Fourth Sunday in Lent: 1
Samuel 16:1-13, Ephesians 5:8-14, John 9:1-41, Psalm 23
This week’s gospel
reading continues our series of surprising encounters. After Nicodemus at night
and the Woman at the Well at high noon we now meet the man born blind, a man who
has known only darkness until he meets the Christ.
When John recounts
events in Jesus’ life, we need to listen to and understand the stories and the
speeches at more than one level. Firstly there is what we might call the
literal level – what actually happens. In the stories we have been hearing
something good happens to people, a deep and often unexpressed need they have
is satisfied. Nicodemus, the seeker after the truth, finds a lot more truth
than he had expected. The Samaritan woman, an outcast, finds new hope and new
life, and is reintegrated into her society. A man born blind, with no hope of
seeing again, is healed of his physical ailment and discovers a renewed faith
and courage. If this Good News was all we took from the reading, then it would
be enough. Jesus’ whole life, especially his acts of love and compassion as
well as his words of teaching, are how the Good News of God’s love was and is
proclaimed. But there is more!
Jesus often also makes
a moral or ethical point. Here it is a very important point indeed – it was not
as a result of sin, neither the man’s nor his parents’, that the man was born
blind. Disabilities, illnesses, disasters, and tragedies are not divine
punishments for sin. Bad things also happen to good people. Jesus makes a
similar point in Luke’s gospel - the eighteen people who had been killed when a
tower, the tower of Siloam, fell on them were no “worse offenders than all the
others living in Jerusalem.” (Luke 13:4) That’s why I really have a problem
with preachers who see a disease like AIDS as God’s punishment or a natural catastrophe
such as Hurricane Katrina as divine retribution. They seem to be wilfully
ignoring Jesus’ teaching. I would call that spiritual blindness and while
physical blindness is never caused by sin, spiritual blindness is sinful. What
Jesus does say however is that tragedies and suffering, while not caused by
God, can still be an opportunity to reveal God’s works of love – as Jesus does
in healing the man born blind, or as many good and faithful people do when they
take care of the sick or help those severely affected by a natural or man-made
disaster.
Each event is however
also a sign of who Jesus is, a demonstration of his power and authority, and proof
of where this power comes from. He is the Messiah, he is sent from God, and he
has the power even to heal a man blind from birth. As the man born blind says:
“If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” According to the prophet
Isaiah, the Messiah will be “given … as a light to the nations, to open the
eyes that are blind.” (Isaiah 42:6-7) Jesus’ actions in this passage are the
visible and tangible fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy – the proof that he is
the light of the world.
Then finally, in the
reactions of the people Jesus meets and talks to, we are taught something about
faith. In today’s narrative John compares and contrasts the reactions of the
man born blind with the reactions of the Pharisees. The man born blind just goes
from strength to strength. He knows little yet learns much. With each
questioning and hostile interrogation his faith and understanding deepen and grow:
it is as if the light he has received is getting brighter and brighter. After
his healing Jesus is first simply “the man called Jesus” who had healed him.
When the Pharisees question him the first time he calls Jesus a prophet, so
someone sent by God. Finally he acknowledges Jesus as the Son of Man, as his
Lord, whom he worships.
The man born blind,
previously a beggar and wholly dependent on others’ good will, finds new depths
of courage. He stands up for Jesus although as a result he is disowned by his
parents and rejected by the religious leaders. Thanks to the love he has
received, he knows no fear. Reflecting Christ’s light, he has become a light
himself, demonstrating faith, courage, love, and hope.
The Pharisees by
contrast exhibit very different qualities: doubt, arrogance, rejection, and
fear. They may have full physical sight, but in the course of the narrative
they see less and less, they become blinder and blinder. They are learned, they
have studied scripture intensely, and unfortunately feel therefore that they know
everything, which makes them so unwilling to be taught anything new, especially
by a formerly blind beggar. They are also fearful, they perceive – rightly -
Jesus as a threat to the status quo and to their positions of power. So it is
not so much that they cannot see, but that they simply will not see. They
actively resist seeing God’s love in Jesus’ actions. The questions they ask
both the man born blind and his parents are not questions aimed at
understanding, because they know their answer before they ask their question.
Instead their intention is to find a reason not to believe and not to learn
from this experience.
You will be glad to
hear that your vestry is not made up of Pharisees, whatever you may have
thought, and that its members are not blind and that they are willing to learn
from experience. Last Saturday we took some time out together. We spent time
getting to know one another better, studying our role as church leaders, and
also trying to learn from recent experience, both bad and good, and from our
own mistakes and wrong behavior – because that is what we can change. One thing
we worked on was a mutual agreement on how we want to work together and
communicate with one another and the parish in the future. We hope this will
enable us to be “an example … in speech, life, love, faith and purity,” (1 Timothy 4:12) and
allow us to show better than in the past that we “love one another, as Jesus
loves us.” (John
15:11) We will publish this once it has been finalized at the next vestry
meeting.
We all have this choice.
Do we behave like the man born blind or like the Pharisees? Are we willing to
learn from experience, to correct our impressions and assumptions, to be
willing to see God in others, to marvel at God’s actions, and to trust in God’s
love and power even in difficult and dangerous situations? Or do we think we already know all the
answers, are determined not to change, and do not want to see what God is
calling us to do and to be? Where do we stand? Do we stand with “the man born
blind, in his new found faith and openness to God’s light” or “beside the
Pharisees, certain of their own rightness but locked in a darkness of their own
devising?”[1]
I am the light of the
world, Jesus tells us. According to Genesis, creation, the first creation began
with light: “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God
saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.”
(Genesis 1:3-4) Jesus’ light is the beginning of the new or re-Creation of the
world that we also call the kingdom of God or heaven. Its purpose is the
transformation of this world into one of light, love, and wholeness. The man
born blind was given new light by the light of the world and became himself a
bearer of that light. Similarly in the letter to the Ephesians the author tells
the Christians in Ephesus that “once you were in darkness, but now in the Lord
you are light. Live as children of light.”
That is God’s call to
us, to live as children of light, and to behave as bearers of Christ’s light.
Like the man born blind we were all in darkness until we met Christ. The powers
of evil tried to extinguish Christ’s light on the Cross, instead it came back
stronger than before. The Pharisees also try and extinguish the light the man
born blind bears for Christ; instead his witness and faith become stronger than
before. As Christians we have seen the light. Many of us will have received a
candle at our Baptism as a symbol of the light. Our calling is to allow
Christ’s light to shine through us into the world, to shine in our faith, in
our courage and hope, and in our acts of love and generosity for one another
and for all the world.
Amen
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