George A. Mason Fourth Sunday in Lent Wilshire Baptist Church 30 March 2014 Fourth in the series Crossing the Planes Dallas, Texas Focus John 9:1-41 We have another long story to look at today from John s Gospel. Last week we looked at Jesus talking with the Samaritan woman at the well, and the week before we looked at Jesus secret meeting at night with Nicodemus in Jerusalem. I say we ve been looking at these stories. Isn t it interesting how we use that word look in so many ways? A few weeks ago our own Nancy Stretch had quite a scare with a detached retina. She quickly had it surgically repaired. Thank God she lives in this time, or she would have needed Jesus to come by and rub mud and spit in her eye. Well, by the next week I bumped into her in the church office. She was still not seeing out of that eye yet, although she has now regained her sight praise Jesus anyway; he s still healing the blind. But we inadvertently fell into a Vaudeville-like act the two of us. Nancy, good to see you. Easy for you to say. We would go back and forth between the literal and figurative meanings: one moment we would talking about whether she could see and the next I would respond with something about understanding, like I see. We would laugh and then go on, only to realize that we were having a hard time saying goodbye as I was walking away. Ok, see you later. Seeing is so important to us that we employ the word and all its cognate kin to talk about knowing and understanding. Now imagine you re this blind man sitting by the Pool of Siloam just outside the walls of Jerusalem in the old City of David. You are not able to work. You can only beg. You are not able to worship in the temple, because you are considered impure by virtue of your disability. All of that is bad enough, but it s worse still. You can t see other people because you are physically blind, but seeing people don t see you because they are more profoundly blind. Even when they do see you, they only see your not seeing; they don t see YOU. They see a BLIND man; they don t see a blind MAN. And they are blind to their not seeing.
They have a blind spot, don t you know?! See how hard it is to talk without using plays on words about seeing? Well, let s focus on this story more closely. See that? Another seeing-related word: focus. When they are passing this man, the disciples turn to Jesus ask Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind. Notice, the disciples don t see the man. They see a theological object lesson. We do this all the time without realizing it. We see a homeless person and we start talking about why she is homeless instead of talking to her. We see a poor person and in our minds we go automatically go to the question of how he came to this state. We go backward, in other words. We look to find fault or fix blame. There must be a cause. She took drugs. He dropped out of school. She had a baby out of wedlock. He s just lazy. She s a victim of prejudice. He s being discriminated against. Whose sin was it, this man s or his parents? I think it s interesting that John says they were passing a man who was blind from birth and the disciples wonder if it could have been because of his own sin. I mean, what, we ve pushed the age of accountability back to the womb? So maybe they didn t know that when they saw him and John is telling us because he already knows, but if that s the case it isn t very good storytelling; and John is a very good storyteller. I think we are supposed to hear just how absurd this approach is, if not downright mean. The categories they had in their day to frame the matter were entirely religious, because religion pretty well explained everything. Unlike today. The chief rabbi in the United Kingdom is Jeffrey Sacks. He has bemoaned the Western tendency in the modern world to omit religion from the discussion altogether. We ought to be amazed that religion continues to be compelling to anyone at all given the state of affairs. He says: The survival of religion in the twenty-first century cuts across some of our most basic intellectual assumptions. After all, how can anyone still need religion if: to explain the universe we have science; to control the universe we have technology; to negotiate power we have politics; to achieve prosperity we have economics. If you re ill you go to a doctor, not a 2
priest. If you feel guilty, you go to a psycho-therapist, not to confession. If you are depressed you take Prozac and not the book of Psalms. And if you seek salvation you go to our new cathedrals, namely shopping centres, where you can buy happiness at extremely competitive prices. 1 And yet, there is a healing power at work in the world that defies all these explanations. And that power is still at work in the world because Jesus is still at work in the world. He told his disciples: As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world. And by the power of the Spirit who raised him from the dead and roams among even now, he is the light of the world. But look at the crucial difference in the way Jesus looks upon this man. First, he sees him more than his blindness. He sees a person not a problem. The spiritual world has this to offer to the scientific. You see it in hospitals all the time. Doctors and nurses are people too, but 1 Thanks to Michael van Breda for sending this: http://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/files/files/ Reports/Theos_AnnualLecture09LordSacks_L ayout%201.pdf sometimes their focus is so trained on the physical that they don t realize how important the spiritual is. That s why chaplains are important partners in healing. They re not witchdoctors sneaking into rooms behind doctors with incantations, competing with modern medicine; they are cooperating with medicine by humanizing it. And they humanize it by spiritualizing it in the most personal way. Many doctors do this themselves, which is all the better. But the point is to move in the Jesus direction and cross the planes, so to speak, between the physical and the spiritual. This can be abused too, of course. Certain religious people think faith healing is the only way to go, that medicine is somehow ungodly. But Jesus used the elements of nature to heal. I can t imagine what the mud and spittle did medicinally, except to take the man back to what it means to be human that is, humus, that is, of the earth. It wasn t only a material compact; it was a spiritual compote. Second, Jesus lives among us to make things better rather than to explain what s wrong. Now, 3
let me be clear about this: I don t think Jesus wants us to ignore root causes. We shouldn t be satisfied putting salve on a wound if we can find out where the infection comes from and stop it from doing more damage. Healing addresses causes while treatment sometimes only abates symptoms. But sometimes our search for answers to why things are the way they are is an excuse for inaction. And sometimes the constant refrain about how broken something is is itself a covert excuse to justify that inaction. I was talking to Jill Allor the other say. She teaches at SMU in the field of research on teaching students with learning and intellectual disabilities to read. She was telling me that even students whose mental abilities test very low can learn to read. It just takes time, technique and patience. But then she said something really interesting: she said that this is what gives her hope for all sorts of kids from disadvantaged backgrounds. If the kids she studies can learn to read, anyone can. We just can t give up on them. It s Jesus spirit that doesn t give up on people and leave them blind when they can be healed. I was listening to the great band Pearl Jam this week. Their lead singer, Eddie Vedder, was talking about their album Backspacer. He was talking about the song he says that pulls it all together called The Fixer. Some of the lyrics go like this: When something s broke, I want to put a bit of fixin on it When signals cross, I wanna put a little straight on it/ If there s no love, I wanna try to love again./ I ll say your prayers, I ll take your side/ I ll find us a way to make light/ I ll dig your grave, we ll dance and sing/ What s saved could be one last lifetime. That s the spirit of Jesus and it must be the spirit of the Jesus disciples you and me. We can t give up on the world. We are with Jesus in the fixing business. And this is the spirit of our increased interest in community action that has emerged in our church s strategic plan called wait for it Vision 20/20. Jesus looks for the mission in the malady. When he says that the man was born blind so that God s works might be revealed in him, he doesn t mean that God made the man born blind in order to 4
set it up for Jesus to heal him. God doesn t have to do bad in order to do good. That tripe trope we trot out Everything happens for a reason (I hate that phrase) only makes sense if you are looking at the what for instead of the how come. If you use that phrase to mean that God allowed a child to die of leukemia so that you would contribute to leukemia research and save other children, well, no. Just no. But if you mean it the way Jesus does when he says that the man was born blind and God never wastes an opportunity to bring good from bad, well, yes. And that leads to the rest of it. Verses 8-41 of this story are the back and forth among Jesus, his disciples, Jewish religious leaders, the formerly blind man and his parents. And the short of it is that those who think they see don t, and those who acknowledge that they don t see everything clearly do. Isn t that the way it is with us? The only way to grow toward the light is to acknowledge you are living in the dark and don t know everything. As the philosopher Immanuel Kant said, excess light blinds. He was talking about Enlightenment thinkers who thought they didn t need religion because they could see everything perfectly with their own reason. The same is true though with some of us who think our faith makes everything clear, that we only need religion and not reason. We must not be like the religious leaders in this story who focus on others and fail to admit how much darkness there is in them. Nancy Stretch told me that at the beginning of Lent she was praying in the spirit of Psalm 51 that God would give her a clean, broken and contrite heart. That prayer was promptly answered by her broken eye, she says. The physical led to the spiritual. Now she says she realizes that broken is just who she is. She just needed a blind eye to see it. This is the truth of the Lenten way. We find our healing upon our admission of our brokenness. Who we really are comes into focus when we confess our need to see. Do you see? 5