John 9:1-42 "Blind Spots"

You are welcome to use parts of this sermon, but if you do, please attribute it properly!

         Here are some essential truths that have been passed down from generation to generation of children.

         1. No matter how hard you try, you cannot baptize a cat.

         2. Never ask your 2-year-old brother to hold a tomato or an egg.

         3. You cannot trust all dogs to watch your food for you.

         4. Do not sneeze when somebody is cutting your hair.

         5. You cannot hide a piece of broccoli in a glass of milk.

         6. Never wear polka-dot underwear under white shorts… no matter how cute the underwear is.

         The source of each of these truths is surely buried in personal experience.  Seeing is believing, so to speak, which is perhaps why these core axioms are re-invented with each successive generation of children.  Even today, without a doubt, the cat will end up drenched and very angry.  Your mother will always find that piece of broccoli drowned in a glass of milk, and the polka dots will forever show through.  However, you do not really know any of these things unless you see them with your very eyes.

         Seeing is believing - or so they say - and perhaps that is why the Pharisees, the neighbors, and even the young man’s parents just did not get it in the story we heard about Jesus healing a blind man on the Sabbath.  Of course, the Gospel writer of John does not make it easy for us either to discern the truth of what was going on. 
         Consistent with so many of the stories the writer includes in his narrative, these verses are filled with metaphors and loaded with double meanings.  There is physical blindness and physical sight.  There is spiritual blindness and spiritual sight.  There is belief and unbelief.  There is seeing what is right in front of your nose and being blind to the workings of God.
         And it is all those various perspectives packed into a single story that makes this particular passage so intriguing.  Did you realize that, in the 42 verses it takes for the Gospel writer to tell the tale, only two of those verses deal with the actual healing of the blind beggar? The remaining 39 consider the slew of reactions to the healing.
         It all began on a Sabbath morning.  Maybe Jesus should have been in synagogue, but instead he and his disciples had come upon a blind man begging by the side of the road.   The man had been born blind, and that fact is the only thing that everyone in this story can agree on. 

         Maybe it was because it was the Sabbath and the disciples were wondering if you can worship God in the great outdoors rather than in the synagogue and, feeling a tad bit guilty about not listening to the local rabbi expound on the Torah, they seized upon this moment to inject a bit of Sabbath theology into their day.

         “Rabbi,” they queried like good synagogue goers who knew their Holy Scriptures well, “who sinned: this man or his parents, causing him to be born blind?”

         “Neither,” Jesus replied emphatically. “You’re asking the wrong question. You’re looking for someone to blame. There is no such cause and effect here. Look instead for what God can do. You know (he continued), we need to be energetically at work for the One who sent me here, working while the sun shines (Sabbath or no Sabbath). When night falls, the workday is over.”

         And with that our rabbi kicked up some dry dirt from the roadside, bent over, and scooped it up in his hands.  Then he did a strange thing, according to the Gospel writer. 

He spit – and it must have been taken a lot of spitting too – he spit onto the dirt and managed to turn it into some sort of mud, mud, I love mud.  And he took the mud – that beautiful, fabulous super duper mud – and rubbed it onto the blind man’s eyes, this poor marginalized blind man whose greatest contribution to society thus far was that he had been a lifelong object of theological reflection on the origins of sin.

         The spitting and rubbing done, Jesus wiped his hands on his robe and said to the man, “Go and wash your face in the Pool of Siloam.”

         The blind man did as he was told, feeling his way along the city walls, lifting his face toward the sky so the mud would not fall off his eyes before its time, but it slid down his face anyway, and some of it got soaked up in his beard.  But that did not make a whit of difference because when he returned, he was no longer simply the man born blind, object of theological reflection on the origins of sin. 

         Now he could see.  He could see the browns and beiges of the dry dust on the road.  He could see the blue of the sky and the whites and grays of the clouds that scudded by.  He could see the hundred shades of cream in a sheep’s wooly coat.

         One would think that people would have been pretty excited and joyful for him – the man born blind but who now could see.  However, that was not so.  Take the disciples, for example.  They were still trying to work through that head-scratching question of sin and never could get past it enough to rejoice in the man’s newfound sight. 

         The town was abuzz though, and the news of a healing on the Sabbath spread like wildfire.  And yet, there was really no celebration there either.  Instead, the neighbors failed to even recognize the man and they, like the disciples, got into a big discussion, not about sin this time but about the man’s true identity.

 

          Some wondered, “Why, isn’t this the man we knew, who sat 

here and begged?”

          Others speculated, “It’s him all right!”

         But still others objected, “It’s not the same man at all. It just

looks like him.”

         And the blind man who now could see kept interjecting, “It’s me, 

it’s me, the very one.”

        But even that brief confession of identity did not sway the neighbors.  They were still wary, and so they asked point blank, “How did your eyes get opened?”

          “A man named Jesus made a paste,” he declared, “and rubbed it on my eyes and told me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’ I did what he said. When I washed, I saw.”

         “Yeah, right! “ they countered.  “So where is this so-called healer?”

         “I don’t know,” the man answered, not doing a lot to strengthen his case.

         No wonder the neighbors marched him off to the Pharisees, not knowing whether this was a miracle they had encountered, some kind of hoax, or – worst of all – something (and someone) dreadfully impure that they ought to avoid.

         And so the Pharisees began their investigation.  They asked for the facts of the case, and the blind man who now could see related his story yet another time, remarking that Jesus was surely a prophet.

         “Hogwash!” countered the Pharisees, who now were unwilling to even contemplate that the man had been blind in the first place.   And so they trotted him off to his parents with the nosiest among the neighbors in close pursuit.  His mother and father admitted that their son had been born blind but then, for fear of reprisal, withdrew their parental support, indicating that if he was old enough to vote, he was old enough to handle this situation himself. 

         In the end, the man born blind who now could see was left to his own defense.  And he, like the woman at the well that we heard about last week, became an evangelist too. 

         He did his best to convince the Pharisees that Jesus – even though the rabbi broke all the rules by healing on the Sabbath – was a good man, a man from God.  However, unlike the woman at the well, whose confession of Jesus as the Anointed One, led to, as the Gospel writer said, “many believing,” the man born blind was not quite so successful.  He got expelled from the synagogue – and that is end of his story.

         Except that Jesus showed up again, and the Gospel writer uses this opportunity for a last bit of theological reflection and for sticking it one more time to the Pharisees.  You see, the man born blind who now could see proclaimed his faith.  “Lord, I believe,” he said, and in a posture of the deepest respect, knelt down before Jesus.

         And in a marvelous twisting and turning of words, Jesus spoke pointedly to the Pharisees about those who are blind who really can see and those who can see who are really blind.        

         “Does that mean you’re calling us blind?” they asked obtusely.

         And Jesus replied, “If you were blind, you would be blameless, but since you claim to see everything so well, you’re accountable for every fault and failure.”

         We who also claim to see so well have our blind spots, you know.  Everyone does – people or events or ideas that are right in front of us that we do not see – and so, like the Pharisees, we are not blameless either. 

         If Jesus were here right now, surely the question he would put to us halfway through our Lenten journey is this:  What do we see – and what are we blind to? What are we blind to - and what should we maybe ought to see?

        Jesus looks at the blind man and he sees an opportunity for God’s goodness to be revealed. The Pharisees look at the blind man and they see an opportunity to make trouble for Jesus. Even the blind man’s parents, God bless them, don’t seem to be able to see their own son. They look at him, and they see the loss of their place in the community, the threat of being kicked out of their synagogue.”

         As the writer of the blog, Magdalene’s Musing, wrote “The disciples look at the blind man and they see a question of sin. 

         But - what do we see?  Not just in this story, but in our own lives and in the life of our church?

         Do we see people living in poverty because they are lazy and do not want to work, because she should have known better than to get pregnant – again, because being on welfare is fun?  Or do we see the unimaginable struggle of the working poor, the MacDonald’s Mom whose kids do their homework while she dishes out fries, the indignity of picking up the phone and making a cold call to a church to ask for help to pay the electric bill? What do we see?

         Do we see the astounding retreat of glaciers as an event that does not matter because we have lots of water in Maine?  Is the disappearance of white birch, balsam fir, and maybe even maples trees something we are content to be blind to?  Or do we see a world swerving almost uncontrollably toward such radical change that we have cause to wonder how in heaven’s name we will ever be able to ask forgiveness from our grandchildren? What do we see?

         Do we see a polarizing debate on the origins and effects of climate change so tiring and at times so boring that we convince ourselves it does not concern us? 

         Do we see a church that is a convenient and comforting place on Sunday mornings?  Do we see a congregation that wants to grow but, deep down inside, hopes that it is the pastor’s job to get people in the door, coming back over and over again, and then joining and pledging lots of money, so the church can continue to be a convenient and comforting place on Sunday morning? 

         Or do we see the radical transformation that is possible in our own lives and in the life of this church and this town if we let the Light of the World shine in our lives and through our ministries – and actually tell people about it?  Do we see the healing that is possible when we (and our church) become the ones who carry that light to a world too often filled with darkness?  What do we see?

         Are we like the blind man who knows he can see – and more than that – understands the source of his sight?  Certainly he is the one we all like to think we are.  And maybe some of us are – at one time or another. 

         But we all have our blind spots, don’t we? So maybe in the midst of our Lenten self-reflection, we also ought to ask ourselves:  When are we like the other characters in this story?

         When are we more like the Pharisees – who convinced themselves of their 20/20 spiritual vision but were, in fact, blind as bats when it came to recognizing Jesus for who he was and his message for its power?  When are we like the disciples – so involved in analyzing the situation to fit it neatly into a theological box that we are blind to the joy of healing and the potential for transformation?  When are we like the parents who divest themselves of any responsibility in order to save their own skins?  When are we like the neighbors – unable to recognize the goodness and greatness of God right before our very eyes?

        Those are the questions of Lent, and my prayer is that when the sun peeps above the horizon on Easter morning, like the man born blind, there will be a part of us that can affirm with assurance and great high hope that, though we, like him, were blind, now we can see: see the world around us for what it is, but also see glimpses of what it can become, see the damage that we have done – and also see impressions of the role we can – and must – play in its transformation.
by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village COmmunity Church U.C.C.