Met Silouan (Muci): Bearing Witness to God's Work in Us

Arabic original here.

In the Line of Christ and Bearing Witness to God's Work in Us

The event of the healing of the man blind from birth introduces you into the core of God's work in the world. Here the Lord introduces you into the core of this work when He unveiled to His disciples the state of the man born blind, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but that the works of God should be revealed in him" (John 9:3). Here He is offering us a new approach for dealing with our life and everything in it from the perspective of God's work, which makes us take the attitude of a partner in the glorious works that God has prepared for us and of witnesses to them after having, individually and collectively, passed through the stage of blindness where God's vision, His works and the glory that lies within them are hidden from us as behind a veil.

In this perspective, Christ introduces us into the mystery hidden in this approach. Here he openly says to His disciples: “I must work the works of Him who sent Me” (John 9:4). With these words, He placed His disciples, just as He places us today, in a state of encounter, listening, preparation and longing to seek to gain knowledge of God's will and to work to incarnate it in our life. When the Lord declares “I must”, He takes you out of your situation in all its importance and out of your manner of analyzing it and approaching it, and brings you to a new approach based on the perspective of how God sees us and our life and His presence in the world and His work in it.

One cannot read without there being light. After Christ set to work doing the will of His Father, with His actions a genuine expression of this will, He did not leave us alone and in darkness. By saying, “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world” (John 9:5), He gave us the light necessary for approaching our life from now on. For us to make Him present, so that the world may continue to have light, the light of Christ's presence and grace, this means that we tie every activity that we undertake to the remembrance of God before we embark on it, as we carry it out, and after we complete it. If we do this, we put ourselves in the line of Christ, who declared to His disciples that He does the works of the One who sent Him, and that we believe that He is the light of the world in the world. In this we reflect that we are eager to seek knowledge of God's will in our life and that we believe that realizing this will is light for us and for the world.

We are surprised in the text of the Gospel by how the man born blind interacted with Jesus. Jesus' asking him, after “they had cast him out,” whether he believed in the Son of God (John 9:35) was met with a practical response from the blind man himself, earlier, at the beginning of his encounter with Christ. In fact, when Christ tested him by increasing his blindness, when he daubed his eyes with clay (that is, making even more impossible his ability to see) and asked him to wash them in the pool, this blind man did not hesitate to put himself in the line of Christ: “So he went and washed, and came back seeing” (John 9:7). We are surprised none nor nothing could separate him from Christ: neither bitter experience since his birth, nor what appeared to him to be the last "trial" in His placing the clay on his eyes, nor even what followed in his parents' and the Pharisees' attitude toward the miracle. And so God's works were revealed in the blind man. He placed himself in the line of Christ and bore witness to Him, before bowing down in worship to Him, in a circular motion that starts from God and is carried out on account of Him, before returning to Him once more through worship and thanksgiving.

Perhaps now you receive a share like the share of the blind man, in case you don't see. In fact, the Lord still does the works of His Father so that the world may see God's works and He has chosen you so that God's works may be revealed in you. Do you not see that? If your answer is affirmative, then do what He tells you; and if your answer is negative, then seek light from Him, since, in both cases, you are in Christ's sights, so that you may in turn see, believe, and bear witness to God's works. At the end, may we sing together, “O Lord, how great are your works! In wisdom have you made them all” (Psalm 103:24).