The Man Formerly Known as Blind

“The Man Formerly Known as Blind”

John 9:1-41

First Presbyterian Church of Jamestown , New York

The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet

April 3, 2011

Fourth Sunday in Lent

I remember as if it were yesterday one Monday evening thirty or so years ago in Dallastown , Pennsylvania . Kim was living in that little town before we were married and, on one of my visits, we decided to order pizza for supper. That was before the day of delivery service, so I hopped into my car to drive to the pizzeria a mile or so away. Stopping at an intersection for a red light, my eyes locked on a young woman who was beginning to cross the street. She looked to be my age and she was blind. I watched as she poked her white walking stick at the pavement, trying to discern her way. My eyes were transfixed as she crossed in front of my car. She was, at once, both within five feet of me and a whole world away.

It was one of those crisp, beautiful fall days. The sun was beginning its descent, bathing the landscape in its golden autumn glow. Canada geese were honking their way south. Cornstalk decorations and pumpkins on every porch proclaimed harvest time. And this young woman could see none of it. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what it must be like to live in constant darkness. I cried to heaven from the front seat of my “John McCain” – I had one of those old Ford Mavericks – trying to talk God into spending a miracle on this girl. I watched her until she disappeared from my sight, but thirty years later, she has not left my life.

I think of that young woman every time I read this story about Jesus healing the blind man and wonder why she was blind. Jesus and the disciples encountered a man born blind and, while the disciples were speculating about whose fault the blindness was – did he commit a sin while in his mother’s womb, something the rabbis taught was possible, or maybe his parents did – Jesus would have none of it. “Neither of them sinned,” Jesus said. That is not the way God works.

That is not to say that our choices do not have consequences. Smoke cigarettes every day for thirty years and the odds are not in the smoker’s favor. Let a nation continue to spend more each year on defense and weaponry than on medical research and education and people will continue to die whose lives might otherwise have been saved. But often the bad things that happen to us just happen. Sometimes we are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sometimes people take advantage of our trusting nature. Sometimes our heart skips a beat and we are thrown into cardiac arrest. Do not always assume “cause and effect,” Jesus told his disciples. But do know this: every painful situation or circumstance in our lives is an opportunity through which the healing power of God may be called forth and experienced. Sometimes people receive their sight. Sometimes cancer disappears. And sometimes we are given the strength and ability to rise above whatever hurt or lack or diminishment we are suffering. Always, God means well for us.

That the man formerly known as blind now could see confounded the Pharisees. When they questioned the man and he said that Jesus had opened his eyes, they did not believe that God was in Christ for no one who came from God would heal on the Sabbath which to them was an egregious breach of the law. On the other hand, as one of the Pharisees pointed out, “How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?” The Pharisees tried to put their feet on the neck of the man’s parents, but they were not talking. They knew that a wrong answer could find them expelled from the synagogue and they did not want that. “Our son can speak for himself,” they said.

One more time they went to the newly-sighted man and said, “Give glory to God for your healing, for we know that this Jesus is a sinner.” But the man replied, “This is what I know: once I was blind and now I see.” The man asked the Pharisees why they were being so obtuse. “How can you have any question about this? How can you not know from where Jesus comes? Why are you trying to evaluate his actions in light of your theology instead of allowing your theology to grow in the light of his actions? Your god is too small.” “Open your eyes,” the man was saying to the Pharisees. “ Don ’t you be so blind.” But by now, they had heard enough from him and, doing what those with power or authority often do with those who call present practices and understandings into question, they drove him out of the fellowship.

Hearing of this, Jesus came again to the man and asked, “Do you believe in their God who would refuse to heal someone in need on the Sabbath day? Or do you trust in the God in whose name I have come in order to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind?” Looking into the eyes of Jesus, the man said, “Master, I believe in the God who is in you.”

Jesus then said, loud enough for the nearby Pharisees to hear, “I came into the world to bring everything into the clear light of day, making all the gospel distinctions clear, so that those who have not seen will see, and those who have made a great (show) of seeing will be exposed as blind” (E. H. Peterson, The Message).

The Pharisees no doubt felt like a quarterback looking to pass but who is blind-sided by a blitzing linebacker. “Surely we are not blind, are we?” they asked. So what is a story about the healing of a blind man is also a story about the ministry of Jesus to people who, in the words of Fred Craddock, “think they’ve walked around God three times and taken pictures.” The restoration of the blind man’s sight is a sign of the “seeing” and that Jesus wants to bring to everyone whose ideas about God are too certain, whose hope in God is too narrow, whose trust in God is too weak, and whose relationship with God is too distant.

To my growing dismay, I am having to hold books farther and farther away from my eyes when I read. The print on the pages of the books is a bit blurrier. I need stronger prescriptions. For many of us, our physical ability to see decreases as our years increase. But unless we are on guard, the same thing can happen to us spiritually no matter how much we practice the forms of religion. We get set in our ways and beliefs. Tradition becomes a god. Change becomes a blasphemy. A hardening of our theologies can occur long before the hardening of our arteries and we become blind to what God wants to do in us and the world.

Faith is not our own doing but is the gift of God to us to heal our blindness. Faith is the flow of God’s life into ours. Faith is the conduit by which we come to see beyond sight, to see past the appearances of things to deeper realities, to look – as St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians – to the things that are eternal, to the fruit that abides, to the things that last for they are of God.

It is through faith given, received, and lived that God works in us and through us to complete his creation of which we are a part. Rick Erickson sent me an email that came through around 10:00 last night. (You’ve got to love a church whose members stay up on Saturday night to help a sermon along!) Rick’s note shared a line from the writing of Abraham Joshua Heschel, the great Jewish rabbi and theologian of the last century who said, “The universe is done. The greater masterpiece, still undone, still in the process of being created, is history. For accomplishing His grand design God needs the help of man.”

When we allow the gift of faith to work in us, we do not become a different man or woman, not a different person. But our consciousness gets transformed and we see and subsequently experience and participate in life, in God, and in the world differently.

The poet William Blake has a little verse that says

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,

And Eternity in an hour.

I think Blake means to say that by faith we are able to see spiritual verities through material vessels, to perceive the infinite grounding of the finite world, to sense the Eternal Now in the midst of temporal unfolding. It is more than a belief in a God-world connection but a consciousness of it by which we are stirred and moved to a new way of living.

The miracle of life in this new consciousness is that we can come to see and repair what is wrong in our relationships with our family, our neighbors, our nation, our world. We can stop running from reality and begin to change it. We can act on what God in Christ shows us. So why live dimly, blindly? Why grope around in the dark when you are offered life in the light? Why be tortured of spirit when all can be well with your soul?

In a moment when you receive the elements of the sacrament of Holy Communion, will you see in your hands a piece of bread and a cup of wine only? Or will you also in them see God seeking to create the greater masterpiece through you and us, the grand design of an earth like it is in heaven, a history that holds both hope and hallelujah? Take it, the bread, and eat God’s grace. Take it, the wine, and drink God’s salvation. For as you do so in faith and trust, the scales will fall away and you, too, will be able to say, “I once was blind, but now I see.”

Amen.

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