You can come to church blind, but you cannot stay that way
As far as the preacher is concerned, the scripture appointed for this morning is an embarrassment of riches. From 1st Samuel we have David, the shepherd-boy, anointed as the new king of Israel, and its climatic verse, “for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Sam 16: 7). The 23rd Psalm speaks for itself: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” (vs. 1). And from the ninth chapter of John’s gospel, there are at least three sermons incapsulated in its 41 verses. Spiritual blindness as a metaphor for unbelief permeates the text. As we walk into the fourth week of Lent these themes—of light and darkness; of seeing and unseeing—challenge us to see the world as God does, rather than from our flawed, human perspective.
Let’s begin with the prophet Samuel who is dispatched to Bethlehem to find a new king after Saul falls out with God. Seven of Jesse’s sons are paraded in front of him. Samuel takes one look at the oldest, Eliab, and is ready to call it a day. But the Lord intervenes, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (vs. 7). After the seven sons are rejected, Samuel asks for the eighth—the youngest, the runt, who is out in the pasture with the sheep. David is called in, and on cue, the heavens open and the spirit of God descends upon David. God sees something other than David’s own good looks, something else that is invisible to Samuel. The kid has heart.
Now to truly understand the 9th chapter of John’s gospel, we need to know where Jesus came from and where he is headed. A few weeks earlier Jesus fed the 5000. That very night he walked on water. Now, the word has spread, crowds have begun to trail him, and the Jewish authorities are rattled by all the “I am the Bread of Life” talk. Even the disciples are confounded—are they really supposed to eat his flesh and drink his blood? The Pharisees team up with the high priests and temple police to arrest him. They have their stones ready; many want him dead. And many ask, “The Messiah doesn’t come from Galilee, does he? Don’t the scriptures tell us that the Messiah comes from David’s line and from Bethlehem?” (John 7: 40-41). Ah, there it is, the progenitor-shepherd David prophesying Jesus’ family tree.
The very first sentence of Chapter 9 says that Jesus saw the man. Jesus saw the man. This idea of seeing as God sees is front and center. The disciples also see the man, but they see him as a theological problem to debate. The fact that the man was born blind recalls the ancient, misguided belief that misfortune is God’s judgement on particular sins. Did his parents sin? If not, how could he have sinned in utero? Jesus dismisses this bad theology out of hand. This may explain why the blind man—who doesn’t see Jesus, doesn’t recognize his voice, and doesn’t even know who he is does not ask to be healed of his blindness.
It is notable that the miracle Jesus performs is only one verse out of 41. What’s more, it’s not even a miracle. In John’s Gospel the Greek word is semeion for “sign” and not miracle. Jesus performs a sign that points to something more important—that the works of God are made manifest in Jesus. Another indication that we’re dealing with a sign rather than a miracle is that Jesus doesn’t act from a place of compassion. His heart doesn’t hurt over this man. No, he is on a mission. We are to see that the Son is sent from God as the light of the world. Light we can’t see when our eyes are shut.
Now when Jesus says, “We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work” (vs. 4) he alludes to the shadow of his impending death. He is preparing us, step by step, for his journey to Calvary. And when Jesus stoops to makes clay with his spittle and anoints the man’s eyes, this primitive action points to the very beginning, when the creator of all that is, fashioned Adam from the dust of the earth and then animated the clay figurine with his breath.
Even with these theological nuggets, the real drama of the narrative doesn’t begin until verse 8. The neighbors ask: “Isn’t this man who used to sit and beg?” How can they not recognize him? Why do they fail to see? Did the blind man use his disability as a disguise? Or did it make him invisible? They don’t know how to see him without his disability. It’s almost as if they have some sort of stake in denying that he was healed of his blindness. Because to accept what their eyes are telling them would be to recognize a common humanity, a bond, a kinship. Surely they threw him coins from time to time. But did not lock eyes? To me, this suggests that humility, curiosity, and openness are essential to real seeing.
So they haul him before the Pharisees, who interrogate him. Keep in mind that the Pharisees weren’t bad guys, even though Jesus sparred with them. In fact, they were revered pillars of the Jewish community. They were beyond reproach—which makes their insistence on interrogating an illiterate beggar seem a bit…defensive. This is a most unequal and intimidating confrontation. The poor man doesn’t even know who it was that restored his eyesight, only that, quote, “He put clay on my eyes. I washed. I see.” The only leaves the Pharisees even more freaked out.
Refusing to believe the poor man’s claims, they call in his parents, who say: “Yup. He’s our boy and he was born blind!” But that’s all they’ll say. “Go ask him—he’s a grown man.” How sad is it that his own parents can’t or won’t celebrate that their boy can now see? They have sniffed out the fact that Jesus represents a serious threat to the ruling class—and they’re afraid that religious leaders will put them out of the synagogue. So they clam up: self-preservation at the expense of their own child.
The Pharisees, unable to tolerate the “offense” of Jesus’ cure, go back to the man born blind. They say, “We know this man, Jesus, is a sinner and an impostor.” And because the man knows nothing about Jesus other than his name, he has no reason to doubt these clerics. Even so, he attests to what he knows: “I was blind and now I see” (vs. 25). The power and truth of this formerly blind “nobody” gets under their skin. They bark at him: “How did he open your eyes?” You can practically picture the man rolling his newly-functioning eyes as he retorts with confidence: “I have told you already and you won’t listen. Do you ask again because you, too, want to become his disciples?”
Oh, snap! But he’s not done. This nameless former beggar then schools the Pharisees, his every word alive with Gospel fire. “Here is an astonishing thing!” he cries. “You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” (30-34. At the risk of repeating myself: Oh, snap!
He’s essentially showing the Pharisees that they prefer the status quo of spiritual blindness to accepting that Jesus was sent by God. And that this lowly beggar sees what they do not, what the Lord himself tells Samuel in today’s Old Testament reading: “For the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” He has heart alright.
So what do we take from this? I think it is this: You can come to church blind—but you can’t stay that way. A wise priest friend of mine would often say to his flock, “You can come to church broken, but you can’t stay that way.” Meaning, you’ve got to do the work. Go to therapy, learn to live in community, pray, make amends, and study the correct theology that teaches God is love and so are you. Not that other stuff that was used to clobber and oppress you because you’re a round peg that doesn’t fit in a square hole. I bet you knew in your gut that that theology was not of God.
And for some of us it means that we have give up ourselves for Lent. All of this has to go! I am giving up “Dana” for Lent. During this Lenten season, may we, too, confess our blindness and receive sight. What I am saying is this applies to the eye as the lamp of the body: “So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness” (Matt 6:22-23). Oh, and there is our own hypocritical judgement of God knows what. Guilty as charged! Again from Matthew, “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?” (Chap. 7) Oh snap! Yeah, I am going to snap a third time.
One of the most dangerous spiritual places that we can live is in the deluded notion that we are fully-sighted, spiritually-speaking. My friends, spiritually-healthy people befriend their blindness and attempt to do better, be better. They acknowledge their sins, their shortcomings and they repent. Our nation, our government to repent too. All of us individually and corporately. This is the only way the log in our eyes can be wiped away. Spiritually-sighted people recognize that acknowledging their own blindness is an act of liberation, not a confession of bondage. The journey toward the light begins when we acknowledge our darkness. And that’s what we do during Lent. Take an inventory of our blindness, and say, I am a sinner, but I am willing to adjust my vision to see what God sees.
Throughout the Gospels, most of the people who encounter Jesus are too busy seeing what they want to see — a magician, a heretic, a political and military leader, a carpenter’s son, a wise man, a phony, a clerical threat — to notice what the blind man, free of all such filters, discerns by the end of the story. May we be born again in these last few weeks and humbly praise the one who kneels in the dirt and gets his hands dirty in order to heal us. Amen.