Readings
1 Samuel 16:1-13
Psalm 23
Ephesians 5:8-14
John 9:1-41
Like last week, we have a long Gospel reading for this morning. And again, it is a story where Jesus engages and encounters a person who, in some ways, was seen as taboo within the culture.
Jesus is walking with his disciples and encounters a man blind from birth. The disciples ask the question “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” And this gets at the heart of the taboo nature of the man. You see, in Jesus’ context, the assumption was that illness was a physical manifestation of sin. So, if someone was ill they must have done something wrong. And, if you couldn’t find anything wrong that they had done, then it must have been something that their parents or grandparents had done. Regardless, the basic assumption was people who were ill got what they deserved and most likely had engaged in some kind of nefarious behavior. If this seems alien, before we judge too harshly let’s not lose sight that we still do this in some ways. Just as a couple of examples: how often when someone is overweight and has a heart attack do we attribute it to their weight? How often when someone is diabetic do we attribute it to their diet? How often when someone gets cancer do we wonder about their genetics? And while there may be instances where such things are true, are we not doing the same thing as our forebears?
Even so, Jesus rejects such thinking and tells them that this man’s blindness is an opportunity for God’s works to be revealed in him. And Jesus goes and heals the man of his blindness with a simple poultice of spittle and dirt.
After the man is healed we hear a long narrative of how the man’s community, the religious authorities, and even the man’s family struggle to accept what has happened. So much so that many people deny that the man who has been healed is the same man who was blind.
The religious authorities struggle to understand how Jesus (whom they reject) could possibly have healed him and want the man to confirm their assumptions about God, Jesus, and their religious practice. When the man does not they reject the man and call him a sinner, negating the man’s healing.
Finally, the man, now isolated from all those in whom he might have found support and comfort, again encounters Jesus and experiences the fullness of his healing by realizing that it was not simply some miracle, but a work of God through Christ. The outward transformation of his body becomes an inward transformation of his heart and spirit.
Jesus concludes today’s passage talking about sight and blindness and how those who are blind will see, but those who presume to see will be blind. And in a twist of irony the Pharisees who overhear him are recast as being like the blind man was presumed at the beginning of the story, in blindness and with sin remaining.
There is much going on in this story. More, in fact, than we can possibly explore in the time we have this morning.
We live in an age when people look back on the past and long with nostalgia for a time when the fabric of community was stronger. When people seemed to know better how to practice community and care for one another. Everywhere we look we see the decline of social institutions like the PTA, Rotary, the Church, scouting and even recreational things like bowling leagues. Add to this the fraying of the family through geographical disbursement and the increasing frequency of divorce and it is understandable why we might be tempted to look backwards and long for the past.
But before we become too nostalgic, let us look again to the question of community, family, and religion and see how they fared in the life of the blind man found in today’s Gospel. Unlike today, Jesus lived in a time when such institutions were relatively strong. And yet, while they provided a strong sense of self and a woven fabric of support for both the individual and the group they did not always result in the type of community we might assume. No, in the story from today the man born blind, when he was healed did not encounter rejoicing and celebration in the midst of his community, family, and religion. No, because he did not match up to the cultural expectations of his day he was met with fear, doubt, judgment, and exclusion. Why? Because the very thing that made the community strong also made it inflexible and unable to recognize good when it did not match expectation. In other words, the very things that set the community up to be strong also set it up to be blind to anything outside its norms.
Every society and culture is blind in such ways. The norms and mores we create in order to have a sense of belonging, safety, and meaning always, by default, make us blind to other dimensions of our lives. And, when we do not fit those norms we can find ourselves alien and outside.
This is a cautionary tale about where we put our faith and trust. Whether looking backward or forward, do we put our faith and trust in ourselves and our ability to create the society we desire? Do we allow the difficulties and woes we encounter to cause us to presume that there must be a reason for such things that is either our fault or the fault of another? And do we, when we experience radical transformation or thinking outside our cultural box resort to fear, doubt, judgment, or exclusion?
This is what’s going on in our culture today. Whether it is the battle around critical race theory, wokeness, or any other number of things, we are engaging not simply in culture wars, but in a fight for what we will believe and in what we will have faith. It is all this conflict that leads some to long for a romantic past when such conflicts seemed far away. But as we have seen in today’s scripture, such longing is misplaced. There is no idyllic time free of the pain we wish to escape, especially for those who do not conform to our social norms.
No, today’s Gospel is calling us to put our faith in something else. We are being called to place our faith in Jesus. We are being called to place our faith in the God who made us. And to be clear, this is not some simpleton faith in which we blindly believe. No, the faith that we are being called to is one that opens our eyes. It is a critical and rational faith that takes the witness of scripture seriously without becoming captive to one generation’s interpretation of it. It is a faith that allows us to see the world and the God who made us in broad and inclusive ways. It is a faith that breaks down the exclusionary boundaries of our society and allows us to rise above the fray and see what is most important, namely the human family and how it manifests the Body of Christ (both in its wholeness and in its woundedness). It allows us to become agents of peace, healing, and reconciliation.
There are times when we will be like the blind man, and there will be times when we will be the society that surrounds him. In such times will we place our faith in Jesus, or will we succumb to the temptation to place it elsewhere?
May we find the courage and the heart to place our faith in Christ. May we set aside our blindness and see. And may we be the presence of Christ in our own day bringing sight to those around us.