In this miracle as in all the rest, Jesus did in little the great work
of the Father; for how many more are they to whom God has given the
marvel of vision than those blind whom the Lord enlightened! The remark
will sound feeble and far-fetched to the man whose familiar spirit is
that Mephistopheles of the commonplace. He who uses his vision only
for the care of his body or the indulgence of his mind--how should he
understand the gift of God in its marvel? But the man upon whose soul
the grandeur and glory of the heavens and the earth and the sea and
the fountains of waters have once arisen will understand what a divine
_invention_, what a mighty gift of God is this very common thing--these
eyes to see with--that light which enlightens the world, this sight
which is the result of both. He will understand what a believer the man
born blind must have become, yea, how the mighty inburst of splendour
might render him so capable of believing that nothing should be too
grand and good for him to believe thereafter--not even the doctrine
hardest to commonplace humanity, though the most natural and reasonable
to those who have beheld it--that the God of the light is a faithful,
loving, upright, honest, and self-denying being, yea utterly devoted to
the uttermost good of those whom he has made.
Such is the Father of lights who enlightens the world and every man that
cometh into it. Every pulsation of light on every brain is from him.
Every feeling of law and order is from him. Every hint of right, every
desire after the true, whatever we call aspiration, all longing for the
light, every perception that this is true, that that ought to be done,
is from the Father of lights. His infinite and varied light gathered
into one point--for how shall we speak at all of these things if we do
not speak in figures?--concentrated and embodied in Jesus, became _the_
light of the world. For the light is no longer only diffused, but in him
man "beholds the light _and whence it flows_." Not merely is our chamber
enlightened, but we see the lamp. And so we turn again to God, the
Father of lights, yea even of The Light of the World. Henceforth we know
that all the light wherever diffused has its centre in God, as the light
that enlightened the blind man flowed from its centre in Jesus. In other
words, we have a glimmering, faint, human perception of the absolute
glory. We know what God is in recognizing him as our God.
Jesus did the works of the Father.
The next miracle--recorded by St Luke alone--is the cure of the man with
the dropsy, wrought also upon the Sabbath, but in the house of one
of the chief of the Pharisees. Thither our Lord had gone to an
entertainment, apparently large, for the following parable is spoken "to
those which were bidden, when he marked how they chose out the chief
rooms."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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