Fifth Sunday of Advent: The Gradual Unveiling of Divine Light
The Fifth Sunday of Advent positions you at a threshold. You’ve been watching, preparing, waiting—and now comes the question that determines everything: When the Light arrives, will you actually be able to see it? John announces that He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. This isn’t about divine failure. It’s about human incapacity. The blind man at Bethsaida reveals why: seeing God requires transformation, and transformation happens in stages you cannot rush.
Stand with this man whom others bring to Jesus, pleading for his healing. Notice what you’d rather avoid: he cannot come to Christ on his own. He needs to be led. This is your situation too, though you’ve learned to hide it better. You perform competence, navigate life with learned patterns, convince yourself you see clearly. But **the deepest blindness is not knowing you’re blind**. The religious leaders in 2 Timothy are described as always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth. They accumulate information, master arguments, maintain appearances—all while missing the reality standing before them. Their eyes are open but they see nothing.
What Jesus does next should disturb your expectations. He doesn’t speak a word and restore sight instantly. He takes the man by the hand and led him out of the village. Before healing can happen, you must be brought outside the place where everyone pretends to see. The village represents the consensus reality you’ve constructed—your religious community’s assumptions, your culture’s values, your family’s unspoken rules about what’s real and what isn’t. Christ must lead you away from these borrowed visions. Gregory of Nyssa writes, “The true vision of God consists rather in this, that the soul that looks up to God never ceases to desire him” [Life of Moses]. You cannot desire what you think you already possess.
Then comes the strangeness: And when he had spit on his eyes and laid his hands on him, he asked him, “Do you see anything?” The spittle—Christ’s own bodily substance mingling with the man’s blindness. **Healing isn’t extraction of darkness but Christ entering into it**. This is the scandal John describes: The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. God doesn’t cleanse creation from a safe distance. The divine life descends into matter, into spit and clay and blood. Your healing requires God’s substance mixing with your wounds, not replacing them from outside.
The man’s response reveals what you must face: I see people, but they look like trees, walking. Partial sight is more disorienting than blindness. When God begins opening your eyes, you don’t suddenly see clearly—you see confusingly. People who once seemed solid and comprehensible become strange, uncanny. The patterns that organized your world start breaking down before new ones emerge. This middle stage is where most seekers panic and retreat. You wanted instant clarity, but God is giving you something deeper: the capacity to see truly, which can only be built gradually.
Why stages? Because **the human will must learn to choose vision rather than have it imposed**. Maximos the Confessor distinguishes between the natural will—your created capacity for the good—and the gnomic will—your actual choosing between competing goods. Adam possessed natural will perfectly but had no gnomic will because he’d never faced a choice. In the garden, good was simply obvious. After the Fall, nothing is obvious anymore. You must learn to choose the true good from among a thousand counterfeits, and this learning takes time. Christ could force full sight immediately, but then you’d never develop the mature capacity to see rightly in new situations. The darkness you’re sitting in isn’t punishment—it’s pedagogy.
Paul writes to Timothy: All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness. Notice the sequence: teaching, reproof, correction, training. This is the same staged process. You don’t grasp truth once and possess it forever. You must be taught, then reproved when you misapply what you’ve learned, then corrected through painful adjustment, then trained through repeated practice until true seeing becomes habitual. Scripture itself participates in this gradual unveiling. The Old Testament patriarchs saw God’s radiant countenance directly in theophanies—Abraham hosting the Trinity at Mamre, Jacob wrestling the divine stranger. But they saw intermittently, in glimpses. The prophets saw more consistently but through visions and symbolic language. Only in Christ does the Word become flesh, allowing sustained, tangible encounter with divine reality.
This is why John’s prologue is read alongside the blind man’s healing: No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known. The Greek word is exegeomai—Christ exegetes the Father, interprets, unfolds, gradually reveals. **The Incarnation itself is staged disclosure**. Jesus doesn’t appear in blazing glory but as an infant, then a child, then an itinerant teacher, and only through suffering, death, and resurrection does the full revelation emerge. God adapts infinite light to finite capacity, respecting your creaturely pace.
After the first touch, Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again; and he opened his eyes, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. The second touch is different from the first. You’ve now been changed by the partial seeing. You know that trees aren’t people. You’ve started distinguishing reality from projection. The second touch doesn’t simply add more information—it transfigures your whole mode of perception. Athanasius says of Christ’s work, “He became what we are that He might make us what He is” [On the Incarnation]. The healing isn’t God fixing broken equipment; it’s God sharing divine vision by uniting His nature with yours progressively.
Notice what you’re being invited to feel: frustration at the slowness. You want immediate transformation. Every spiritual system you’ve encountered promised quicker results—three steps to enlightenment, seven keys to breakthrough, instant salvation through correct belief. But trees-that-walk vision reveals something crucial: **rapid change without depth creates illusion, not insight**. The man must sit with partial sight long enough to recognize its insufficiency. Only then can he receive the second touch not as magic but as gift.
Paul warns Timothy that the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions. This is precisely the temptation at the halfway point. When trees start walking, you can panic and find someone who’ll assure you they’re actually trees, that your childhood vision was correct after all. Or you can find teachers who promise that trees are really people if you just try harder, think more positively, have more faith. Both options protect you from the disorienting middle passage. **Sound teaching insists you stay in the confusion until God completes what He’s begun**.
The cosmic dimension illuminates why stages are necessary. Creation itself participates in this gradual unveiling. In the beginning, God speaks—Let there be light—and light appears. But that primordial light isn’t the sun and stars, which come later. It’s the uncreated light of divine presence pervading formless matter. Then God begins differentiating, separating, forming—six days of progressive unveiling of creation’s potential. The seventh day isn’t cessation but the establishment of rhythm: work and rest, movement and integration, action and contemplation. Your healing follows creation’s pattern. God doesn’t make mature things appear ex nihilo. He plants seeds, nurtures growth, waits for fruit in its season.
John writes that to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. Not “made them instantly” but gave the right to become—the authority, capacity, potential. You’re being born, and birth takes time. The embryo doesn’t become infant instantly. Each stage requires previous stages. Your eyes are opening, but the muscles controlling focus must develop. Your brain must learn to interpret visual input. Your whole being must coordinate around this new capacity. Maximos teaches that “Christ is the true and perfect natural will of all that is willed rightly” [Questions to Thalassios]. Jesus isn’t adding something foreign to human nature but actualizing what humanity was always meant to be. But actualizing takes time because your warped habits must be unlearned.
Sit with what this demands you face: your childhood wounds around vision. Someone important taught you not to see what was actually happening. Perhaps violence you were told didn’t happen, or love you were told you didn’t need, or harm you were taught to call help. You learned to interpret trees as people, or people as trees. Now Christ is undoing those distortions, and it’s terrifying because **your whole adaptation strategy depended on that blindness**. The man at Bethsaida had organized his entire life around being blind—his social position, his livelihood, his relationships. Seeing clearly will require him to reorganize everything. This is why Jesus asks, Do you see anything? He’s inviting the man to participate, to report his experience, to co-create the healing rather than passively receive it.
The Fifth Sunday of Advent asks: Are you willing to see in stages? Advent itself is staged preparation—not one week but five, each building on the last. The Church refuses to rush you to Christmas precisely because **premature celebration prevents actual transformation**. You must sit with longing, acknowledge your blindness, allow yourself to be led outside the village of comfortable assumptions, endure partial sight without retreating, and trust the second touch will come. This is how God respects your freedom. Instant sight would overwhelm your capacity to integrate it. Staged sight allows you to participate in your own healing.
Paul’s language about Scripture being God-breathed connects to John’s Word made flesh. Both are about divine reality becoming accessible to human capacity. Breath is intimate, bodily, rhythmic. God breathes Scripture out at the pace you can inhale it. Some passages strike immediately. Others remain opaque for years until your capacity develops. The Bible itself undergoes staged revelation in your reading—first you see moral lessons, then psychological insight, then cosmic patterns, then mystical encounter. Not because the text changes but because your eyes are opening progressively.
The man sees people like trees walking. What are you seeing half-way? What looked solid is now moving. What seemed alive is now appearing more static. Your spiritual life undergoes this disorientation when genuine transformation begins. The religious practices that once felt life-giving become hollow. The theology that once seemed comprehensive now appears incomplete. The community that once felt like family now shows its dysfunction. This isn’t backsliding—it’s trees-walking vision. You’re seeing more truly, but not yet clearly enough to navigate confidently. Gregory of Nyssa teaches that “the one who ascends never stops going from beginning to beginning through beginnings that never cease” [Homilies on the Song of Songs]. Each stage of sight reveals how much you still don’t see.
**The darkness you’re sitting in isn’t obstacle but womb**. John says the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. The verb can mean “overcome” or “comprehend”—both true simultaneously. Darkness cannot extinguish light, and darkness cannot fully understand light. You’re standing in that darkness right now, watching dim shapes move, uncertain what you’re seeing. This is exactly where Christ meets you. Not after you’ve figured everything out, but in the murky middle where trees walk and nothing makes sense yet.
Paul’s warning about those who turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths describes the temptation you face at partial sight. Myths promise instant clarity—simple explanations, clear enemies, guaranteed outcomes. Truth requires you stay in complexity until clarity emerges from within the situation, not imposed on it from without. The myths Paul warns against aren’t ancient stories but any system that short-circuits the slow work of transformation. Prosperity gospel, therapeutic deism, political salvation, even certain forms of traditional religion—any framework promising sight without the disorienting middle passage.
What does the second touch give? John describes it: And from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The Greek is charin anti charitos—grace replacing grace, wave upon wave, stage upon stage. The first grace is partial sight. The second grace is full sight. But full sight doesn’t mean you see everything—it means you see truly what you’re given to see, with capacity to integrate new sight as it comes. The man doesn’t become omniscient. He sees clearly enough to navigate reality rightly. That’s what maturity looks like: not having all answers but having trustworthy vision for the path ahead.
The ancient pattern connects through Temple progression. The outer courts anyone could enter—corresponding to natural human knowledge, trees-as-trees vision. The inner courts only priests could access—partial sight, beginning to see sacramentally. The Holy of Holies only the high priest entered once yearly—direct encounter with divine presence. But Christ tears the Temple veil from top to bottom, God’s action not ours, making the progression accessible to all. Yet even in the new covenant, you move through stages. Baptism is outer court, initiation into the community. Chrismation is entrance to inner court, anointing for priestly participation. Eucharist is Holy of Holies access, feeding on divine life itself. But you don’t grasp Eucharistic depth immediately. You receive it as infant, then child, then adult, each stage revealing more of what was always present.
Sit with your impatience. You’ve been preparing through Advent and you want the fulfillment now. But the Fifth Sunday says: one more week. Stay in the waiting. Let the partial sight do its work. Notice how trees-walking vision is changing you already. You’re less certain of old categories. You’re more willing to question inherited assumptions. You’re developing humility about what you actually know versus what you’ve been told. This groundwork is essential for the second touch. Gregory of Nyssa says “concepts create idols of God, only wonder understands anything” [Life of Moses]. Your concepts are breaking down. Good. Wonder is becoming possible.
The man’s healing concludes: Jesus sent him to his home, saying, “Do not even enter the village.” You cannot go back to the village of shared blindness, even after you see clearly. Once your eyes open, returning to collective illusion would be betrayal of the gift. But you can go home—to your actual life, relationships, work, embodied existence. Clear sight doesn’t remove you from ordinary reality. It lets you engage it truthfully. Paul tells Timothy to preach the word; be ready in season and out of season. This is what healed sight enables: faithful presence regardless of external conditions, because you’re navigating by true vision rather than group consensus.
John concludes his prologue: grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. Not grace or truth, but grace and truth together. Truth without grace crushes you with demands you cannot meet. Grace without truth becomes permissiveness that leaves you unchanged. **Staged healing is grace—Christ adapting to your capacity. Staged healing is truth—nothing less than divine vision will ultimately satisfy**. You’re receiving both in the slow opening of your eyes.
The invitation is stark: Will you let Jesus lead you outside the village? Will you endure trees-walking vision without retreating to familiar blindness? Will you trust that the second touch is coming even when you can’t see how? The Fifth Sunday holds you in this threshold moment. Christmas is almost here, but not yet. The Light is about to dawn, but you’re still in darkness. And in this precise moment, Christ asks: Do you see anything? Answer honestly. Report your partial sight. Let Him know what trees-walking vision looks like from inside your experience. This honesty—not pretending to see more or less than you actually do—is how you participate in your own healing. The second touch comes not to those who claim perfect sight already, but to those who know they’re still learning to see.
The Greater Horizon 