Sermon at The Church of
the Holy Apostles, New York City
March 2, 2008,
The Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year A
The Reverend Elizabeth G. Maxwell, Associate Rector
1 Samuel 16:1-13
Psalm 23
Ephesians 5:8-14
John 9:1-41
I do not know whether this man is a sinner. One thing I do
know; that though I was blind, now I see. In the name of God,
the holy and undivided Trinity, Amen.
This Gospel lesson that we heard this morning is
one of the densest and most tightly crafted, to say nothing of
one of the funniest, passages in all of scripture. And the
man born blind is surely one of the bible’s greatest
characters. He has growing insight, he finds his voice, he
takes courage, he finds freedom. He’s a kind of a truth
teller of the order of the child in the story of the emperor
who has no clothes. The story itself is replete with big
themes: light and darkness, judgment, sin, creation, healing-
but paramount among all of them is the theme of blindness and
sight.
The passage is a kind of a drama in seven acts; let us
see more closely how it unfolds. As the story opens, Jesus
sees. He sees a man, blind from birth, sitting by the
roadside. The man is passive – he doesn’t ask for anything,
although later we will hear that he used to beg there in this
place. Instead, others talk about him.
The disciples ask, “Whose fault is it that this poor
guy is blind? Is it the sin of his parents? It is his own
sin?” We may wonder whether their question comes out of pity,
or a feeling of judgment, or just wanting to know who to
blame. Jesus says, “No one sinned. It’s no one’s fault.
Rather, it is that the work of God may be revealed in this
man.”
On one level that’s a relief, of course, that the poor
man is not being blamed for his blindness and neither are his
parents. But we might ask what kind of God this is that we’re
talking about. Has God made the man’s disability for His/Her
own glory? I actually read this a little differently than
that. I don’t take Jesus’ words to be causal – it’s not that
God caused this for God’s glory – but rather that in this
situation there is the possibility that glory- that God’s
work- may be seen. We might say that’s why any of us is born:
in order that the glorious work of God may be revealed.
In any case,
Jesus is focused on what there is to do while there is time,
and even though it is Sabbath and there is meant to be no work
on the Sabbath day, he heals the man. Again, a healing not
asked for, but given freely. Jesus bends down and spits on
the ground and makes a mud paste and smears it all over the
man’s eyes. I love this detail. A friend of mine said it
just shows that when healing happens, things get messy before
they get resolved.
It’s not a spa treatment, but perhaps it is meant to
remind us of our origins in the earth. The man is sent to
wash in the pool of Siloam, which John makes sure we know
means “sent,”. Jesus has been sent from God, and the man is
sent to wash in the pool called “sent.” Some see a baptismal
reference here, as in the washing, he rises with illumination
and vision. In any case, he goes, he washes, and he comes
back able to see.
Before we go any further, we might note the general
lack of rejoicing about this amazing event. One poetic
commentator fills in the blanks and says, “The man first
turned handsprings and then cartwheels and then somersaults,
and was dragged off to the authorities in mid-cartwheel!”
Instead, the neighbors again begin to talk about the man who
was formerly blind. “Isn’t this the man that used to sit and
beg?” “Yes, I think it’s he!” “Oh it’s not, but it looks
like him.”
Why don’t they know?
Haven’t they been looking at this man his whole life?
Or have they just looked through him, overlooked him, only
seeing the category “poor blind beggar,” and never the person
at all, even as today people might say ‘the homeless,’ ‘the
elderly,’ ‘Muslims,’ ‘minorities’- anyone who is other. But,
for the first time, the man himself speaks; he finds his
voice, and John says he keeps on speaking: “Yes, it’s me, I’m
the one!”
Understandably confused, the neighbors want to know how
this has happened, and the man explains to them. So they
bring him to the religious authorities to have this certified
appropriately. The Pharisees are also confused. They’re not
so much confused about the man’s identity, but about how to
understand this healing that has happened to him. The man
born blind tells them what has happened, that Jesus put mud on
his eyes and sent him to wash and he came back seeing.
They then enter into a dispute: “This man,” meaning
Jesus, “is a sinner who does not observe the Sabbath.” “No,
no, God wouldn’t hear a sinner and grant such a healing.”
So they ask the
man who he thinks Jesus is, and he says, “A prophet, he must
be a prophet.” The Pharisees think of another possibility:
“This is all a hoax, he wasn’t really born blind. Let’s call
his parents and ask them if this is really their son and if he
was really blind from birth. How is it that he can see now?”
The parents say, “Well, we do know that this is our
son, and we do know that he was born blind – it’s been a lot
of trouble and disappointment, we can tell you. But, we don’t
know what happened, why don’t you ask him? He is old enough
to speak for himself.” John says as an aside that they speak
this way because they are afraid of the Jews, who have already
agreed that anyone who confesses Jesus will be put out of the
synagogue.
I’d like to pause here for a moment to look at the
figures of the Pharisees and the Jews in the Gospels, and in
John in particular. The Pharisees brought a renewal movement
to the Judaism of Jesus’ day. In their impulse, they were in
many ways very close to Jesus – in some ways, I dare say,
formative for him in his theology and ministry. The conflict
they had with Jesus comes from their own deep and slightly
different sense of God and Torah. But in John, we see a kind
of a polemical language about the Pharisees that reflects a
later time close to the end of the first century of the Common
Era when Christians were indeed put out of the synagogue.
We might think of it as a kind of a family feud, an
identity struggle on both sides, but especially a struggle for
the new Christian movement, an evangelical impulse that was
claiming its validity. As we hear these words in the
gospel today, we may also remember to our shame the uses that
have been made of these texts to justify Christian
anti-Semitism, intolerance, and persecution. It’s ironic
because this very language becomes a way that people in power,
both religious and political power, assert that they know the
limits of who God is and what God might do, with no room
for ambiguity. It’s exactly the thing that the Pharisees
are being accused of, set up for, in the text.
A more fruitful
way to read this text might be to acknowledge that the
different characters - the questioning disciples, the man born
blind, the crowd, the fearful parents, and the righteous
judges in the religious establishment – are all living in us,
maybe especially in us who are here today instead of sleeping
in, or reading the New York Times, or going to brunch. We
might take note of the voices of piety and right belief and
certainty about how things should be done and how God works
that live in us for the very best reasons, but none the less,
sometimes shut down the new and the strange and the
unexpected, the disorienting ways of God. We might take note
of how the necessary voices of discernment and caution can
turn all too quickly to a dogmatic certainty and superiority
in us.
So, we return to the next scene: and the religious
leaders say, “Give glory to God!” which is actually a formula
that means, “Be ready to make a confession.” They say, “We
know this man is a sinner.” Ironically, of course, we know
God’s glory has been seen in the healing that has been done.
And the formerly blind man says, “I don’t know if he’s a
sinner; I only know one thing: I used to be blind, and now I
can see.”
He’s grounded in the miracle that has happened to him.
He doesn’t claim more; he’s not sure what it all means, but he
does know that he can see and it makes them crazy. So they
keep asking questions about how this could be and he pushes
back. He really does seem to have found his voice; “Do you
want to become his disciples too?” he asks. Even more
enraged, they say, “Well, we’re the disciples of Moses. We
don’t know anything about this guy.” The man formerly blind
says, “If this man were not from God, surely he could not do
this,” and they’re enraged. They say, “You were born entirely
in sin; you have nothing to teach us.” And they drive him
out.
You may notice that Jesus has been absent since the
beginning of the story- but now, as the man is driven out,
Jesus comes to find him. “Do you believe in the Son of Man?”
he says, using what is both a Messianic title and a mysterious
way of referring to himself as ‘the human one.’ This man he
speaks to must recognize this voice with the acute hearing of
a blind person . “Who is he, sir? Tell me, that I may
believe.” Jesus says, “You have seen him, and the one who is
speaking with you is he.”
The man born
blind, who has just recently seen any human face for the first
time- perhaps first his own face reflected in the Pool of
Siloam, and the faces of his parents and life long neighbors,
the angry, threatened and threatening faces of the authorities
– this man looks at
that face, at Jesus’ face. I
wonder what he sees. Light Bearer, Light Bringer, Light
Revealer. There is an old idea that it is light inside a
person, a kind of an inner energy, that comes out through the
eyes and enables sight, and that there is an inner light from
which all vision and healing and awareness comes. Light is
also the sign of the Divine Presence, and all of that is
implied in this moment, as the man says, “Lord, I do
believe.” Alone in all of John’s Gospel, he bows in worship
before Jesus.
There is then a sobering coda to this story as Jesus
says that he has come for judgment. It is the actions that
judge, and in a final exchange with religious leaders who are
stuck in their certainty he says, “Those that have no sight
receive their sight, but those who claim sight become blind.”
So, what are we to take from this long and complex
story? For me, very simply, it is the invitation to see. In
Lent, we are called to examine ourselves, to understand and
own our blindness, to find what blocks we have to insight,
especially blocks that come from investment in ‘the way things
are,’ that come from privilege in the structures of power, and
from our own sense of righteousness. We are called to make
room, to notice what’s going on around the edges and the
margins, to allow for surprise and healing that come from
homely things like earth and spit.
So, I will leave you with some images of seeing. Those
of you who were here last week heard Father Tim’s story of his
son Gabriel learning words for what he sees: “Truck, truck!”
and bringing new insight to his parents.
Some months ago, you may have read in The New Yorker
interviews with formerly blind people who had received their
sight because of surgery. Each of them spoke about being
overwhelmed, of not having categories for what was happening
to them. Some of them said they might almost prefer blindness
to this jarring world of color and motion and light and
stimulation. They talked about the scariness, the bigness, of
the sighted world- but also of learning to know those they
loved, and previously had only been able to touch and hear,
anew through sight.
I remember, also,
an experience that I had many years ago when I was in seminary,
really a cumulative experience, in which I came to see and
understand how completely riddled with sexism the Christian
tradition is.
I was young; I had been raised in the church- but
somehow, I had never noticed it. I had never noticed my own
exclusion, I had never noticed my own collusion with it. I
think the realization had something to do with all the portraits
of 19
th century male divines on the seminary wall
looking down sternly at me. During those years, especially the
first year, I walked around feeling that I had exposed nerve
endings that were raw all the time. It was an opening of my
eyes, yes, but a painful one. There was a Christian feminist
folksong that my friends and I used to sing in the late 70s that
began: “Sometimes I wish my eyes hadn’t been opened.” It wasn’t
a great song, but it did express one of the more difficult parts
of seeing.
Far better than that song is that great and beloved
hymn that surely has run through many of our minds in hearing
this story, “I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind but
now I see.” Many of you know that Amazing Grace was written by
John Newton, who had been a slave trader. It turns out that it
is something of a legend that his eyes were opened instantly to
the horror of what he was doing in the midst of a storm at sea.
But it is true that by grace he gradually came to recognize the
humanity of those he had captured and degraded. He gradually
was led to turn his life around, to become a preacher, to work
for the abolition of the slave trade. In this case, grace
enabled a growing sight that led to action, taking his whole
life.
But there are also those grace-filled moments of sight,
aren’t there? I had one earlier this week as I was walking
Scout in the exquisite early silvery light of the winter
morning. All of a sudden, I looked up and I saw a flash of red,
and it was a cardinal. I don’t know when I’ve ever seen a
cardinal in Chelsea! It was one of those moments of beauty, of
wonder, of presence.
This Lent, may God heal our blindness and grant us eyes
to see and teach us to bear the light.
Amen.
.
