Open Our Eyes

Written by Ed Kauffman

Open Our Eyes

Lent IV – April 3, 2011

First Mennonite, Calgary

Ed Kauffman

 Scripture: John 9:1-41

 In 1970 I was visiting a friend of mine in Dusseldorf, Germany and one evening walked with her father, a pastor, to his church a few blocks from their house.  After we entered the building and were walking through one of the rooms, I happened to bump into a table, causing a bit of noise.  “Oh” said Pastor Brunger, “the light switch is by the door if it’s too dark.”  Pastor Brunger was blind.  He didn’t need the light switch.  It was I who was at the disadvantage in this situation.

 Physical sight is something that many of us take for granted, and I have often heard people say that sight is the one sense they hope they don’t lose.  Yet I know many persons with limited or no sight who get by quite well, and even excel in other ways.  I don’t know how many of you have experienced the musical talents of Ken Medema, who is able to listen to a story, testimony, or sit through a meeting, and then capture the essence of the event in a song composed on the spot.

 But there is another kind of blindness that I’m sure we have also all encountered.  Ed Friedman, in his little book Friedman’s Fables, tells the story of the man who one day declared that he was dead!  This, of course, caused a great deal of consternation and worry  among his family and friends, and they began to employ all kinds of people to convince the man that he was not dead.  They called in pastors and psychiatrists and lawyers, but no one could convince the man that he wasn’t dead.  So finally they called the family doctor.  When the doctor arrived he asked the man, “ Is it true that dead men don’t bleed?”  “Yes,” the man replied, “I believe that is true, dead men don’t bleed.”  Immediately the doctor pulled out a scalpel and made a small cut on the man’s arm, and to everyone’s vast relief, blood appeared!  “Ah,” said the man, “I see that I was wrong – dead men do bleed!”

 It was Jonathan Swift who wrote, “There is none so blind as those who will not see.”  Today’s story from  John 9 of the healing of the man born blind involves both physical sight, and what we might call insight – the openness to see the world in new ways.

 Just a side note, the story really involves both sight and hearing.  While hearing doesn’t play a major role in the verses we read, Jesus goes on in his explanation in Chapter 10 to talk more about the sheep hearing the shepherd’s voice.  So anything I say about seeing could also be translated into hearing language for those of you, like me, who are more auditory in your sensing.  If you want a lesson in miscommunication, just listen to an auditory person arguing with a more visual person.  The auditory persons says, “Do you hear what I’m saying?” and the visual person replies, “No, I don’t see it at all!”  And they wonder why they can’t communicate.

 Anyhow, back to our story.  The initial story involves the healing of a man who was born blind.  Jesus takes mud, places it on the man’s eyes and tells him to go wash in the Pool of Siloam.  The events of the healing are, in fact, repeated four times in the course of the chapter.  We are told of the healing, then the man repeats it to the Pharisees, then the parents are questioned about it, and finally the man has to repeat it again.  Sight or blindness is mentioned in 24 times in the course of these 41 verses!

 So clearly sight is an important factor in the story and receiving sight was clearly a spectacular event for the man.  It’s hard to imagine what it meant for him.  On the one hand, he could now see!  Things that had been only shapes he could feel, or images he could only imagine now became real, colourful, there in front of him.  Perhaps some of them were disappointing.  You know how you sometime imagine what something is like before you see it, and then are disappointed when you actually do see it.  Perhaps he experienced some of that.

 But more distressing was the trouble he seemed to get into once he could see.  First of all he had to try and establish his identity.  Up until now, he was a blind man.  But how do you establish your identity when that identity changes?  He had no passport, probably no papers at all.  And the neighbors seemed to be divided.  Some said yes, it was him, while others said no it must be someone who looks like him.  Can you imagine standing there declaring, “It’s me!”  But how do you prove it.  It took his parents to finally establish his identity.

 And then there was the questioning.  First the neighbors, then the Pharisees, not just once, but twice, and finally he is driven out.  John doesn’t make it clear where he was driven out of, but his first readers would have clearly understood the message, for they had just recently been driven out themselves, banished from the synagogue as followers of Jesus and no longer considered part of the Jewish world.

 But perhaps more importantly, John shows us the progressive insight which the man gains into Jesus’ identity.  Regarding his recovery of physical sight, the man finally resorts to a simple explanation.  “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see” (v. 25) But his insight into who Jesus is progresses throughout the story. 

 As the neighbors question him, and ask how his eyes were opened, he replies that “a man called Jesus” made the mud and told him to go wash.  And that man called Jesus seems to have then disappeared from the scene for the man doesn’t know where he is.

 In the next scene, the Pharisees debate among themselves.  Some said clearly this man can’t be from God, because he doesn’t follow God’s rules!  He healed on the Sabbath and we all know that anyone who doesn’t follow the rules laid down by the church can’t be considered “from God.”  Others couldn’t figure out how a sinner could heal a blind man.  And the man says, “He is a prophet.” (v. 17)

 The man’s parents, while confirming finally the identity of their son, refuse to get caught up in the controversy and toss the ball back to their son.  And so the man is called in a second time and confronted by the religious leaders who declare definitively that “this man”, namely Jesus, is a sinner.  And at this the man who had received his sight begins finally to talk back.  “Do you also want to be his disciples?”  “You are so smart, yet you deny that he comes from God, even though he opened my eyes, something unheard of before.”

 But as the man born blind gains more and more insight, the Pharisees close their eyes tighter and tighter to the truth before them.  As he opens his eyes to the possibility of who Jesus is, they determine to shut theirs.  And so, when Jesus finally finds the man again and reveals himself to him as the Son of Man (v. 37), the one “you have seen and who is speaking to you” (v. 37) he is ready to confess, “Lord, I believe” and worship him.  In the meantime, the Pharisee standing by ask, “Are you saying we’re blind?” to which Jesus replies, “If you were blind, you would not have sin.  But now that you say, ‘We see’, your sin remains.”

 One of the ironies of this story is that the Pharisees accuse both the man born blind, and Jesus of being sinners.  They couldn’t decide whether God was more interested in healing a person,  or whether God was more interested in making sure the rules were obeyed.  And, as is too often the case, they came down on the side of following the rules.  “There are none so blind as those who will not see.”

At the beginning of the story, Jesus declares himself as “the light of the world.” (v.5)  And Paul, in Ephesians 5 encourages the church to “live as children of light.” (Eph. 5:8)  But what does that mean for us?  How do we move from blindness to sight, and how do we avoid the blindness of the Pharisees?

 One of the things we could note is that walking in the light means opening ourselves to God working in new ways.  Time and again the religious leaders of Jesus’ day got it wrong because they thought that God could only work within the rules.  But the rules were ones they had made, not God’s.  And the church has continued to fall into that trap ever since.  As Jesus told Nicodemus, “The Spirit blows were it wills.”  God will not be confined to our rules and regulations.  Not that we shouldn’t have any, but we need to be open to recognizing God at work sometimes even outside those boundaries we set up.

 And perhaps that’s the biggest thing we need to hear from this story.   As one commentator said, “Blindness can be healed.  The claim to see can be far worse, for it masks a blindness to the need for corrective vision.”  Or as another said, “One of the most dangerous claims we can make is that we are fully sighted.”  If the religious leaders of the day had a fatal flaw, it was the contention that they could see perfectly and knew precisely what was going on, who Jesus was, and what needed to be done.  Proclaiming such insight doomed them to miss the light that was coming.

 I am reminded of a letter I received a number of years ago when a committee I chaired made a decision on a rather controversial issue.  A pastor who disagreed with the decision wrote to me and said, in essence, “I don’t care what the church says about this, I know what the Bible says and that’s all that matters to me.”  Such an attitude, it seems to me, leads us to the blindness of the Pharisees.  Or it leads to the kind of manipulation and convoluted thinking of the man in Friedmann’s fable.  So perhaps the biggest lesson from these texts is the need to acknowledge our own blindness.  But that’s hard.

 Dan Clendinen puts it this way:

 Acknowledging your own spiritual blindness can be embarrassing, painful, and threatening. To confess your own groping darkness and howling demons, your frustrations, fears, and failures, unnerves us. And as unsettling as that confession is to make to your own self, there is the added anxiety of what others might say, think, or do. We know from experience, and from the disciples and the clerics in this gospel story, just how cruel and condescending, how derogatory and dismissive, people can be towards the blind. Some people will kick you when you are down. We shoot the wounded.

 But he goes on:

 Healthy people befriend their blindness and make their peace with it. That's different than self-pity, self-loathing, rationalizing it, or invoking it as an excuse. Spiritually-sighted people recognize that acknowledging their blindness is an act of liberation not a confession of bondage. Perfection is an awful and oppressive burden to bear. Only when we identify our symptoms can we experience a cure. The journey toward the light begins when we acknowledge our darkness.

 Leonard Cohen, Canadian song-writer, sums it up rather beautifully in his song “Anthem” when he sings, “There is a crack, a crack, in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” 

 Being human involves acknowledging that we see only dimly; that darkness still lurks in many corners.  Recognizing our own blindness, and allowing others to recognize theirs is the first step to receiving sight and walking as children of the light.  Allowing Christ’s light to penetrate through the cracks is the only way that the darkness can be overcome and we can walk in that light.

 And when the light does come, when we gain insight into who Jesus really is and what that means for us, then we will no longer need to try and explain it, but with the man born blind can only confess – “How it happened, I don’t know. But this one thing I do know.  Once I was blind, but now I see.”  A statement that we must be ready to make over and over again.

 So let us acknowledge our own blind spots, allow others to acknowledge their blind spots without fear of recrimination, and together seek to know the one who brings the light of God into the world, namely Jesus Christ.

 

Amen.