Lent 4A • 3 April 2011
Judith Schenck, an Episcopal priest in Montana and also a vowed solitary living in her monastery of the Transfiguration, tells the following story:
Eddie was the extrovert in the community for the disabled in the assisted living unit. He always plunked himself down right in the middle of where the action was – in a chair by the mailboxes, at the entrance to the dining room, or right in front of the TV in the sitting room.
He knew everyone by name. “Good morning Miss Liddy. Your knees must be hurting you today.” “Hello there, Harry. Lydia was looking for you, and, my, but she was mad.” “Hello, Maxine, you got a letter today. Maybe it’s from that son of yours.” “Watch out, Charlie, someone spilled water there, and the floor might be slick.”
Eddie was blind. He was born that way. But he didn’t miss a trick. He saw more with his blindness than most of us see with our two good eyes. He saw with his ears, and his gut, and his heart. Sometimes “blind” is not really blind and “seeing” is not really sight.
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The gospel reading this morning brings us one of the most important and best-constructed chapters of the gospel of John. Facing a man blind from birth and, as a result, used to begging to live, Jesus’ disciples ask who is responsible for this man’s misfortune. They decide it is because he and his parents are sinners because in their day and time physical handicap or illness, and poverty were understood to be punishment for sin.
The ‘signs and miracles’ that Jesus performs midst the poor causes great impact on them and consequently they become reasons for controversy. Those against his movement see in Jesus’ healings simply the work of a healer. His disciples, however, understand in them all their liberating and salvific work. But these works are not just those that heal human limitations but also those that open up the dignity of all people. The one who recovers his vision discovers that his problem was not a punishment from God for the sins of his forebears nor a terrible test of destiny. He is someone who passes from desperation to faith and discovers in Jesus the prophet, the anointed one of God. His problem, a physical limitation, had been converted into a terrible social and religious mark. But the problem was not his visual limitation but the terrible weight of distain that his culture had imposed on him. Jesus liberates him from the insufferable weight of social marginalisation and leads him to a community that will accept him for who he is without worrying about etiquette that social prejudices had imposed on him.
Indeed, instead of punishing the blind man, Jesus restores his sight. To liberation from a distorted and damaging religious perspective Jesus adds the elimination of physical and spiritual blindness. In the course of the discussion that takes place in the gospel narrative, the formerly blind man affirms himself as a full person, and he opens up to believe in Jesus. The leaders of the people, the Pharisees, try to deny the events by every possible means in several ways. First, since the cure takes place on the sabbath, they claim that the law is not observed. Therefore, what has happened does not come from God and Jesus, the performer of the deed, is a sinner. Then they say that perhaps the beggar was never really blind. Even the testimony of his parents cannot convince them. The Pharisees insist he deny the very gift of sight he has been given and renounce the giver. But since he assures them that Christ must be from God, they expel him from the premises and his community. ‘You are steeped in sin from your birth and you are giving us lectures?,’ they fume.
The blind man sees the matter differently. He starts with the only thing he knows, his own experience. He states, ‘I was blind and now I see.’ The opponents become progressively hardened and aggressively interrogate the man who has been healed, rather than celebrate the restoration of his sight. Seeing them so preoccupied by what has happened, the former blind man sarcastically asks them, ‘Do you also want to become his disciples?’
What has the opponents so bent out of shape is that this former beggar who used to spend his days sitting and holding his hand out for alms, now stands up as their equal. Not only does he dare to be their equal, he dares to argue with them. They can no longer oppress him. What becomes most pointed in this exchange is the spiritual vision of the blind man and the blindness of his and Jesus’ opponents. The former blind man understands who Jesus is, whereas the leaders are blind to the manifestation of the Messiah. The blind man becomes a child of the light (which the Prologue to this gospel promises to all who believe in Christ) and his opponents children of darkness.
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The gospel clearly invites one to consider the source of suffering but I am going to put that theme aside for another day. Instead, I want to return to the story with which I began that describes someone who lives in community and takes care of those around him despite his physical limitation.
Judith Schenck states: ‘Some of us have blindness of heart, and that is a terrible blindness. The blind of heart can’t love another beyond a superficial level and usually can't even love themselves. The blind of heart often live lives corroded with addictions to material things, possessions, and work, to cover up the empty hole.
‘And worst of all is blindness of the soul, which wraps all the rest of life in gloomy darkness.’
She then asks: What kind of blindness lives inside you?
That is a hard question but she leaves us with hope: Jesus notices our blindness. Jesus sees. Jesus invites us to see. Jesus invites us to see with our very blind eyes, with our wounds and brokenness. Jesus uses our weaknesses as grace.
Schenck says: We look at our physical and mental blindness as a curse. And indeed Jesus does heal the blindness. Yet at the same time, the blindness is a door to grace. It is the sick who need the doctor. It is the blind who need to see. It is we who need the redemption, the transfiguration, the Burning Light.
Jesus plays a lot with the concept of blindness. There is an upside-down turning pirouette between the sighted that are blind and the blind that see. Jesus is like Copernicus, saying that things are not as they appear: the world is not flat, the earth is not the center around which all else revolves, and what we think is true often is not. The sighted are blind and the blinded see.
Schenck gives us a new image of what happens to the man in the gospel: The blind man was given Jesus Eyes. When we truly see, we are given new eyes, new insight, new vision, new understanding. Jesus Eyes are not like the flat-seeing, self-centered world around us. Jesus Eyes are world shattering and paradigm changing. Jesus Eyes are often unwelcome and threatening. It can be lonely and frightening to have Jesus Eyes. There is a cost to Jesus Eyes. It always brings the cross, and with the cross comes transfiguration. God’s love is the laser light that cuts away our cataract blindness.
Her meditation asks us: What needs to be turned upside down in your world? Where do you pass by when you need to stop and see Jesus? Where in your own brokenness can God's glory be made manifest? How can you use your own weaknesses to become holy? And how can you see what is holy in what is broken around you, in yourself, and in others?
I’ll take her questions one step further and ask where in our common life here at Trinity do we need to see with Jesus Eyes? Where in our common life do we need to cut away our figurative blindness to see new ways of being, ministering to one another and to the world outside our doors? Where do we need to have new vision and most important, not be afraid of where that might lead us?
Having considered those questions, we can then say as does Schenck: Let us pray for Jesus Eyes. Let us pray to see Jesus in each face we meet, each life we pass in this life. Let us pray to see God. Let us worship with our lives and make God manifest, as it says in the hymn: “God in man made manifest.”1
END NOTE
1 This entire last part draws full excerpts from her sermon at http://www.episcopalchurch.org/82478_95231_ENG_HTM.htm
