University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

BLIND TRAGEDY[1]

John 9:1-41

A Communion Meditation by Robert E. Dunham

University Presbyterian Church

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Fourth Sunday in Lent    March 6, 2005

            This story of Jesus’ healing of a man born blind is an odd tale, almost comical.  The question of who sees and who doesn’t see in John’s ninth chapter has filled numerous pages of commentary over the years, and everyone sees the irony and humor of this story of the man who gets caught in the middle of a tussle between the religious authorities and Jesus.

            Most of the healing stories in the gospels draw attention to Jesus’ power and authority.  Here, though, the story of the healing itself takes just two verses, while the controversy surrounding the cure fills the rest of the chapter – another 31 verses. Clearly John is more interested in the rest of the story.  The rest of the story, says Duke’s Rick Lischer, is that religious institutions have always been pretty good at investigating and naming irregularities, but not so good at acknowledging any power of God that can not be contained within established religious premises. Of course, we may sympathize with the religious authorities, says Lischer; after all,

They were only attempting what many of us have been trained to do: observe, describe and explain the phenomena. Haven’t you ever listened to the testimony of someone who has been “healed” at Lourdes or Tulsa, who’s thrown away the crutches?  And haven’t you wanted to ask a few follow-up questions?  Have you never felt a twinge of doubt when all those glamorous but corrupt celebrities … whose sins are so much more interesting than yours, manage to get born again just as their scandals are cresting in the media? Where does all this religion really come from?[2]

At first, that seems to be all that is going on in this story… just a few follow-up questions… just a little healthy skepticism.  Who is this guy?  They want to know.  Who healed him?  And on what authority?   But the deeper truth is that his story has disturbed them, has gotten under their skin like a nagging splinter.  Miracles like this simply do not fit their pattern of sin and punishment, righteousness and reward.  In fact, they are not alone in their unease; many people are not particularly comfortable with miracles.

In Leif Enger’s novel, Peace Like a River, the narrator is a young boy named Reuben Land, who, along with his brother Davy and his sister Swede, are occasional witnesses to their father’s miraculous powers.  But Reuben wants to be clear about what he means by the word “miracle.”

For too long it’s been used to characterize things or events that, though pleasant, are entirely normal. Peeping chicks at Easter time, spring generally, a clear sunrise after an overcast week – a miracle, people say, as if they’ve been educated from greeting cards.  I’m sorry, but nope.  Such things are worth our notice every day of the week, but to call them miracles evaporates the strength of the word.

Real miracles bother people, like strange sudden pains unknown in medical literature.  It’s true: They rebut every rule all we good citizens take comfort in.  Lazarus obeying orders and climbing out of the grave – now there’s a miracle, and you can bet it upset a lot of folks who were standing around at the time.  When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up.  A miracle contradicts the will of the earth.

[Reuben says] My sister, Swede, who often sees to the nub, offered this: People fear miracles because they fear being changed – though ignoring them will change you also.  Swede said another thing, too, and it rang in me like a bell: No miracle happens without a witness.  Someone to declare, Here’s what I saw.  Here’s how it went. Make of it what you will.[3]

In a sense, that is what the man born blind says to the religious authorities: Here’s what happened. Here’s how it went.  Make of it what you will. So they want to ask him a few questions; the problem is that this man doesn’t possess the right vocabulary to answer their queries to their satisfaction.  He lacks the proper religious language to describe his healing, although he surely does more than hold his own.  He is not pious in any traditional sense, and he certainly is not especially respectful of these temple leaders. All he knows is that up until he encountered Jesus he had been entombed in darkness, and now he is awash in light. And all he can do is acknowledge that fact.  “‘One thing I know,’ he says… How is that for ironic understatement?  As if the only teensy little thing you happen to know is – who saved your life!”[4]

It is one of a host of little ironies in this story, a literary scheme John employs frequently in his Gospel.  But one can get caught up in things like ironies and miss the darker thing that happens in this story – the darker thing that happens in spite of, or because of, the new light that Jesus brings into this man’s life.

He has received a wonderful gift, the gift of sight after a lifetime of blindness, but it has no sooner happened than he is dragged before these protectors of the faith.  These gatekeepers are interested in all reported miracles, especially if performed by unauthorized individuals, and most especially if done in violation of some law.  Such is the case here, for the healing occurred on the Sabbath. They have a quandary on their hands: if this man is truly healed, it was done by someone with the power of God, but if the healing took place on the Sabbath, then it was done by someone in opposition to God’s law.[5] Of course, there is another possibility – that Jesus was reinterpreting the Law to help meet the needs of this man – but that was beyond their imagination.  It is still beyond the imagination of many in our time that God can work beyond our expectations.

And so, the story dissolves into darkness.  The authorities, faced with the irrefutable evidence of the healing, try to make the man denounce Jesus as a sinner. The poor man, armed only with his experience and sound logic, cannot believe a sinner could wield the power of God. So he is denounced along with Jesus and expelled from the Temple. Shortly after he has been given the gift of a lifetime he becomes an outcast, disregarded by his friends, rejected by his parents, no longer welcome at his old place of worship.[6]  The problem with seeing, I suppose, is that sometimes what you see is ugly and mean… and downright arrogant. Barbara Brown Taylor says that the religious authorities

were so sure of everything – that God did not work on Sundays, that Moses was God’s only spokesman, that anyone born blind had to be a sinner and ditto for anyone who broke the Sabbath, that God did not work through sinners, that God did not work on sinners and that furthermore no one could teach them anything. Their system was a closed one and it worked. It closed Jesus out and it closed them in – not in outer darkness this time, but in inner darkness – because they let their fear of being wrong [make them blind and] keep them from being in the light.[7]

If we read this story as an ironic comedy and nothing more, we miss the pathos and loneliness of its final scene. In the end, meeting Jesus outside the Temple where neither of them is welcome any longer, he makes a remarkable profession of faith. When Jesus identifies himself as the Son of Man, he says simply, “Lord, I believe.”  And he does.  He does.  Despite all that has happened to him because he looked deeply and directly into the Light, he does believe. And the word Jesus speaks to him in response is tender and promising, but also laced with warning.  He says,

I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind. (Jn. 9:39)

Religious authorities then, I suppose, were not so different from religious gatekeepers today… so determined to protect God and God’s people that they become blind to what God is doing in their very midst. A theology rooted in paranoia almost always ends that way.[8] They missed miracles when they happened then and miss them still, even when one stands among them and says, “Here’s what I saw.  Here’s how it went. Make of it what you will.”  If only we could learn to depend on God and stop placing limits how God saves or whom God calls![9] 

             In the end then, this story is not an ironic comedy.  It is a tragedy…a tragedy of human blindness, even among people who should know better… a tragedy that awaits redemption in a new ending that God will write a bit further down the road in Jerusalem. Of course, we know that ending. We know the new thing that God does there, that great act of wondrous love and amazing grace that undoes all the limits that people like us had placed on God’s redemptive power. We know that new ending, and we will rehearse it around this table in a few moments.  Knowing it may or may not change the way we live, may or may not affect what we choose to see or whom we choose to embrace, but we all know where this story leads, and we ignore it at the peril of our own moral blindness.  We know. We know.