“One thing I do know: that though I was blind, now I see.”
A recent survey on about religious questions asked, “what do you have to do to get to heaven?” The results showed that close to 80% of respondents believed that if you lived a good life and didn’t hurt anyone, you’d get to heaven. Being Christian was not the requirement. Simply “being good” was.
So what does it mean to “be good”? What yardstick do you use to measure that? The truth is, the only measure that we use to determine whether or not we’re ‘good’ is more often than not our own opinion. And it’s always easy to be good when we’re the judge, isn’t it? We tend to only consider ourselves as ‘not good’ when we look at our past selves.
It’s funny – and sad – how often the culture we live in picks and chooses the kind of baggage it can carry along. TV and movies still largely carry the message that you should live your life as you choose, not caring what other people think of you. You are the last and best judge of your actions.
And the same plot plays itself over and over and over again: someone commits a grievous error, hates themselves, and tries desperately to find some way to make amends through their own actions. If they’re successful, it’s a happy ending.
In the movie Seven Pounds, Will Smith plays a character who killed seven people in a car accident. To make amends he chooses seven people to help. He donates parts of his body and vital organs to people, first making certain they’re worthy to receive his gift.
As he lives, he chooses who will receive these things. Finally, he finds the last two candidates to whom he will donate his seven pounds of flesh – a man who’ll receive his eyes, and a woman to whom he (literally) gives his heart.
Having found them, he then commits suicide, having arranged through a friend that the deserving recipients will receive his gifts. He dies, they live. As he lived, he satisfied his own conscience, met his own criteria, found his own forgiveness.
And you know, we want to be able to fix everything, to make everything better, to clear our own conscience. On some level, we know we can’t. Yet that’s what we consistently try to do. Take charge of ourselves, take charge of our lives.
It’s good to hear that redemption is within our grasp. It’s the stuff of powerful
So, there’s a man in the gospel lesson for today who was born blind. We don’t know who he is, but we do know as we have come to understand the culture of the time that he would have been worthless. Being born blind, if he was lucky enough to come from a wealthy family he would have been sequestered at home.
Since he wasn’t – and we can know this from the way the Pharisees treat his parents – he was probably a beggar. Sitting by the side of the road with a bowl, dependent upon strangers for alms to help his family and support himself. This is where Jesus meets him, as he walks along the road.
And his disciples ask the question: who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind? It’s a question that the disciples have to ask. In their religious system, if you have done good things then God looks after you and blesses you. If you have done bad things, then God will curse you and possibly your children. If you are born blind, then either the man or his parents must have done something to deserve it. Later on, when the Pharisees are driving him from the synagogue, they accuse him – “you were born entirely in sins!”
Because that’s always the big question, isn’t it – if God exists, then why do bad things happen to good people? That question has been at the root of many people who have walked away from the life of faith, because that question and its reverse – why do good things happen to bad people – struggle and strain at our hearts and our minds. If we are responsible for our own salvation, then if something is wrong in our lives then that must be our fault, too. It must be someone’s fault.
But as often as we think of those questions, we don’t remember the Saviour’s answer: Neither this man nor his parents sinned. Jesus doesn’t just answer the question with a ‘no,’ he negates the entire question.
It’s not about ‘who sinned,’ but rather that a man was born blind so that God’s work might be revealed in him. Jesus gives the disciples a better question to ask, which is “how will we see God at work in this man’s life?” And to think of it, that must have been the question they were asking. Because the blind man is still on the side of the road until Jesus takes some direct action.
The man wasn’t blind because of something he or someone else had done. He was born blind so that people would see that God’s grace is for all, perhaps even especially for those who didn’t think he deserved it. After all, the Pharisees who question him aren’t interested in his answers, only in that he’s not asking what they think are the right questions.
And it’s those questions that really define this gospel lesson, don’t they? From the very opening to the closing of the passage:
Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?
Is this the man who was blind?
How were your eyes opened?
Where is this man?
Who is this man?
Are you trying to teach us?
Do you believe in the Son of Man?
Surely, we are not blind?
Place yourself in the story: Are you a disciple? Are you the man’s parents, trying to defend a religious position against attack while not feeling safe enough to place yourself in with the group under attack? Or are you a Pharisee, safe in your own righteousness and knowledge, able to denigrate and dismiss someone else’s miracle and attack the source of their hope and their identity because your safe answers are in jeopardy?
Actually, I think, in this story we’re the blind man on the side of the road. Our minds are filled with questions: who am I? Why am I here? How do these things happen to me?
The blind man doesn’t know who comes to heal him; in the same way that at our baptism we don’t know this Jesus who comes to us. In fact, we might live most of our baptised lives never actually feeling like we are part of the family of God: it’s easy to forget. If there is a monumental failing of the Lutheran church it’s that we pastors haven’t always been direct in connecting the pew, the pulpit, and the altar to the baptismal font. You are here and you are baptised – you are not here because you were baptised. You are here because you are.
It’s really easy to forget something that we might not actually remember; a day long ago when a pastor held us and sprinkled water on our head. When God is so far away from us, it does indeed seem that the world we know – the dust of the road, people passing by, our own internal thoughts – is all there is.
Jesus does not let us remain that way. He doesn’t even speak to the blind man before he does something about his affliction. Kneeling down, Jesus makes mud in the dust of the ground and forms it over the blind eyes. Telling the man to go and wash, he says nothing else to him. The man isn’t healed because he deserved it, or because he’d done something good in life. He’s healed because Jesus sought him out, and brought him into the
And the man is left, on his own, to reach his own conclusions about what happened to him. Indeed, to reach his own conclusions about this man who healed him; who re-created his own eyes with the dust of the earth even as God created those first two humans in the Garden.
And when he is put to the test by the Pharisees who demand he admit that the man who touched his life is no different than anyone else, he can only offer one testimony in reply: this man may be a sinner. But one thing I know: though I was blind, now I see. And after he is put out of the synagogue for his troubles, Jesus comes seeking him again. The one who was blind and now can see has traded places with those who, though able to see, blind themselves to the presence of God in their midst.
Jesus calls the Pharisees blind because they willing blind themselves. In the comfort of the traditional answers they have, they don’t want to be moved beyond what they know. If Jesus is, in fact, the Messiah, then their carefully constructed system is about to fall down about their ears. The solution, then, is that Jesus cannot be the Messiah. He just can’t.
And I’ve said before that the Pharisees are good people. They’re not big bullies, the way we make them out to be. They follow the rules, they know the answers, they are the textbook example of good people.
And maybe they are a good example why it might not be enough to say that ‘good’ people are automatically fit for the kingdom of heaven. Maybe the question that survey should have asked instead was, “who is outside of the kingdom of heaven?” But that wouldn’t get many good answers, or at least, answers that would get good press. The old questions are much to be preferred. The old questions – what must I do to get into heaven? – are the ones the Pharisees ask.
And in much the same way, we become willingly blind through some of our own questions, when either we don’t want answers or the old answers we have are too comforting to let go. A few hundred years ago, there was no way that anyone who wasn’t Lutheran was going to go to heaven. It just wasn’t going to happen.
But over time pluralism and ecumenism worked to bring us together, and now we count many, many other Christian traditions among our coworkers in the vineyard of the Lord. Of course, they may not always count us among their coworkers, but we spend a little less time thinking about that.
As we sit, blind on the side of the road, and even later with our eyes newly opened, Jesus seeks us out. In our community we seek out the questions and the answers that the world asks of us: who is this Jesus, and what is he to you?
And we may spend several thousand more years trying to determine better answers to those questions than those we already have. Doctrine and dogma, the Small Catechism and the Lutheran Confessions all contribute to those discussions.
But let us, in this season of Lent, share our answer with the blind young man who was questioned by the Pharisees – what do you know about this man?
One thing we do know – once we were blind, but now we can see. Once we were asleep, but now we are awake. Once we walked in darkness, but now Christ shines upon us. Not because we earned it, but because we received it as gift.
Let the people of God say amen.
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