March 17, 2026 Tuesday of the Fourth Week of Lent Or Optional Memorial of Saint Patrick, Bishop Gospel: John 5:1-16
Today the Church celebrates the Optional Memorial of St. Patrick, Bishop. The account of his life tells us: the Saint was a fifth-century Romano-British missionary and Bishop of Ireland. He is called the “Apostle of Ireland,” the principal patron saint of Ireland, and also the patron saint of St. Brigid of Kildare, St. Columba, and Nigeria. In his autobiography Confessio, he wrote: “At the age of sixteen, I was captured by Irish pirates from my home in Britain and taken as a slave to Ireland. I lived there for six years, tending flocks, until I escaped and returned to my family. After being ordained a priest, I returned to preach the Gospel in the main part of Ireland and its western regions. In my later years, I served as a bishop, though little is known about where I carried out my work.”
Today, the passage from the Gospel according to St. John describes Jesus’ healing at Bethesda:
We often see beggars along the roadsides—many of them, like those gathered around the five porticoes of the Pool of Bethesda, suffer from various ailments: the blind, the lame, the paralyzed, all waiting for assistance (Jn 5:1-3). Yet when we encounter them in life, we often dismiss them as professional beggars and refuse to offer aid.
Before we knew God, we too were like the man paralyzed for thirty-eight years, longing for His mercy (Jn 5:5-7). By reason of original sin, we are stained with sin from birth. Though we may move freely in the world, our souls remain under the power of the devil and his minions—bound by the slavery of sin and death, yearning for God’s redemption. The moments we encounter God are often unexpected: when passing by a church, our hearts are moved by the prayers and sacrifice of praise offered by those who worship the Father in spirit and truth (Jn 4:23). At such times, our souls impel our bodies to draw closer to God. Christ, rich in mercy, then heals us with His infinite compassion, just as He did the paralytic of thirty-eight years (Jn 5:8-9), freeing us from the bondage that sin inflicts upon our souls.
Today, let us imitate the paralytic healed by Jesus no longer be bound by the logic and rules of this world, which often hinder our journey to God. Only the words of Jesus Christ and the world of God He reveals to us can grant us true freedom.
May the venerable exercises of holy devotion shape the hearts of your faithful, O Lord, to welcome worthily the Paschal Mystery and proclaim the praises of your salvation. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever
March 16, 2026 Monday of the Fourth Week of Lent Gospel: John 4:43-54
We are drawing closer to Holy Week. Starting this week, the Gospel readings in the Liturgy of the Word are taken from the Gospel according to St. John. Today, St. John tells us what happened after Jesus left Samaria. In our daily lives, we often seek help from others. For example, when we encounter urgent difficulties, we often place our hope in our neighbours, whom we see as our saviours; or when we are ill, we entrust our hope of recovery to medical staff, believing that those who care for us with dedication will heal our illnesses with their skilled medical expertise. All of this is built on trust and reliance. In today’s Gospel passage, a royal official from Capernaum, whose son was ill in Capernaum, disregarded his status and came to Cana to ask Jesus to go personally to Capernaum to heal his son. Jesus said to him, “Go your way; your son lives.” Full of faith, he returned home. While still on the way, his servants met him and told him that his son was alive. This is the fruit of worshipping the Father in spirit and truth. Similarly, today, having received the Baptism of our Lord Jesus Christ by faith and the Anointing of the Holy Spirit by faith, we must always believe in God and live out the grace He has given us. May the favor that Christ bestows upon us be shared more abundantly with those who do not yet know Christ through all that God works in us, so that they may see the notable changes in our lives, turn away from all evil and vanity like us, renounce all that is ours, courageously take up our cross, follow Christ, and walk toward holiness.
O God, who renew the world through mysteries beyond all telling, grant, we pray, that your Church may be guided by your eternal design and not be deprived of your help in this present age. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever
We often romanticize miracles. We imagine them as neat, tidy endings, the closing credits rolling over a scene of unblemished joy. But the gospel of John, in its profound depth, refuses us such comfort. The healing of the man born blind is not the end of his story; it is the beginning of a far more tumultuous journey. The true miracle is not merely the acquisition of sight, but the painful, costly, and ultimately glorious passage of a soul from physical darkness into the blinding light of faith.
Consider the immediate aftermath. This man, for his entire life, has known the world through touch, sound, and smell. His identity was forged in the crucible of dependence and darkness. He was “the blind beggar,” a role as fixed and familiar to him as his own skin. Then, with a touch of mud and a command to wash, that world dissolves. He opens his eyes and is flooded with a chaos of light, color, and form he has no framework to process. This is his first, unspoken upheaval: the crisis of a deconstructed self. Who is he, if he is no longer the one who cannot see? The man who returns from Siloam is a stranger to himself, and the world’s reaction confirms this terrifying new reality.
His neighbors and those who knew him as a beggar ask, “Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?” Their confusion is our own when faced with genuine transformation. They cannot reconcile the old label with the new reality. “It looks like him,” they say, “but no, it must be someone else.” In their eyes, he undergoes a second kind of blindness—he becomes invisible as his true self, erased by their inability to process the grace before them. He is forced to assert his identity, insisting, “I am the man.” This is the first step of his new journey: learning to define himself not by his past affliction, but by the grace he has received.
Then comes the trial. Dragged before the Pharisees, the man faces the full weight of institutional suspicion and hardened theology. They are not interested in his transformation; they are interested in the protocol of its execution. This is the next assault: the external attack on his experience. He, who has just been gifted with the most extraordinary physical event, is met not with wonder, but with hostile interrogation. “How did he open your eyes?” they demand, again and again. They try to confuse him with semantics, to trap him with their laws about the Sabbath.
It is here that the man’s inner journey takes a stunning leap. He moves from passive recipient to active theologian. When the Pharisees, desperate to discredit Jesus, pronounce, “This man is not from God,” the healed man does not retreat. He does not have the answers from the scriptures, but he has something the scholars lack: an unassailable, lived experience. His retort is a masterpiece of grounded conviction and spiritual audacity: “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” In that moment, he anchors his growing faith not in abstract doctrine, but in the concrete reality of his own life. He refuses to let their dark theology snuff out the light he has literally just seen. With breathtaking irony, he becomes their teacher, exposing their ignorance: “Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.”
Their response is swift and cutting: they cast him out. This is the third and deepest wound: social and religious excommunication. He is now an outcast, thrown from the only religious community he has ever known. His parents have already distanced themselves, paralyzed by fear. He stands utterly alone, his new sight now showing him a world that has rejected him. The gift of healing has cost him everything: his identity, his community, his place in the world. This is the dark night that follows a profound grace. One can imagine him, sitting alone, his newly opened eyes filling with the bitter tears of abandonment, wondering if the physical sight was worth the spiritual and social blindness it has revealed in everyone around him.
And it is precisely at this moment of deepest desolation, when he is “cast out,” that the most important healing occurs. Jesus hears of his plight and seeks him out. The Healer returns for the final consultation. He finds the man in his loneliness and poses the ultimate question: “Do you believe in the Son of Man?”
The man’s physical sight has already been given. Now, the purpose of that physical gift is revealed: it was always meant to lead him to this encounter. He had called Jesus “a man,” then “a prophet,” then “a man from God.” But now, face to face with the One who found him in his rejection, his inner vision clears for the first time. When Jesus reveals Himself, the man does not just see; he perceives. He utters the confession of full faith: “Lord, I believe,” and he worships Him.
This is the journey from physical sight to salvific vision. The man born blind teaches us that healing is not an event, but a process. It is a path that leads through confusion, interrogation, isolation, and loss, only to arrive at the feet of the One who is the Light of the World. He received his sight, but the true gift was the vision to recognize the Face that had been mercifully smearing mud on his eyes all along. His physical eyes were opened at Siloam, but the eyes of his soul were finally opened in the presence of Jesus. He was cast out from the synagogue, only to be brought into the very presence of God. In the end, it is the one who was blind who truly sees, while those who claim to see stand in the dark.
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