Being of Age
1 Samuel 16:1-13; John 9:1-41

March 3, 2002

March 10, 2002

Philosophical questions always have a market as long as they do not require us to do anything.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? If a man is alone in the middle of the desert and there is no woman around, is he still wrong?

Walking around the Temple area in Jerusalem, Jesus and company saw a man blind from birth. The blind man was not wearing a sign, nor shouting out his condition, but everybody probably knew him from way back when as a fixture in the area. They knew the story that he had been born blind.

In the callous way some church people can behave, one disciple acted as if he were in an academic setting and posed Jesus the philosophical question, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Nothing personal to the fellow at their feet, of course.

The issue at hand is really not blindness, but the consequences of sin and evil. Blindness itself is even today an uncomfortable topic when face to face with someone blind. Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles present wonderful models, but I doubt few would venture to ask them directly about their blindness.

That is because being blind is still a stigma. Just as for the first century Palestinians, on encountering someone blind, an internal tug in our mind and heart nudges that there is something fundamentally wrong with them. In the first century, the common view was that personal suffering was the result of one’s sinful behaviour. What to do with a person born with a defect, born blind? It certainly was not their own behaviour that caused their blindness. It had to be the parents’ fault, but even that did not sit right with many, as the disciple’s poser indicates.

Jesus’ response is swift: Neither. This is no demonstration of sin, but of God’s work in the world. He wasn’t born blind for the sake of God’s publicity, but it happened according to natural forces which God does not leave the final victor. John talks of darkness and light. Jesus is the light who drives away the darkness. He makes the blind man see and reveals the blindness of the powerful who believe they see everything.

Saliva, spittle, was considered a healing potion by the ancient world. There was a blind man who sought out the spittle of the Roman emperor Vespasian in order to give him back his sight. Jesus offered it freely, creating a poultice of mud which he placed over the man’s eyes. Yet it was only after he washed in the pool of Siloam that he could see. Baptism takes many forms.

That’s the miracle, but it is far from the end of the story. When the blind man came back, many people did not recognize him, for they had never really looked at him before, lest his sin be catching. Perhaps he did look different now that he could see. “I am the man,” he had to keep saying. Where is this Jesus who gave you sight? I do not know.

They brought him before the Pharisees who were especially concerned that it took place on the Sabbath. The Pharisees became embroiled in their own philosophical debate: if one performs work on the Sabbath, that person can’t be from God; yet how can a sinner do such godly things? Listening to all this the man who now sees concluded, “He is a prophet.” Someone from God.

They drag the man’s parents before the authorities to see if he were born blind, to see if he were an imposter. Oh yes, declare the frightened two whose reputation must be that they had committed some terrible sins to cause their son this suffering. Don’t ask us, he is of age, ask him.

The man is definitely of age; he is old enough to know what he is doing. He is old enough to know what the Pharisees are trying to do, and he is old enough to comprehend who Jesus really is. When they interrogate him a second time, hoping he would break down and tell a different story, he begins to sense the truth. “Why do you want to hear my story again? Do you also want to become his disciples?” He knew he was mocking them.

The Pharisees accuse this man of being a disciple of Jesus whom they have decided is not to be given any credibility. The man answers back, “Here is an astonishing thing!....If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” They could no longer argue cogently with him, so they resorted to physically throwing him out of the Temple, excommunicating him from the community of faith.

Jesus got wind of all this and sought the man out again. This man was blind no more and getting smarter every minute. “Lord, I do believe in you, the Son of Man.” Jesus, the one who brings light to the blind, also betrays the blindness of those who believe too confidently that they see reality. “Are we supposed to be blind?” some Pharisees complain.

All those folk tales about the sin of being born blind are turned upside down. “If you were blind,” Jesus says, “you would not have sin.” A modern thought at least. “But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.” Sin does not reside in physical blindness, but in the arrogance of believing that we know and see it all without God’s eyes.

One thing I do know, that I was blind, but now I see. The man born blind said this, and we sing it famously, but it is not a declaration in the past tense, statement of history. As we become of age, as we mature spiritually, we learn painfully how blind we have been and learn to see again and again through God’s eyes. Our blindness emerges when we believe that we see perfectly the way the world is. When we are convinced that our science comprehends the nature of reality, when we are assured that our political agenda corrects the problems in society, when we believe that we understand and can define social justice, then our sight is becoming opaque.

It is only when you have recognized your own blindness, that you have sinned against God and other people, that you have been the source of injustice, that you see only part of the world’s reality, then you will see God’s reality more clearly. As long as you know deeply in your heart that the source of light which allows you to see God’s world properly is not in your abilities, but through the grace of God, then you will see the truth.

We will see the person whose oddness makes us uncomfortable from the perspective - the place from which we see things - of her discomforts. Being engaged in the conflicts of this age, political, military, local church, and family, we will be able to see not the ‘right side,’ but both sides, both struggles, both injustices.

If this man were not from God, he could do nothing. It is only with the sight that God grants us that you and I are able to do something by which all can see the life and light of God.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan