Quinquagesima Sunday AD 2025

The Gospel for the last Sunday before Lent tells of a blind man whose sight Jesus restored, and of Jesus’ disciples who, in a spiritual sense, were even blinder than that blind man. When Jesus told them about the suffering, death, and resurrection that awaited Him in Jerusalem, “they understood none of these things: and this saying was hid from them, neither knew they the things which were spoken”.

All this happened near Jericho, which is the oldest and lowest city in the world and symbolizes the fall and misery of mankind. It was Jericho, where a blind man sat by the roadside, unable to do anything but beg, hoping that someone would have mercy on him. It was Jericho, where even Jesus’ closest disciples, the twelve, didn’t understand a word of what He was telling them.

And yet, it was not Jericho that was to become the place where mankind’s fall reached its ultimate depths. That place was to be Jerusalem, the Holy City, the city of God’s temple and of His glorious presence. In Jericho the blind man received sight, but in Jerusalem those whose job it was to know God and His Word and who should have welcomed Jesus as the promised Messiah turned out to be truly blind.

This poses serious questions for us: Do ​​we truly know God and His Word? Do we acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah, sent to save us? Do we have the same faith in Him, the same great trust in Him, as did the blind man of Jericho, who cried: “Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on me!” Jesus Christ is our only Saviour, He is the only light for all the blind, and it is only when we place all our hope in Him that we can know that our faith has saved us.