Fourth Sunday in Lent
March 2, 2008
1 Samuel 16:1-13
Psalm 23
Ephesians 5:8-14
John 9:1-38
It’s good to SEE all of you here for worship this morning at St. George’s. But I need to know. Did you bring your eyes with you? I did. But today’s gospel lesson from John doesn’t make me feel very confident about my eyes this morning. Because it seems that everyone who has eyes in today’s gospel does not see very much with them. In fact, except for Jesus, there is a good bit of blindness in all of them; three kinds of blindness. One is a physical blindness, one a mental blindness, and one a spiritual blindness. And if we are able to read ourselves into these scriptures, we have to admit that we suffer from at least two kinds.
The first kind of blindness we encounter in our gospel lesson today is obvious. The beggar who sits at the gate suffers from the worst case of physical blindness; he has been blind from birth. His eyes do not function at all. He cannot see anything. Now, in the ancient world this was considered a curse; physical flaws and bodily impediments were a sign of one of two things: in the pagan world of capricious gods, it was a sign that the gods did not look favorably upon you, and your flawed status as a human being kept you from taking any meaningful role in society. If you were a Jew, however, a physical flaw or a bodily impediment was a sign of sin, either your own sin or the sin of your parents. You were necessarily an outcast, often cast into the street, even as a child, to become a beggar and people went out of their way to avoid you.
We should not be surprised, then, that Jesus shows such compassion for these persons. We who live in the modern world and understand God through the lens of our Episcopal faith are certainly not surprised, because we can’t imagine a God who would intentionally cause us to be born flawed or willingly make us suffer for our sin. We expect that Jesus would be compassionate and bring healing to a broken body or mind or spirit. But we also know that such healing compassion is also what gets Jesus in trouble with the religious leaders of his day.
If you remember from last week’s gospel lesson compassion is what brought Jesus to Jacob’s well to heal the pain and end the isolation of the Samaritan woman. Our season of Lent is the best time for us to be hearing such stories. Because healing the blind and the broken-hearted, and bringing the disenfranchised back into relationship with God and community are the very acts which will provoke the religious leaders of Jesus’ day to condemn him to suffer and die on the cross. This is what makes the story of Easter the ultimate story of healing. Healing which Jesus continues to bring to the broken places of our life.
We all brought our eyes to church today, but truth be told we brought our own impediments to seeing, as well. We like to think that we have eyes that can see. Sight is very important to us, so important we are willing to wear corrective lenses when our sight becomes deficient. But how little we see. How self-limiting we are with the sight we’ve been given. I mean, how many things do you really see in a day? The sighted people in John’s story passed the beggar at the gate regularly, but they never really saw him, and they didn’t care to know him. They couldn’t even identify him as the person Jesus healed. And that is one of the many sins people commit in this story, and one of the sins we commit in our own life. The sin of not seeing people God would have us pay attention to.
The blind man goes unnoticed by people who pass by because they see only what their eyes will look at, only what choose to see. We go through life thinking that what we see is outside of us; people and objects reflected by light which fall into our range of vision. But the truth is this: what we see is behind our eyes, not in front of them. What we see depends upon what we have been taught to see, and what we don’t see or won’t see is what we have been taught to ignore. The beggar in John’s story is within sight of all who pass by, but people in this culture have been taught to avoid or ignore those who are born in sin. So their religious and cultural beliefs keep them from really seeing him for the person he is; the person God made him to be. The same is true for us and for people in any age. We are only able and willing to see what our mind selects for us to see, a mind which has been programmed by the values, attitudes, opinions and beliefs we learn from our culture and from our experience with the people who influence the ways we think.
We should not be surprised that people who have been taught to believe that a bodily defect is a reflection of sin will look upon a blind man and not see him to be anything more than his sin. And we are not surprise that Jesus would want to heal the physical blindness of the man born blind, the mental blindness of those who ignore him or cast him aside, and the spiritual blindness of religious leaders who cannot recognize their own God because he does not play by their rules. This is why we need to take a close look at John’s story of the blind man, so that we might begin to recognize our own impediments to seeing. We need to find out how Jesus can also heal us in our blindness.
This past week I had the opportunity to read stories about mental and spiritual blindness in several essays written by students who are applying for a diocesan scholarship to attend college. I was amazed by the ways their eyes were opened by experiences they had with people so unlike themselves; people they had been able to avoid or ignore until a life experience took them out of the safety and comfort of their sheltered life and their proscribed belief systems. They told stories of seeing poverty and homelessness for the first time in situations where they worked side by side to feed people and build shelters for them. They told about caring for the most vulnerable in our world; the mentally challenged and the physically disabled. They related their newfound friendships with people in foreign places, seeing them differently from what they were given to believe about them. They told of witnessing the deceitful and self-serving practices of businesses and volunteer organizations they worked for. In all of these accounts it was clear that students were able to overcome mental and spiritual blindness which limited their knowledge and understanding of people and their world.
But here’s the best part of their stories. In every case the blindness of these students was healed and their eyes were opened within the context of their faith. They were convinced that they were able to see people and life situations differently because of the ways they were maturing in their faith in Christian community. They spoke about their commitment to living a life of faith. Their new eyes had made them advocates for the poor and the marginalized, they were open and eager to engage with and learn about people different from themselves, and some, even at the cost of losing a job, or not getting a job, became public defenders of honesty, fairness and truth in the face of deceitfulness and harm which they saw perpetrated on the innocent and powerless. Reading these student’s stories in light of today’s gospel made me realize how much Jesus is still healing us of our blindness, not just by opening our eyes so that we see in new ways, but by giving us new ways of seeing through the eyes of our faith.
I hope all of us can see ourselves in the stories of these students. I hope we can also see ourselves in our gospel story today. None of us here is physically blind, but the first message Jesus gives to us about our blindness comes with the healing of the blind man. The message is this: we are not to think of those who are born with a physical or mental challenge or disability as a product of sin. We are not to believe that people deserve the bad things that happen to them, or even the good things, for that matter. In fact, Jesus wants us to know quite the opposite. He wants us to know that God works through people who are mentally or physically challenged or disabled in ways that reveal God to us, and in ways that reveal God in us. And how true that is for caretakers who are people of faith. Their work with the most vulnerable of our world makes them see such persons differently from others whose eyes are limited by fear, or prejudice, or by their own human inadequacies.
People of faith are able to see the mentally or physically challenged or disabled through the eyes of God, and they will tell you and show you the difference that makes in their life. Through eyes of faith, caretakers are able to open the recesses of their heart and do what seems impossible to the rest of us; they are able to care for the physically and mentally challenged and disabled as Jesus would care for them.
Unfortunately, Jesus’ message of care and compassion, healing and seeing through the eyes of faith is lost on the Pharisees and on the blind man’s family and friends in the story. But, ironically, his message is also illustrated by their blindness. The people who regularly pass by the blind man at the gate do not recognize this blind person who can now see; some even doubt that he is the same man. They are unable to see anything new with their same old eyes. The blind man’s family confirms that he is their son, but they will not acknowledge Jesus’ healing of him for fear of being expelled from the synagogue. They cannot see past their self-centered agenda for saving their reputation as good and faithful Jews. Instead they are willing to abandon their son and close their eyes to God’s message of healing in order to maintain their status in the eyes of the authorities. And the Pharisees, well, they can only see Jesus’ healing of the blind man as adding to sin to sin. They regard Jesus’ act as sinful because he performs the healing on the Sabbath. The Pharisees also discredit Jesus because they believe he has tampered with God’s purpose for making this man blind form birth—to atone for sin. In the end, we can see that the blindness of the Pharisees is worse than the blindness of those who cannot or will not see with their eyes; the blindness of the Pharisees is a spiritual blindness which keeps them from seeing God at work in the healing acts of Jesus.
So there you have it. John’s story of the blind man who is healed by Jesus. Or more accurately, John’s story about those who have eyes to see, but refuse to be healed of their blindness. A story which shows us how our mental and spiritual blindness limit our ability to see ourselves and our world as God would have us see. As people of faith we need to ask how we might become healed of our blindness. What it might take to expand our own mental and spiritual capacity for seeing the world through God’s eyes so that we can live in the world in God’s truth.
Personally, I do not think we can be healed of our physical, or mental, or spiritual blindness outside of a community of faith. It is only in a community of faith that we can find people who can help us learn to see as Jesus teaches us to see. People whose ability to see has been expanded through word and sacrament in regular worship. People who can take us into new places of faith and experience which open our eyes, not only to new ways of seeing but to deeper levels of believing. People who live a life of faith because they see their life through the eyes of faith. People who are able to live with the consequences which come from seeing as God sees in a world which can only deal with them within the limitations of its own blindness. Because there is one thing we can be sure of; there will always be consequences for those who see by faith and who act on faith by what they see. Like the blind man, we might also find that our friends no longer recognize us or count us among their friends; we, too, might find ourselves being challenged and warned and even dismissed by authorities who fear any authority higher than their own; we might also be made to suffer the shame and loss of being unsupported by family who love us only on the condition that we see as they do; and we might one day experience the indignity of being expelled from a community whose rules for membership are too rigid to accommodate eyes which see far beyond their usefulness or their authority for our life.
John’s story of Jesus healing the blind man tells us much about the limitations and the possibilities for seeing. And, once again, he gives us a choice. We can learn to see our life and our world as God would have us see, or can choose to remain limited by the ways our world teaches us to see. The choice we make will make a distinct difference in the way we live our life in this world because, like the blind man, all of us have been given life so that the work of God can be revealed in us.
The question every Christian needs to ask is this: What kind of God do people see revealed in us? What difference can that make in the way others see God?