Some of you know that I served on the staff of another All Saints Church (this one in Pasadena) in the 1990s and early 2000s. Because I was not the rector I didn’t get to preach very often. Late in the 1990s a parishioner asked me when I was preaching next. I answered, “Some time in Al Gore’s second term.”
The culture at All Saints Pasadena was and is a bit different from the culture here. We associates didn’t preach very often, but when we did we had to be attentive to the extreme ideological and personal sensitivities in the congregation and especially the staff.
I did get to preach every once in a while, and on one occasion I preached on the very (long) Gospel we just heard, John’s story of the man born blind. At the staff meeting on the following Tuesday, one of my colleagues had a pained look on her face and said wanted to give me some “ constructive criticism” of my sermon. The phrase “constructive criticism” alerted me that I would be taking incoming, so I braced myself for the assault I knew was on the way.
She didn’t complain about the sermon as such, but she took me to task for talking about the Gospel story’s use of blindness and sight as figures for understanding. “You compared being blind to not understanding. I invite you (another loaded phrase in progressive circles)” she said, “to stop using metaphors of disability in the pulpit. That would include no longer singing ‘Amazing Grace’ because of the line ‘I once was blind but now I see.’”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Oh for heaven’s sake!” I blurted without thinking. Not use metaphors of disability? That idea is so lame.” Not, I imagine, the response she was looking for. She didn’t get the joke, but you do.
Speaking abstractly, she was right, of course. We should not compare deafness or blindness to lack of understanding. But the problem is that I wasn’t the one making the analogy. It is Jesus himself who seems to be explicitly making the comparison. I was merely along for the metaphorical ride.
Today’s Gospel [John 9: 1-41] is a long narrative, a story the scholar Andrew McGowan has compared to a drama in five scenes. It tells the story of a man blind from birth whom Jesus heals. The Pharisees get involved and so do the man and his parents. In the final confrontation between Jesus and his accusers, Jesus tells them: “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” The healing of the blind man is contrasted with the seemingly willful refusal of the Jewish leaders to understand who Jesus is and what he is up to.
As my reactive Pasadena colleague rightly noted, we should be careful when using physical disabilities as figures for states of the soul. As a person who has worn glasses since age 10 and hearing aids since age 60, I would wince if someone used my nearsightedness to accuse me of moral myopia. And, though I may not always hear you, I am not deaf to your concerns. And much of Western literature has turned the blindness/sight question on its head. Tiresias, the blind seer in Sophocles’ Oedipus plays, sees things that others don’t. Sometimes blind and deaf people are the ones who truly get it.
But the inadequacy of the comparison should not get in the way of our understanding the spiritual process going on in this story. Jesus, called earlier in this passage “the light of the world” is bringing God’s clarifying light to bear on us and our doings. What we see in his life and ministry is the willingness to look the truth full in the face and to act on what he sees there. He does not accuse the blind man of having been born in sin. He lovingly responds to the man’s need by making a paste of mud and putting it on his eyes. The early church father Irenaeus saw in this act a reprise of the Genesis account of God’s making human beings out of the mud of the earth. Jesus ushers in a new creation, and the world he heralds does not disparage anyone because of the physical or social or racial or economic or sexual identity they bear. The “light of the world” shows things both as they are and should be, and our job is to help God turn what ought to be into what is.
There is another aspect of this story that has always interested me, and that is the willingness of almost everyone to throw the man born blind under the bus. Everyone, that is, except Jesus. The disciples treat him as the object for a lesson about sin. The Pharisees use him as a weapon to wield against Jesus, and when he resists them they drive him out. Even his own parents shift the responsibility away from themselves and onto their son. “He is of age,” they say, “ask him.” It is only Jesus who treats the man as a fully human being, as a person with more to his story than his blindness. Far from throwing the man under the bus, Jesus invites him to climb on board.
The point of this story is less about the miracle of restoring sight to the blind than it is about who Jesus is for you and me. The so-called experts in this story cannot see him at all. It is only a man born blind from birth who is open to the possibility of new life on offer from the one who is the light of the world. Jesus sees the man for who he is beyond his physical characteristics. The man sees Jesus as the one who is bringing light and love into a broken world.
You and I inhabit a time similar in its gloom to the one in which Jesus lived. Our world is no stranger to the knee-jerk judgmentalism exemplified by the Pharisees in their interrogation of the man and his parents. Even on good days we can attribute base motives or bad acts to those we do not agree with or understand. We make snap judgments based on appearances.
Jesus is the light of the world. If we are going to proclaim that with integrity, we will need to be willing not only to believe in him but to commit ourselves to acting toward others as he did to the man born blind. Jesus looked at him, loved him, healed him, and saw him as a particular, loved human being. Jesus knew that the man’s blindness did not define him.
In the same way, when God looks at you God sees you in all your wonderful particularity. No matter what our external markers, we have been made in the image of one who knows us and loves us as we are. In following that One, we claim God’s loving acceptance of us and commit ourselves to working to see each other as God sees us.
We have all, in a sense, been born blind. It is the light and love and blessing of life in the community that gathers around Jesus that allows us both to be seen and to see. Those aren’t metaphors of disability. They are states of the soul. And we find the gift we give thanks for today in the way God sees us, loves us, and calls us to lives of gratitude and compassion as we seek to follow the One who brings light and a new creation into our lives and the world. Amen.
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