The gospel of Quinquagesima Sunday, from Luke 18:31-43
At that time Jesus took unto Him the twelve and said to them: Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and all things shall be accomplished which were written by the Prophets concerning the Son of Man. For He shall be delivered to the Gentiles, and shall be mocked and scourged and spit upon: and after they have scourged Him, they will put Him to death, and the third day He shall rise again. And they understood none of these things, and the word was hid from them, and they understood not the things that were said. Now it came to pass, when He drew nigh to Jericho, that a certain blind man sat by the wayside begging. And when he heard the multitude passing by, he asked what this meant. And they told him that Jesus of Nazareth was passing by. And he cried out, saying: Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me. And they that went before rebuked him, that he should hold his peace. But he cried out much more: Son of David, have mercy on me. And Jesus standing, commanded him to brought unto him. And when he was come near, He asked him, saying: What wilt thou that I do to thee? But he said: Lord, that I may see. And Jesus said to him: Receive thy sight, thy faith hath made thee whole. And immediately he saw and followed Him, glorifying God. And all the people, when they saw it, gave praise to God.
There are two kinds of blindness here. One induced. The other imposed. I will limit myself to the former.
Passages like this have always troubled me. For some reason i have always taken perfect past tense as being something God did to the disciples: kekrummenon - having been hid from them. It just dawned on me they did it to themselves. They were blinded by their assumptions. They could not possibly understand what Jesus was plainly saying because “This is not how a Messiah talks…” They did not want to hear it because they did not want to believe it.
We are all sophists at heart. Mundus vult decipi. The world wants to be deceived. Perhaps this is the philosophical harmonic of original sin. ( I recommend Josef Pieper: Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power - Read it or listen to it) And we have created lots of ways to hide things from ourselves.
Consider the current commentariat on Ukraine. The same supercilious wisenheimers that lied to us for two years about COVID-19 are now in a position to tell us the truth about Ukraine? “Two weeks to flatten the curve"
Gell-Mann amnesia writ large.