Eyes Wide Open – sermon on March 26, 2017
John 9: 1-41 As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man who had been blind from birth. “Rabbi,” his disciples asked him, “why was this man born blind? Was it because of his own sins or his parents’ sins?” “It was not because of his sins or his parents’ sins,” Jesus answered. “This happened so the power of God could be seen in him. We must quickly carry out the tasks assigned us by the one who sent us. The night is coming, and then no one can work. But while I am here in the world, I am the light of the world.” Then he spit on the ground, made mud with the saliva, and spread the mud over the blind man’s eyes. He told him, “Go wash yourself in the pool of Siloam” (Siloam means “sent”). So the man went and washed and came back seeing!
His neighbors and others who knew him as a blind beggar asked each other, “Isn’t this the man who used to sit and beg?” 9 Some said he was, and others said, “No, he just looks like him!” But the beggar kept saying, “Yes, I am the same one!” They asked, “Who healed you? What happened?” He told them, “The man they call Jesus made mud and spread it over my eyes and told me, ‘Go to the pool of Siloam and wash yourself.’ So I went and washed, and now I can see!” “Where is he now?” they asked. “I don’t know,” he replied. Then they took the man who had been blind to the Pharisees, because it was on the Sabbath that Jesus had made the mud and healed him. The Pharisees asked the man all about it. So he told them, “He put the mud over my eyes, and when I washed it away, I could see!” Some of the Pharisees said, “This man Jesus is not from God, for he is working on the Sabbath.” Others said, “But how could an ordinary sinner do such miraculous signs?” So there was a deep division of opinion among them. Then the Pharisees again questioned the man who had been blind and demanded, “What’s your opinion about this man who healed you?” The man replied, “I think he must be a prophet.”
The Jewish leaders still refused to believe the man had been blind and could now see, so they called in his parents. 19 They asked them, “Is this your son? Was he born blind? If so, how can he now see?” His parents replied, “We know this is our son and that he was born blind, but we don’t know how he can see or who healed him. Ask him. He is old enough to speak for himself.” His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jewish leaders, who had announced that anyone saying Jesus was the Messiah would be expelled from the synagogue. That’s why they said, “He is old enough. Ask him.” So for the second time they called in the man who had been blind and told him, “God should get the glory for this, because we know this man Jesus is a sinner.” “I don’t know whether he is a sinner,” the man replied. “But I know this: I was blind, and now I can see!” “But what did he do?” they asked. “How did he heal you?” “Look!” the man exclaimed. “I told you once. Didn’t you listen? Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples, too?” Then they cursed him and said, “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses! We know God spoke to Moses, but we don’t even know where this man comes from.” “Why, that’s very strange!” the man replied. “He healed my eyes, and yet you don’t know where he comes from? We know that God doesn’t listen to sinners, but he is ready to hear those who worship him and do his will. Ever since the world began, no one has been able to open the eyes of someone born blind. If this man were not from God, he couldn’t have done it.” “You were born a total sinner!” they answered. “Are you trying to teach us?” And they threw him out of the synagogue.
When Jesus heard what had happened, he found the man and asked, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” The man answered, “Who is he, sir? I want to believe in him.” “You have seen him,” Jesus said, “and he is speaking to you!” “Yes, Lord, I believe!” the man said. And he worshiped Jesus. Then Jesus told him, “I entered this world to render judgment—to give sight to the blind and to show those who think they see that they are blind.” Some Pharisees who were standing nearby heard him and asked, “Are you saying we’re blind?” “If you were blind, you wouldn’t be guilty,” Jesus replied. “But you remain guilty because you claim you can see.
Sermon: Eyes Wide Open by Rev. Doreen Oughton
Wow. There’s a lot here, isn’t there? The story starts off with a theological question, moves on to a healing, and then comes all kinds of chaos. Not rejoicing, not crowds gathered to seek more healing – reaching for the hem of Jesus’ robe or the lowering of loved ones through a roof. Instead there is skepticism, accusation of sin, a focus on the rules and rule-breaking. There are some things that trouble me in this passage, and some things that challenge me.
First, the troubling things. The opening question of the disciples may be one we believe we’ve moved past as a society – the idea that a disability is a punishment from God, either a punishment of the person with the disability, or of the person’s parents or grandparents. We don’t think that anymore, right? We have all kinds of knowledge now about how human beings develop, where things go off that result in bodily function or appearance that is different from the norm. We understand about illness and accidents, brain chemistry and genetics – things that have nothing to do with sin or punishment. Of course, when something happens to us personally, or our loved ones, we are bound to wonder why. Such questions as the disciples ask may very well cross our minds – is it something I did? And other people, frightened by these differences, wanting to assure themselves that something like this couldn’t happen to them, are also likely to wonder about the “reasons” it happened.
One of the things that disturbs me is the detachment with which the disciples ask. It is just an intellectual exercise for them. They barely see the man as a person. And as we learn later in the story, the same is true of the man’s neighbors and the Pharisees. They don’t even recognize him, though nothing about his physical appearance has changed. All they saw was a beggar, a sinner, an outcast. Jesus sees him as a person, a child of God. I believe his healing of the man was to restore not just his sight, but his humanity, to bring him back into community.
But I am also troubled by what Jesus says here, at least by the way it can be, and has been, interpreted. The words used in the translation we used were “Look instead for what God can do.” But other translations say “this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.” It makes it sound as if God created a hardship for this person so that God could show off by enabling a healing. Since we don’t hear much about miraculous healing these day, a similar message might be about the glory of God shining through this disabled person who overcomes obstacles, who is an inspiration, who becomes so much more than others thought they could be. Now its tricky, because I don’t mean to say that such things DON’T show the glory of God. They certainly might. My problem is with the idea that God would inflict a person in order to get that outcome. It just seems so cruel and exploitive. Think about it. As a parent would you ever harm your child so their life would be harder and you can then encourage them to do great things, thus glorifying yourself? That would be pretty messed up. And yet people still say such things to those with disabilities and their families about God’s role in it. There are some awful sayings, like, “God never gives us more than we can handle,” or “this one is God’s special child,” “God is testing you through your disability as a measure of love for you;” “You who are last on earth will be first in heaven.” These platitudes deny the reality of suffering. And when we expect people with disabilities to inspire us and increase our faith in God, what sort of burden is that adding to their lives? Don’t they and their families have a right to be angry and scared and grieving; to struggle and want to give up, at least some times? Generally, people don’t want to be poster children for a cause. They don’t want their suffering exploited, whether to raise funds or provide an example of perseverance. I would imagine that all of us want to be accepted and respected as full human beings, sometimes inspiring, sometimes not so much. We want to be seen as more than the things that limit us, or that make us different from others. We want to be seen as beloved in a way that transcends our brokenness.
Jesus enabled the man to see, giving him a chance to reintegrate into society. But I think in our times Jesus needs to heal the blindness of those who will not see the ways we continue to exclude people with disabilities. Like the disciples, we might want to have an intellectual debate. We might not focus on who’s to blame, but instead argue the cost-benefit analyses of accommodating people with handicaps, whether its installing ramps and elevators, having a sign-language interpreter, allowing service animals in restaurants, allowing more time on standardized tests, and so on. We can forget to recognize the humanity of the people affected by such decisions. We overlook all they have to offer. We are blind to the damage done by our own tunnel vision.
Moving on now to the challenging parts of the story, at least for me. We’ve all heard the saying that seeing is believing, but here people are witnessing a great miracle and still they don’t believe it. This beggar has had his sight restored. And the townspeople, including his relatives are not rejoicing. If God’s plan was to be glorified by the healing, it is an epic fail. First, some question whether this sighted person is the same one who had been begging, or just a look-alike. And even if they believe it is the same person, they are not sure it is a good thing. They march him off to the religious leaders, who also are not sure this is a good thing. The healing happened on the Sabbath, and it involved kneading, which is expressly forbidden on the Sabbath under the law. So how good can it be? For the Pharisees to consider that God’s compassion was more important than God’s law was just too much. It challenged their understanding of themselves and their purpose, and they found it easier to excommunicate this man than to adjust their understanding.
They are not alone in that. It is very hard for people to accept information that dramatically challenges the way they see the world and themselves in it. There is this mistaken belief that if we just give people enough information, or explain the science of something, or use reason, we can convince them that their position is wrong, or mistaken. That might work on something innocuous, something that has no impact on your world view. … But studies show that deeper beliefs are fairly impervious to information. If a study results in a conclusion you disagree with, you challenge the methods, you wonder who sponsored the study. When I worked in addictions treatment, total abstinence from all substances was always the treatment goal. In my reading and research, I would come across studies that indicated that a return to safe drinking was possible for some people, and I just flat out dismissed them. And I’m still skeptical about them. They challenged everything I’d learned and been teaching and counseling.
In 2013, a law professor named Dan Kahan set up an experiment to explore the question of why evidence has so little impact on political debates. The experiment indicated that people subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values. He suggests that the social cost of changing our beliefs and values are usually greater than the cost of being “wrong.” If I had sought out more studies that lifted up a return to social drinking as possible and desirable, my colleagues would have thought I was deluded. I might have even lost my job. We often affiliate with people who think like we do, and we don’t want to disrupt those relationships.
The Pharisees had been working hard to learn the law, to teach the law, to emphasize the importance of keeping the laws to the best of one’s ability. To say that the breaking of a law was something to rejoice about, to claim that one who broke the law was a prophet – well, they could lose a lot. Kahan says, “What we believe about the facts tells us who we are.” Psychologically, it is important to know who we are, to keep that somewhat stable. He calls it identity-protective cognition – thinking in ways that protect our identity. We reason the facts to fit our beliefs. So the trouble is, if we can’t trust our own reasoning, how do we reason around it? I don’t think we can do it on our own. To do it at all requires a certain level of humility, perhaps the kind of humility it takes to give ourselves over to Christ, to ask him to live in us and we in him.
Jesus makes clear at the end of this passage that it is our own certainty about the things we “see” that will get us in trouble. We can get so certain about what we know, about the right way of doing things, about who is worthy and who isn’t, about who is a sinner and who is righteous; that we block out the light of God, we deny the truth of God. We hide in a darkness that allows us to stay blind to suffering and pain of those around us. We hide in a darkness that divides us, separates us from each other and from God. It is a huge price to pay to cling to the illusion of being right, or to maintain our social standing. Jesus wants to free us from that burden. Jesus wants to open our eyes, to be the light of our world. Can we let him? Can we let ourselves trust him as he reveals, over and over again, God at work right in front of our eyes? May it be so.
