Sermon Text - March 2, 2008
"Characters We Meet Along the Way (to the Resurrection) - The Blind Man and the Birth of a Witness"
Rev. David Kratz
John 9:1-38
During this Lenten season, we’re working our way to Easter, and as we walk along the way to Jerusalem we’re meeting some interesting characters. Last week we met a woman by the well and the week before that Nicodemus. Next week we’re going to meet Mary and Martha and their brother Lazarus. They all have a rich story; the dialogues between them are filled with lots of metaphors, different understandings and lots of ways for us to relate them and to find ourselves in the story.
I particularly like this last scene of the story. There is this beggar, this man born blind. I certainly wish he had a name – Amos or Ralph or something. But commentators just say that was the man that was born blind. In any case, he’s sitting there on a curb (at least how I imagine it) outside the synagogue, he’s wrapped in his rags, he’s got a seven-day growth of beard, his hair is still a little wet from the pool of Siloam maybe. But he still looks like a beggar except he has on his face this astonished look. He has just been through a roller coaster kind of a day.
He began it by walking into this pool of water and coming out not just wet but with his eyesight and who would have expected that when he got out of bed in the morning. And then he goes through this time that instead of celebrating his miraculous sight, his friends don’t recognize him, his parents won’t stand up for him. And the religious leaders all try and interrogate him and in the end throw him out so that at the end of the day he was just about as much of an outcast as he was at the beginning. Except that he can now see, of course. But there he is wondering whether eyesight was all that it was cracked up to be. I know he could see the color of the crocus and he could see what the color blue meant. But on the other hand he was out all by himself.
And just then Jesus comes up to find him and they have this conversation about who Jesus is and you can almost see the tears in his eyes and feel as he says when Jesus says who he is. You can almost feel the air go out of the man’s lungs as he leans down and leans against Jesus and he says he has found someone to worship – someone who cares enough to find him outside of the community and to give him a reason to keep on living. It reminds me of this part of the First Corinthians 13 at the end of that wonderful passage about love, where it talks about all of the things change in the world and that in the end it says but right now we see in a mirror dimly. But when the perfect comes, when God comes, when wholeness comes, we shall see face to face. And we shall know that of all of the great things in the world the greatest of them all is love.
It’s hard to believe that in the world as we know it, especially in the world of this particular man, it certainly didn’t seem like that was the world he lived in. It’s a story about seeing, different kinds of seeing, physical seeing, and what I call seeing from the heart. It begins with this miracle of seeing after all, a miracle that Jesus sees even before it happens. Instead of blaming people, instead of trying to figure who to blame about the problems of life, he sees the limitations and the pain of life, the suffering of life actually as an opportunity for the glory of God and so he heals this man.
But then one of the strangest things about this story is that nobody seems to celebrate it. Nobody comes up and embraces him, nobody has a party for him, nobody is glad to welcome him home and out of the streets so he can do something more than beg, he can be a contributing member of society after all! His parents can welcome him home again. The rabbis could say he could read the Torah again and become a full-fledged adult member of the society because he could read again – he could read for the first time. But nobody does that.
As our colleague Phil Lee said, “they turned this celebration into an inquisition!” Isn’t it odd what we do with the miracles of life? We have to somehow explain them and fit them into our system where we don’t recognize the people who have these profound experiences of God’s presence in their lives, whether it’s a miraculous physical healing or a moment where you find all of life finally makes sense.
When you have that moment when you know that life is more than life and death, that there is something that is even transcends the movements of our lives. When you feel like one is seen for who one is and not simply as a problem to be solved. Those times, those precious times, they’re worth celebrating and welcoming the family in and having big meal. And sometimes we get defensive don’t we, at least in this story, the implication is that even having an encounter with God that could change your life is not the reason for celebration, but the reason for questioning, for not seeing.
It seems so odd to me that people who share the streets with this beggar would then, when he could finally see and help them, they turn their back. And then when his parents have a chance to stand up and welcome him home as a full-fledged member of the family, they say sorry, we don’t know anything about that.
And those rabbis, those religious leaders who are suppose to celebrate the glory of God at least every week, maybe every day, when they are confronted it and it doesn’t fit into their system of how life is suppose to be, they cannot accept the power of light. The parents said I think the whole thing in when they said they were afraid. They were afraid. Sometimes we’re so afraid that if we look outside of the world view that we have constructed for ourselves, where everything fits in its place, when we see that there is a light that we cannot account for, we want to reject it. We want to put it away from us, we pretend that things like that just don’t happen because then we would have to change.
It’s interesting, some of the people that we look back on as people who bring light into the world like Jesus, and Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. – we’ve found ways to reject the very bearers of light in our world because we’re afraid, the story says – we’re afraid to see.
But this man, this man without a name, this man that was born blind, he lives in the fear and he doesn’t know everything. But what he does know, he speaks up for. He may not know everything about Jesus but what he does know is that he won’t betray the one who gives him the gift of sigh and insight. And as the story goes, his insight grows. For some of us that is a powerful story to know that when we do see the truth, when we have the light of truth, we can actually speak it and not be afraid.
I don’t know about you but I often have insights, sometimes I even say them out loud. But if other people have a different idea, or if it sound too unrealistic, it seems silly, not possible, I often say “I guess it’s not true” or “maybe it’s not right.” I find myself backing away when the darkness comes in and the fears, not only from the outside, but from the inside start taking over and start squelching the light of the truth that I do know and that’s what I love about this man, without a name.
He says to me, and this story says to me that you can face the worst fear possible, that fear of rejection from the community, and someone will find you on the curb outside and that person will know your name, and that person will be the very one that you can worship. And that one will make sense of all of the ambiguous visions that we see of our life. That one Jesus will comfort us even in our rejection, even in our loneliness we need not be afraid, we need not live afraid.
Because the light of the world will find us, and will give us enough sight to make sense of it all. That we’ll know in the end that love is the greatest of all. Amen.