St. Charles' Episcopal Church - St. Charles, IL

The Fourth Sunday of Lent - Lent 4 – Year A – RCL

Sunday March 2, 2008 

1 Samuel 16:1-13 – Psalm 23 – Ephesians 5:8-14 – John 9:1-41

Rev. William R. Nesbit, Jr.

In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.

It was many years ago. I was watching a TV series on the miracle of the human body. The show that week was about the miracle of sight. There was a man who had been born blind and through the miracle of human ingenuity he was attached to a gizmo that was allowing him to see....for the first time. He was sitting at a table with this gizmo next to him, with wires running from the gizmo to various parts of his body. He had a small camera attached to a headband so the camera would point at whatever he looked at, or I should say, what he pointed his face at. On the table in front of him was a candle. His face had the look of rapture. "Nobody ever told me that a flame had such a wonderful shape before." In that instant I suddenly became aware at a whole new level, of what an incredible gift the gift of sight is.

All the blind man in Jerusalem knew of the sun was the feeling of warmth on his face and his hands as the sun rose in the morning, and the smell of flowers and sweat and dung as the heat of the day drew on. He knew nothing of the gleam or the glare or the glory of the Temple blazing in white and gold above the place where he sat each day begging, or the almost magic way that the light danced on water of the pool of Siloam. He was, however, intimately familiar with the shoves and the kicks of the impatient and the arrogant as they made their way in and out of that fabulous Temple. On a certain day when Jesus and his disciples had just fled a stoning, they rather curiously stopped in front of this man to take the time to engage in (of all things) a disputation on the hermeneutics of disability. Noticing him, but not addressing him (as is so often the pattern of interaction between the abled and disabled), the disciples asked our Lord whose fault it was that this man was blind, his or his parents'? Disabilities were seen as the result of moral flaws in those days. (Sadly, not much has changed since then.)

Jesus immediately responds: "It is no one's fault! The man's blindness is, in fact, a window through which the world will see and know That our Lord is the light of the world." Jesus then made a salve from dirt and his own saliva and rubbed the man's eyes with it, and told the man to rinse his eyes in the Pool of Siloam. The man did as he was directed, and he returned, seeing, but not soon enough to see his healer.

What followed next was the playing out of an ancient drama, a drama familiar to anyone who has ever undergone a seemingly inexplicable conversion, healing, or restoration outside the boundaries of convention. First, the man's neighbors and acquaintances question him in wonder and more than a little suspicion about his miraculous healing. He can't tell them who the agent of his healing was, just as we find it difficult to talk about our own experiences of the holy. Feeling he is in need of professional help, they take him to the Pharisees, who, because Jesus has been performing unapproved healings on unapproved days, decide Jesus could not possibly be from God. He is just too far outside of their box. Striving for at least the appearance of fairness before passing judgment, the Pharisees pretend to ask the healed man what he thought. But they don't really listen to the answer. And they should!

It turns out, the healed man is the only one who gets the point; he was blind and now, thanks to Jesus, he isn't. He wonders, aloud, what any of the questions he has been asked have to do with that marvelous fact. He even ventures a little theology of his own, "We know that God does not listen to sinners. This man healed my blindness. Therefore, God must hear him when he asks for healing." It seems logical enough, but the Pharisees cannot follow his lesson because it is counter to what they have already chosen to believe. His data does not fit their hypothesis. Ultimately they miss the point because they cannot see themselves as God sees them. They remain blind.

Foiled in their initial attempt to exercise damage control, the Pharisees fall back on the tactics of prosecutors everywhere and began to investigate the man's parents. They badger them with questions and accusations, "Is he your son? Was he born blind?" His parents do the best they can to answer the questions, but eventually they can’t take it any more and say, "He's old enough to answer his own questions. Ask him!" And so once again the council focuses its efforts on the no longer blind man and the Pharisees, more frustrated than ever, whine, "Give us a break. This man has to be a sinner." And the formerly blind man says in turn, "I don't know anything about his behavior except this: once I was blind; now I see." An elegant statement in its simplicity."I don't know anything about his behavior except this: once I was blind; now I see." They had asked him to explain the inexplicable and all he could do was to once again state the facts, the good news that a blind man begging outside the Temple one day encountered a stranger who gave him his sight.

It was good enough for him, but not the Pharisees. Furiously, they accused the man of being in cahoots with the reputed healer. It is interesting that throughout all of this wrangling, a name is never assigned to the healer. It's like the great unspoken truth. For the Pharisees, this is truly an encounter with the unnamed God, and it frightens them to know that one is walking abroad in the world doing the work of God. Totally out of their control. They were becoming aware that things were not as they appeared, and it scared them, but not enough to open their eyes. Still they remained blind. The healed man's reassertion of the facts does nothing to open their eyes, it just gets him into hotter water, and they drive him from the temple community.

It would be all too easy, at this point, to ridicule the Pharisees and hold them up as the very worst of bad examples. It would be easy and it would be wrong. We must always remember that we all have a little Pharisee in us and so we run the same risk of falling into the trap that captured them. There are many kinds of blindness. So it goes with us like it goes with the Pharisees at times. And at other times it goes like the blind man. We encounter God somewhere -- unasked for, uninvited, unexpected. Something changes radically in us or around us. Burdens are removed, and backs are straightened. And, for a while, we walk about in a fog, a fog of serenity, a fog of peace, and we are suffused with a feeling of connectedness, of oneness. People in our lives notice and they question us. We can't explain it -- all we can do is tell our story. Once we were blind, now we see. But human beings find it difficult to accept blithely the unexplainable, the numinous, the holy. We hurl our questions: "Who?" "How?" "Why?" "Why you and not me?" We try to get a handle on what happened. We struggle for control. To maintain control. If we allow ourselves to lose focus of the healing moment, we can find ourselves lost in spiritual chaos. It can be a time of profound vulnerability. And if we're not careful, we close our eyes again.

It appears that blindness is not so easy to cure. What our Gospel tells us this morning is that if we can accept our new health confidently, giving thanks to the giver of our healing even though he may not be seen, then we can be assured that one day the unseen and unnamed healer will reveal himself to us. And we will find that along with healing we will have been blessed with faith.

The truth is, the same savior who healed the man born blind stands ready to heal our own blindness, All our blindness no matter what form it takes. In Lent, we are encouraged to ask for the guidance of God's Grace so that we will be protected from our own awkward blunders and foolish notions as we wander, blind in the darkness. In Lent, we are encouraged to ask for, and to accept, the great gift of Holy sight, seeing ourselves as God truly sees us. In Lent, we are given the gift of time, holy time to identify our blindnesses, both new and old, and to await the revelation of God's healing action in our lives. Use your time well, God knows what will come of it. One thing I do know, is that though I was blind, now I see. And so can you. Amen.