to joke. Graduation weekend, he was out with some friends. Remember, he ran off the dock and dove in head first. He didn't realize there was only a foot deep of water. And in that instant, his life changed. And that instant from then on, he was completely paralyzed from the neck down until the day he died, he couldn't move anything from his neck down. Choices of consequences.

Whose fault is it? His. I mean, you think we can do this all day. You know, here's someone who is defensive, right? Someone who's like really snappy when it comes to people around them. He's like, why do you like this? And maybe it's the case that as a kid,

they were mercilessly teased. And so now I'm always on defensive. Right now I'm always ready to fight. Maybe you're someone like who just say, I really struggle to trust people. I really struggle in relationships to really actually hand my mind. heart over. Why? Well, because I actually know betrayal. Because I was cheated on. We know this,

right? We know that the consequences, the pains, the wounds that we all walk around with, they're real. And I think probably a lot of us can all trace some of our wounds to something that someone else has done. That's real. I remember I was actually listening to a woman. She was sharing how, she said, you know all the garbage that I've brought into my family, all the garbage, all the garbage, I brought into my relationships. All the garbage I brought into my marriage. She said, I can trace this directly to the abuse that I suffered at the hands of my father as a little girl.

And whose fault is it that I'm broken in these relationships? Whose fault is I have this baggage? She says, it's his, and that's true. But then she also pointed out, she said, there's also a problem, there's a problem when my reason becomes my excuse. Because we all know that, right? We all know there's a problem when my reason becomes my excuse.

so like, okay, I'm critical because my mom was a really harsh judge. That way I don't need to actually not be critical anymore. Or have a really bad temper because my dad had to short fuse when I was growing up. Therefore, I don't need to work on this. So, of course, in those cases, when we ask the question, whose fault is it? The only answer I really care about is not mine. I'm asking the question, who's to blame? The only answer that I really want to hear is not me.

But, of course, we ask the question, and it makes sense. Why? Because when we're suffering, we want to find the source of our suffering. Always. I don't know if you've ever had this experience where you woke up and your knee hurts for some weird reason. Again, I'm old. It happens a lot. But like, your knee hurts like, wait, why does my knee hurt?

And it's like, oh, yeah, because Jack asked me to help him move yesterday. So it's Jack's fault because I helped him move. And so the reason my knee is all jacked up is because of Jack. Or even the last three years, how many times in the last three years, when you caught COVID, it was like, okay, who's fault? Who did I get this from? Right? We all want to ask the question, who's to blame? Whose fault is this? And so what we can do is we can end up spending all this time, all this energy trying to find the source of our suffering. And for what? Like, what's the point? To keep asking, whose fault, who's to blame? Well, yeah, but if I knew that, then I could,

then you could what? Because I think a lot of us will find ourselves with wounds that we did not self-inflict in situations that we did not create. What good is it to keep asking whose fault it is? That you and I might not be responsible for the cards that we've been dealt, but we are responsible for how we played those cards. That I may, I may never know who's to blame or why it is that I'm doing what I'm doing, when I'm wounded, the way I'm wounded. But the most important question is not whose fault is it.

The most important question is, what do I do with it? The disciples are saying, who's to blame? And Jesus is like, no, no, no, not who's to blame. What are you going to do with it? Back in 1979, there's a man, his name is Dr. David Rabin. And in 79, Dr. Rabin was 45 years old. And he was diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease. And at 45 years old, his legs began becoming stiff

and began becoming weak and then began becoming useless. And he knew as a physician, he knew what would happen next. What would happen next is that would continue to creep up to his operative. upper extremities and pretty soon he'd lose the ability to move. He lost the ability to speak. But there was another physician who came up with this, he invented a computer. And the computer was, as long as you had control over one muscle group,

you could operate this computer and communicate. And so Dr. David Rabin, the only muscle that he could use, that he can control for the last four years of his life. From 1981, till he died at 50 years old in 1985, was one eyebrow. But with that eyebrow, he was able to communicate with his family. With that eyebrow, he was able to tell his family that he loved them,

he's able to joke around with them. With that one eyebrow, he continued to tutor medical students. With one eyebrow, he was able to write a landmark textbook on endocrinology. And he did it all with one eyebrow. Because he didn't waste any time, didn't waste any energy asking whose fault it is, he asked the question, what can I do with it? And that's, I think, where Jesus shows up today. Our rabbi shows up today, as the disciples ask, whose fault it is,

Jesus says it doesn't matter whose fault it is. What matters is what God is about to do. Because what Jesus points out, he says, he says, there's something more going on here. In fact, Jesus even says, this isn't because someone's to blame. This is so that the works of God might be revealed. So God might be known. This is so that God might be glorified. So the whole rest of that chapter, right, is this whole story of what God has done.

I don't know if he caught this. Jesus never gives an answer to whose fault it is, but he just redirects the disciples' attention to, here's what God is going to do in the midst of this. It's not who is to blame, but who is going to be glorified in this? And this is the last thing. I mentioned that the three wisdom books, right? Proverbs, you do good, you get good, you do bad, you get bad.

In Ecclesiastes, you do it. good and you can lose everything and you can do bad and still get everything. Well, there's the third book, the book of Job. And we probably all know the story of Job, right? Job at the beginning of the story is a righteous person. He's a good person. He does good. He's faithful to the Lord. He's faithful to his family. He's a good. He's a good. He gets good. His abundant crops. His incredible family. They all love him. And then it's like Proverbs, right? And then what happens as the story goes on is he does good and loses everything. And at first Job is faithful. Job is faithful. Job says, the Lord gives. The Lord takes away.

the name of the Lord. And he is faithful. But then what happens to Job is what happens to us, right? He gets tired. He gets tired that the suffering hasn't let up. He gets tired that the fact is life keeps grinding away at him. And at one point he says, I just wish that I were dead. I curse the day that I was born. And that's when God shows up. Because in the midst of this, Job saying, like, whose fault is it? Who is to blame? God shows up. And it's remarkable because God doesn't give Job an answer to why he's going through what he's going through. He simply speaks to Job. And at the end of this bunch of chapters of God speaking to Job,

Job says, now I've seen the Lord and I trust him. What I find fascinating is that God doesn't tell Job whose fault it is. God doesn't tell Job who's to blame. God doesn't tell Job why he's going through what he's going through. He never learned why he suffered. But he didn't have to. He didn't have to find out whose fault it was. Didn't have to find out who to blame.

He was humbled, and he found peace and trust in the Lord. And this is what our rabbi does, right? This is how our prototype looks at this world and looks at this suffering. And if we're going to be like our rabbi, if we're going to be like our prototype, if we're going to look through his yoke, we have to do the same. Where we're able to say, I don't know whose fault this is. But I know that God is good. Like, I don't know who is to blame.

But I know that God is here and that God can do something with this.