The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
April 3, 2011
Vol. 14 no. 14
It is the beginning of baseball season and so the right time to consider the healing of a whole team full of blind men. It’s the umpires who are blind, of course, they always have been. Missing a call at first base that everybody in the universe could see was not even close and wiping out a no-hitter was no recommendation for umpires’ ability to see. I have been an athletics official and many of you have been so as well, and I certainly have been accused of one version of blindness or another.
John’s long saga of the blind man healed is not really interested in his blindness. Blind from birth, he is overjoyed and flabbergasted at the same time. What he cannot believe is now that he can see, why the religious leaders cannot see a thing. The leaders accuse everyone involved of some cheap charlatanism, and once it is finally determined that he has been healed, they pontificate that his sight is not legitimate.
So the story is not first about physical blindness, but our inner blindness that does not allow us to see what is really the truth. As with the Pharisees, we sometimes refuse to see things that are inconvenient to the way we want the world to operate. The sad part with the man born blind who now sees is that he was treated in the end as the guilty party and thrown out of the temple and community. Never heard that happen before!
Those who have ears, let them hear. Those who have eyes, let them see. No matter how good or not so good our physical hearing and eyesight may be, our first task as a community of Christians is to help one another develop our spiritual senses to see God’s real world.
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan