Fourth Sunday of Lent – 15 March 2026

St Paul’s Bridgewater – Saturday 6pm /St Mary’s Cathedral Hobart – Sunday, 10.30am

There are certain places to which we return because they allow us to see the world differently.

Perhaps it is the lookout on Mount Wellington or a quiet place by the Derwent. On a clear day you stand there and suddenly everything appears in a new light. The landscape you thought you knew reveals something deeper—a wider horizon, colours you had not noticed before, a beauty that was always there but somehow overlooked.

The Scriptures today invite us to something like that.

They invite us not simply to look again, but to see again—to see with the eyes of God.

In the first reading the prophet Samuel was sent to the house of Jesse to anoint a king. One by one the strong and impressive sons passed before him. Each seems an obvious choice. Yet God says something that overturns human logic:

“Man looks at appearances, but the Lord looks at the heart.”

Finally, the youngest son was called in from the fields—David, the one no one had even thought to present. The overlooked boy becomes the chosen king.

Already the message is clear: God sees differently from us.

Then the Gospel gives us one of the most powerful encounters in the Scriptures—the healing of the man born blind.

For years this poor man sat begging. To many he was invisible. To others he was a theological puzzle. Even the disciples begin by asking, “Who sinned, this man or his parents?”

But Jesus does not see a problem to analyse. He saw a person.

He bends down, touches the earth, anoints the man’s eyes and sends him to wash. And the man returned able to see.

Yet the deepest blindness in the story is not the blindness of the beggar. It is the blindness of those who believe they already see.

Meanwhile the man who was blind moves gradually into the light.

That is why this Gospel is proclaimed in the middle of Lent. Because Lent is a season in which the Lord gently asks each of us:

What is it that you cannot yet see?

Sometimes we fail to see the goodness of God quietly at work in our lives. Sometimes we overlook grace present in ordinary people. Sometimes we walk in a kind of spiritual twilight—and the Lord patiently leads us out of darkness.

Sometimes our greatest blindness is failing to see the dignity of the human person.

Our society is quick to measure people by usefulness—by productivity, efficiency or economic value.

But the Gospel tells us something far deeper.

A person does not have dignity because of what they can do.
A person has dignity because of who they are.

Jesus saw that truth in the blind beggar by the roadside.
He saw it in the Samaritan woman at the well.
He saw it in fishermen, tax collectors, sinners and strangers.

And he sees it in every person we meet.

Another beautiful thing about today’s Gospel is that the man who was healed does not only receive the gift of sight—he receives the gift of faith.

At the end of the story Jesus asks him,
“Do you believe in the Son of Man?”

And the man answers simply:

“Lord, I believe.”

The journey from darkness to light becomes the journey from sight to faith.

That is the journey of Lent.

Little by little Christ opens our eyes.

Beneath the wars, anxieties and uncertainties of our times there lies a deeper problem—a blindness that forgets the dignity of the human person, forgets the presence of God, forgets the light Christ has brought into the world.

But here, in this Cathedral/church, something very different is happening.

Here the Word of God opens our eyes again.
And when we leave today, hopefully we do not return to the world unchanged.

Hopefully, we go as people who have begun to see: the dignity of every person, the quiet action of grace,
and the presence of Christ walking with us through every darkness.

And if we truly see these things, the light encountered here will not remain within these walls.

It will travel with us—into our homes, workplaces and communities—until the world learns to recognise the One who is both the God of day and the God who triumphs over darkness, the Lord who always leads his people into light.

Most Rev. Anthony J. Ireland
Archbishop of Hobart
14/15 March 2026