How Do You See?
John 9:1-41
April 3, 2011
Never on a Sabbath. This novella about Jesus and the man born blind presents a complex picture, demonstrating that a healing by Jesus is not a simple matter. If it is a miracle, then we see and hear that miracles are fraught with conflict, doubt and self-interest, and therefore, not that miraculous.
Jesus has just left the Jerusalem Temple after an acrimonious debate with the Pharisees. An unfortunate heritage of the Gospel of John is that Jesus’ opponents are referred to not so much as the Pharisees as “the Jews.” Too many Christians have lumped all Jews in with the conniving and disingenuous religious leaders of Jerusalem and as a result all too many pogroms and holocausts have disgraced our Christian history.
When Jesus declared “before Abraham was, I am” his opponents were picking up stones to stone him to death for blasphemy, but as Jesus does many times he slides safely out into the open air. And it was then that he saw a man blind from his birth.
How he knew he was blind from birth is never stated, perhaps it was his demeanour, or that somebody whispered the fact to Jesus. The disciples were with Jesus, though they too were not locals and wouldn’t have known the fellow. But one of them at least was a budding rabbinical scholar, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
That sounds like rather crude academia, but we do the same thing today looking at someone who is obese, those with HIV-AIDS, certainly within our lifetime cancer came with the same moral stigma. In that culture, the things that couldn’t be explained were explained through the necessity of sin. It had to be sin, although I can’t figure out what it was or is. Nobody who is sick or poor or unfortunate in life can be anything but a loser.
Jesus was quick to respond, “Nobody has sinned here. This happened so that now we can see how God works.” That was really not a good answer either, for it reduces God down to a cruel manipulator of human failings and dilemmas. Many people have pushed this rationalization for the unexplainable absurdities of life, especially when they have no idea what is the problem. Jesus, though, knew what God was going to do right at that moment with this man, so he wasn’t guessing. No false hopes or pious wishes.
But in order to do God’s work, Jesus performs one of the most unusual and visceral healings memorable. He spat on the ground and made a kind of compress with the mud and saliva – remembering that until fairly recently saliva was considered to have medicinal powers – and then spread it on the man’s eyes. He sent him off to wash this glop off in the pool of Siloam and when he returned he could see. That would normally be the end of the story, but it is only the preamble.
Everybody wants a piece of the man born blind who now sees everybody and nobody seems to be happy about him. At first they are subtle, is this the same blind guy who used to beg or just someone who looks like him? He can’t see, he just looks that way.”
“Oh no, I am the guy,” he responds. Then they ask how can you see and he tells them about Jesus. “Where is he?” they ask skeptically, but the man does not know. This is too suspicious for inquiring minds, too much happiness to be tolerated, so the neighbours escort him right away to the Pharisees who repeat the interrogation. The Pharisees were split – he couldn’t be godly since he performed this healing on the Sabbath, while others thought out loud, “How can a sinner perform such signs?”
To find out about sin, they drag in the parents of the man and examine them like the closest relatives of a corpse. Is this your son and was he really born blind? We don’t know why or how he sees, but if you really want to know, ask him, he is an adult.
These guys must have been professional bureaucrats because they go back to the man born blind and ignoring most of what they have heard, challenge him all the more. They refuse to let go of the basic assumption that he is a person born entirely in sins, an original sinner, and assume just as basically that Jesus is a sinner too and incapable of doing such wonderful things. The Pharisees, now the Jews, have their world all neatly organized, wrapped up and written down. Both Jesus and this former blind man do not fit into their mental construction of the world, so they declare both of them illegal. You aren’t allowed to see. “One thing I do know,” says the man, “that though I was blind, now I see.” They do not relent and ask him to repeat again his story, looking for inconsistencies somewhere along the line. “You don’t listen,” the man answers somewhat cheekily, “Do you also want to become his disciples?” That really gets the Pharisees riled up. “Here is an astonishing thing! Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” That gets him excommunicated on the spot. He was blind from birth and so isolated from an unsympathetic society; now that he can see, restored to wholeness, the good people throw him out because he wasn’t healed according to the rules.
Out on the street, Jesus hears the news and seeks out the man, and unlike everyone else does not ask him about himself, but wants to know whether he believes in the Son of Man. The man born blind senses this is someone he wants to believe in, but doesn’t know him. “The one speaking with you is he,” Jesus replies. That’s all the man needed to know.
We’re not done yet, for Jesus says that his mission is to do the kind of things that make the blind see and those who see become blind. The Pharisees were still listening and stopped him, “Surely you aren’t saying we are blind?” Jesus turns upside down the traditional assessment of the man born blind: “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.”
I think you missed it. I do not believe you ‘got’ it. This was a long story for a Lectionary reading, and we discussed how to read it so that our ears could hear. There are so many characters involved because the evangelist wants to get you engaged in the story and become one of its characters. This is one of the “signs” of Jesus to demonstrate that he is the Christ, but the story is not really about the healing of a man born blind. We are so proud of being practical and down to earth, being doers, but most important is what you think. When you are convinced that someone else is a sinner, has done something terribly wrong, that blocks your mind from seeing where there is a new life. And sometimes the way things have been for as long as we remember can make sure we can’t see a darned thing that looks different, and we will do nothing different and “miss it.”
I don’t care what those people do say. I don’t care what those people do do. I was blind, but now I see.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan