Where to start?
There are so many layers in John’s account of Jesus and the man born blind. All four gospels contain stories of Jesus healing the blind, but in the Synoptics, these are merely tales of healing miracles. Only John’s gospel puts in so much detail; piles so much meaning and symbolism onto this particular act of healing. No doubt this story spoke especially to John’s own community, embroiled as it was in disputes about the place of Jews and non-Jews in the Christian community. It also speaks directly to the theme that John lays out at the beginning of the gospel: that the light was coming into the world and although he created the world, the world did not know him, and his own people did not receive him. So in John’s account, this particular act of healing is pivotal, and John uses it to lay out clearly (at least clearly for his own community) his argument about faith and understanding.
First, he deals with a knotty theological question. In Genesis it says that the sins of the parents will be visited on the children through multiple generations, while the prophet Elisha says that each person’s sin and the afflictions that go with it belong to that person alone. Depending on who you followed, birth defects were therefore either caused by the sins of your ancestors, or by your own sins committed in the womb before birth. Jesus dismisses both of those ideas as being just as silly as they sound to us, but then he makes and even more troubling assertion: that the man was born blind so that the glory of God might be revealed. Jesus seems to be saying that God made the man blind so that God could then make a show of restoring his sight.
It’s a troubling idea about God, unless you decide that Jesus is talking about his spiritual blindness. But even then, the use of physical disability as metaphor is troubling. Neither Jesus nor anyone else in scripture uses disability as a metaphor in any positive way.
I’m going to suggest that being troubled by that is a good thing – that in a culture far more brutal and insensitive than ours, people casually thought of physical infirmities as metaphors, and even symptoms, of spiritual ones, but we should endeavor to do better, and at least think twice when we say or sing things like I “was blind but now I see.”
But if we can carry our unease with the blindness metaphor lightly enough that we can keep looking at the story for what else it might teach us, we discover that the healing of the blind man only sets the stage for the heart of the story, which is indeed about a spiritual malady, but one that only superficially resembles blindness. Spiritual obtuseness, spiritual obstinacy, spiritual self-righteousness might better describe the attitude of the community leaders who repeatedly question the man and his family. The world-view they inhabit so thoroughly is an edifice so strongly constructed that it is a house without windows. There are at least three “facts” – convictions strongly held – that make the religious leaders doubt the man’s story of recovered sight. First, God and God’s servants do not act on the Sabbath. Second, God does not listen to the pleas of the sinful. Third, Jesus is not one of them, and therefore he cannot have done this thing.
So they jump to the obvious conclusion: this man who can see is not the same guy who was blind. The Pharisees’ attempts to publicly discredit the man and Jesus by proving the man is an imposter fail, but their world-view is strong, so they then move to the next necessary conclusion: that the healing itself is in some way sinful – that healer and healed must be involved in evil.
The man, to his credit, continues to stick to the facts of the case. “I don’t know about sin. I just know that I was blind and now I see.” “I don’t know about Jesus. I just know that I was blind and now I see.” “I don’t know about breaking the Sabbath laws. I just know that I was blind and now I see.” But that simple statement of fact is not enough to break open the world-view that cannot contain it, and so the leaders continue to denounce and conspire against Jesus in order to uphold their own understanding of the truth.
And let us not be too smug or self-satisfied that we are not like those Pharisees. We all have sheltering, comforting world-views that we dwell in, and none of them reflect the world the way it truly is. And we cling to those shelters for a while even when they are battered by contrary information, whether we are talking about our view of our own virtues, vices, or talents, or those of our children; or our ideas about the relative value and importance of our families, community, nation, or culture. Or the character of a friend or a political leader. Or the reality of climate change. All of the opinions that make up the structure of our sheltering world-view are safe, to some extent, from the assault of contradictory information, and we assume, at first, that our heroes and our loved ones are falsely accused, or have reasons as yet unrevealed for what they have done. And we prop up our internal world-view houses for as long as we can, until eventually the assault of facts makes them too weak to stand.
The good news, I guess, although it never feels that way when our illusions are finally shattered, is that out of the rubble of our old world-view and of the truth that has battered its way into our lives, we build new world-views that are, shall we say, a little less untrue.
And this is the point at which we find the once-blind man as we near the end of the story. I said earlier that it was to his credit that he stuck to the facts in the face of the barrage of attacks on his veracity and character, but I don’t really believe that. His world-view was certainly at least as assaulted by what had happened to him as was the world-view of the Pharisees. God had impinged on his life in an extraordinary and unprecedented way, and against the blazing light of God’s involvement in his life he persists, at least for a little while, in sheltering under the shabby little tent of facts: “I don’t know anything about whether Jesus is a sinner. I just know that I was blind and now I see.”
Fortunately for the man, Jesus knows that the healing moment has only now arrived for this man, and he goes to the man, whose new sight has laid him open to new truth, and offers him the insight that the Pharisees are steadfastly refusing to see – that the man is now face to face with the living God.
Now, many people have had similar encounters with God – experiences that defied expectations, and so shattered their world-views that the presence of God was unmistakable and the power of the experience led to real, deep, and permanent changes of life and heart.
Those experiences are remarkable, but they are nothing to boast of, for they show as much as anything that those who experience them were so stubborn in their world-view that God had to use a battering ram to break down the walls.
Others of us have more permeable world-views, and the light of God gets in through the cracks and chinks, or under the flaps of our tents, resulting in a life story marked by undramatic movement forward and backward instead of shattering conversion experiences.
This too is nothing to boast about. Our world-views, whether demolished and rebuilt or continually remodeled, are still pretty shabby compared to the place where God is inviting us to dwell.
But whatever kind of shelter your spirit dwells in, Lent is a perfect time to pay attention to how God is trying to get in. Does a nagging sense of unease suggest that you are moving toward change? Are there signs that you’ve been ignoring? Signs that a truth that sustains your life – an idea about who you are, or about someone you admire or dislike – is being challenged by your experience? Is there something about life that just isn’t working right now?
God is constantly knocking at the doors, the windows, the walls of the protective world-views we build for ourselves. Where is God knocking for you right now?
And what are you going to do when you finally answer? And you will, in the end, answer. God is nothing if not persistent.
Will you invite God in? Or, better still, will you accept God’s invitation to open the door and step outside into the light? Will you leave the house of your own making and dwell in the house of the Lord?
Amen.