March 6, 2005
Seeing and Believing
“Whose fault was it,” the disciples asked Jesus, “that this man was born blind?” It’s not a question that most people would ask these days. Most of us would attribute such a misfortune as blindness at birth to something that could be explained by medical science. The disciples’ question, however, betrays a worldview in which there was no clear boundary, if any boundary at all, between the physical and the spiritual, between the medical and the moral. Disease and disability were the fault of someone, the divinely ordained result of some unnamed, and perhaps unknowable, sin.
“A different thought world,” we moderns, and even we post-moderns, say to ourselves. But perhaps not so different as we might initially think. After all, two Christian leaders, Revs. Falwell and Robertson, leaders who enjoy continued access to the White House, and whose television programs attract millions of admiring and contributing viewers, attributed the attacks of September 11, 2001, to feminism, homosexuality and liberalism, among other contemporary sins, at least sins in their universe. Even though the identities, the motivation and the plan of attack of the nineteen hijackers were all known very soon after the event, the two reverends felt compelled to find the deeper sin, the real reason why over 3,000 people were murdered. It was, according to them, immorality–not the immorality of the victims, to be sure–but God is apparently none too precise in the way he visits retribution. It was someone’s fault, and since gays and feminists are the enemies du jour, it must be their fault.
But in our Gospel lesson, Jesus tells his disciples that they’re asking entirely the wrong question about the man born blind. “Don’t ask who was at fault,” he tells them. “Look for the ways that God’s will is accomplished through this man.” And then, Jesus gives the man his sight.
The religious authorities, the ones who were so adept at identifying infractions of the law, the ones who were so good, in other words, at finding fault in others, were scandalized. Their first reaction was denial. The man must have been faking his blindness. Or perhaps it was a case of mistaken identity. “I am the man,” the formerly blind man repeats. This isn’t enough. The fellow’s parents are summoned. “Yes, this is our son. Yes, he was born blind. No, we don’t know how he was given his sight. Ask him. He’s old enough to tell you.”
Finally the religious leaders resorted to what people in power who are threatened often resort to. Jesus, they proclaimed, was “not authorized” to heal. He didn’t even observe the Sabbath properly. The healing shouldn’t have happened, therefore it couldn’t have happened. “All I know is that I was blind, and now I see,” said the man. And for this effrontery, he was driven from the temple.
The episode concludes with Jesus’ telling this formerly blind man that there is a bigger, a more profound, question of blindness and sight here. He tells him that those who are physically blind can see with the eyes of faith what those whose eyes are sharp and scholarly will never be able to see.
The Gospel of John, from which this account is drawn, often seems like an extended exposition by a writer who was determined to prove that Jesus was more than a man, that he was divine. This was a big question in the early church. Unlike Matthew and Luke, who trace Jesus’ ancestry to human progenitors, David and Adam respectively, John’s genealogy begins with Jesus as the pre-existent and eternal Word that becomes flesh through the incarnation. His human lineage is almost irrelevant. But in this extended episode from John’s account of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, John shows us a Jesus who is exquisitely human, a Jesus who almost seems to revel in the accusation that he is a sinner. This is a Jesus who turns the customary religious categories upside down, suggesting that the supposedly righteous are really only self-righteous; that those who presume themselves to be wise are fumbling in the dark of their own self-deception. Jesus tells his followers that those who see with the eyes of faith, who simply acknowledge the miracle of God’s love are those who experience salvation.
Sometimes, I think that our own sharp and often cynical eyes, or at least the limited scenarios that our culture permits those eyes to see, get in the way of our seeing, really seeing, God’s loving and life-giving presence in this world. We are skeptical, perhaps hardened by our disappointments. We’re too ready to believe that such goodness can’t be real. And sometimes even the church puts the barrier of its own fearfulness, its own need to hold on to that precious authority, in the way of our experiencing that goodness.
But we need that vision, don’t we? We need to get outside of our institutional selves; we need something to push us beyond the limitations that we impose on ourselves. We need to save the church from itself, to see the church not as a goal, or an end in itself, but as a way toward fulfilling God’s will and experiencing new life in God. We need to have the word and the world opened to us, a world of need and sufficiency, a world of pain and joy. We need to witness the vitality of churches in Africa, we need to see the newly discovered dignity of dalits of India, people who have found in Jesus a fellow untouchable whose life and example inspires them to challenge and defy India’s rigid and dehumanizing caste system. We need the insights of a Latin American Christianity that has taught us to look at the Gospel through the eyes of the poor. We need to be one with Palestinian Christians who have defied all that gloomy contemporary logic about the clash of civilizations and as a witness to their faith continue to render assistance to Palestinian Muslim refugees. We need, in other words, to change places, to move from the learned blindness of our privileged world, from the cynical determinism of the world-world weary, to the unfathomable joy of the one who, once blind to God’s grace and love, now sees, really sees Jesus.
What I have been describing as “what we need,” I hope you will recognize, is God’s mission through the church, a mission of giving and receiving, of witnessing and being transformed by what we see. And there is no more eloquent symbol of that mission, that witness, than the eucharist, the feast of thanksgiving that we are about to share. At our table together, we will be proclaiming our oneness in our identity with Jesus. We will be sharing God’s gifts with one another, as equals, as children of that God. We will see, and we will taste, the incarnate love of God. And, if we are willing to be changed by what we see and what we taste, our eyes will be opened like the eyes of those two disciples who broke bread with the risen Christ at Emmaus. They will be opened like those of the blind man whom Jesus healed, the man who, against all odds, could see, could really see, the goodness and the power of Jesus love.
Amen.
