Was Blind
John 9:1-41

March 6, 2005

What kind of question can be more useless than an academic question? We put down those questions and thoughts that talk about ideas that can never be solved and have little relationship to day-to-day living. Let the ivory tower spend their time wastefully on such matters; we’ll only ask about things that can be answered.

Nevertheless, there are lots of academic questions that seep out of our minds and souls. As Jesus was walking with his disciples into the Temple at Jerusalem, an academic question came up. It could even have been one of those currently popular conundrums, like “Why do bad things happen to good people?” When they happened upon the man born blind begging, a form of that question was asked. “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

Unlike the all-time academic question - “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” - this one was not going to be limited to the classroom. We’ll have to meet and talk with the man born blind and his actual parents. Nothing academic about that.

Blindness becomes a symbol here, nor is it a new one to us. Here blindness symbolizes the opposite of what Jesus is when he declares he is the light of the world. Another long story by John is loaded with dialogue that plays on these words.

The question was about sin and one has to watch out for religions absorbed with sin. No one really wanted to think hard about the real nature of sin, and what it actually constituted. It is because people want to avoid the academic question of the nature of sin, that they end posing such a condemning, almost ignorant, idea. A man born blind is a sad and tragic fate in a subsistence society with no welfare. A fate almost worth than debt, so there must be something wrong about it, something wrong about the person, or more likely his parents. Who sinned? The world only makes sense if someone else is a sinner.

As Jesus does elsewhere, he responds that neither side sinned, that God has not condemned or abandoned this man, and that it is God who has a wider purpose for him. There is a new way of thinking.

Then Jesus got practical and reached down into the dirt under his feet, grabbed a clump, spit into it, molded it into what older versions called a poultice. Ancient theories had the saliva considered a source of powerful healing capabilities. He placed these poultices, I assume, on the man’s eyelids. I remember my mother making up those weird little homemade contraptions, placing it around my eyes when I developed a sty or cyst. It would seep into me some ingredient that would neutralize the cyst. For the man born blind, dirt and saliva penetrated his blindness and brought light. Three times in this story how this was done with dirt and saliva was repeated. I wonder how often this method has been tried since then.

Almost comically the change is so dramatic that his neighbours and acquaintances have trouble recognizing him. What would you think if someone came up to you and said, “No, that’s not you, but you look somewhat like him.” The poor guy who can now see is frustrated out of his tree, “I am me! I am the man!” He knows exactly what has happened, although who would blame him for not understanding why.

But in that world and in ours, you don’t get healed for nothing. The blind see in order to see something. The Pharisees had an investment in certifying that he was seeing nothing good. An old tactic to start, they attacked the integrity of Jesus, not for the first time. He had violated the sabbath by working, but picking up and molding that dirt and healing the man. Don’t doctors today naturally refer to their activities at the hospital as “work”? Obviously, by definition, Jesus was a God-less man because he worked on the sabbath. That makes sense.

Once again, we do not know the man’s name. However, we meet his parents. They are careful because intimidated by “the Jews” they are afraid to say too much or say the wrong thing. They too had to be Jews, so this is an unfortunate example of John’s polemic against the leadership of the parent faith of Christianity. The Pharisees were getting desperate and were trying to prove all of this was a spiritual fraud, that the man really wasn’t blind from birth, perhaps he had some easily curable ailment anybody could have taken care of, if they had only tried. Jesus was either lucky, or connivingly aware of the publicity he could muster around this marvelous healing. “Ask him yourself,” the parents ended the interrogation, “he is old enough.”

The Pharisees go back again to the man who can now see and try to break him down, get him to come up with inconsistencies in his story -- you know, you’ve watched all the police movies.

But this man is one of the smartest people we meet in the Bible and he starts to smell a rat. He listens to all their theological wrangling and innuendos and asserts the only thing he is absolutely qualified to say, “One thing I know, that though I was blind, now I see.” And we can all start singing along.

They keep pressing him, turning his answers upside down, so finally he responds with a remarkably clever and insightful comeback. “Why do you keep asking asking about all this? Haven’t you listened to what I have said? Is it because you also want to become his disciple?” That drives the Pharisees crazy. He keeps going, unwrapping the arguments about Jesus’ connection to God. “I don’t know about all your complicated arguments, but as far as I know, if this man were not from God, he could do nothing.”

The Pharisees didn’t want to think or have their theology challenged. They go back to square one, this man formerly blind, was “born entirely in sin” and so was unworthy to challenge their learned observations. They drove him out of the Temple, excommunicated him in other words.

Jesus heard about it and found him and let him know just who he was, the Son of Man. The man who once was blind has no trouble seeing that.

The Pharisees overhear Jesus, hearing in particular his indictment of their spiritual blindness. Jesus reverses their theological assumption that people born blind are born in sin, saying that if you are blind you have no sin. But if you declare, “We see, we know, we understand everything,” then you are the ones still stuck in the mud of sin.

We think we have the world all figured out, the formulas are all set and proven beyond a doubt. What we have set in the hardest concrete are our conclusions and prejudgments and prejudices about the things we cannot explain. Those prejudices are more important to us than the facts. A blind man sees and they see nothing good in this wonderful reversal of misfortune. Somewhere someone must be evil and ungodly, because we can never begin to do something like that. Even God is not allowed to make the blind man see.

To reverse a prejudice - that the handicapped and crippled are basically sinners getting their just reward, for instance - is a life-threatening move. Once you have thrown out such a fundamental prejudice, you have to examine everything else in your life. That is never comfortable, and for some people, rather embarrassing. Sometimes that means losing social status or income or power. It also means recognizing that “once I was blind, but now I see.” My, my, what can you now see?

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