If you’ve ever been to the home of a person who is blind, you might notice the absolute order of his house, not one thing out of place. The extreme tidiness is not due to strict housekeeping standards; it is because of the simple fact that a blind person needs to know by memory where everything in his house is; how many steps it takes to get from the sofa to the kitchen; precisely where in the cabinet to find the salt shaker. A blind person never rearranges the furniture in his house; he needs things to stay the same so he knows where he is.
You and I rely on our eyesight to tell us these things most of the time; but we’ve all experienced blindness in some way: for instance, getting up in the middle of the night to go to the kitchen and get a glass of water, not turning on any lights so as not to disturb anyone, and knowing our way around the house; walking with hand held out, feeling our way so as not to bump into the door jamb.
Most of the time this works pretty well, and we manage to get our drink of water and get back to bed without incident. But what if someone left the dresser drawer standing open? We would have a big bruise on our shin the next day. What if someone left a pair of shoes in the middle of the floor? We might find ourselves sprawled out on the kitchen floor among shards of broken glass and puddles of cold water.
Worse still, what if someone snuck into the bedroom in the middle of the night and moved all the furniture around? We would be moving confidently toward the bedroom door when bam! There we’d be, come to a dead stop with a six-foot dresser barring our way and no idea how to get around it.
Think of the Pharisees in today’s gospel as blind people who believe they know where all the furniture is. This is no judgment on the Pharisees: the human condition is that we’re all blind, living in darkness; we can’t see all the time what God is doing and what God intends for us. God realized this a long time ago, and gave the Jewish people an excellent map in the form of the Torah, the law, which is pretty helpful to people who need to know how to feel their way through their daily lives.
But the problem is, what happens if someone (a) comes into the bedroom and rearranges all the furniture, and (b) turns on the light and says, you can open your eyes to find your way now!
John’s gospel from the beginning has set up this idea: in the first chapter, he tells us that Jesus is the true light that has come into the world. In the story of Nicodemus that we heard a couple of weeks ago, he tells us that Nicodemus came to Jesus under cover of darkness, and heard the great truth that Jesus has come into the world to save the world, to bring light to the world. However, Jesus tells Nicodemus that not everyone will welcome the light, and some who are evil will simply prefer to stay in darkness, and judgment will come to them not by God’s choice, but by their own.
Effectively, what John tells us in the gospel today is that when Jesus rearranged the furniture and turned on the light, the Pharisees in this story covered their eyes, refused to see by the light Jesus provided, and insisted that the furniture hadn’t moved. And their actions in this story reveal that they are the ones who are truly blind, because they prefer to remain stumbling in darkness.
This is a story laced with irony and comedy from first to last. The Pharisees come into the story assuming they can see and the man is blind. And they see lots of things: their religious furniture is carefully arranged. In one corner, there’s the nightstand: those who suffer must have deserved it, so they must have sinned – even to the absurd idea that a baby can sin in its mother’s womb. In another corner, the solid immovable dresser of the law meant that anyone who broke a rule like working on the Sabbath must not be from God. Therefore, no healings should take place on Sabbath, leading to the irony that they accuse God Incarnate of being a sinner for doing God’s work on the Sabbath.
In another corner, they have the certainty that since healings don’t take place on the Sabbath, that the man must not have been healed after all and in fact, has to be a different man. So they send for his parents to say maybe he wasn’t blind, or maybe this wasn’t him, but his identical twin or something. When assured that it was the same man and he had been healed, they reverted to their first certainty that he was a sinner and therefore had nothing important to say to them. And when confronted with a challenge to everything they knew about how the furniture was arranged, they simply decided they couldn’t deal with the challenge and drove the man out of the synagogue.
You can see what they’re doing: they’re carefully maintaining their blindness throughout, refusing to open their eyes and recognize that Jesus is a new light that allows them to see in new ways. And by refusing to see by Jesus’ light, they prove that they are willfully and intentionally blind, and they are stuck in darkness – so judgment comes to them. Ironically, at the end of the story it is the formerly blind man who can see - not only physically, but also spiritually, for he sees the truth that Jesus is the Messiah, with spiritual sight that unfolds gradually throughout the story. And it is the Pharisees who are blind, who have proved themselves to be sinners by choosing to remain in darkness.
Those silly Pharisees, right? Always making mistakes, bumbling their way through the New Testament like Keystone Kops, constantly critiqued by Jesus and everyone else as too certain, too rigid, too judgmental, too condemning of everyone else. It’s easy for us to criticize them because they’re so different from us.
And yet – and yet – aren’t we all Pharisees in some way? Think of who they were in Jesus’ time – sincerely religious, devoted people. Don’t we know lots of people like that? In fact, isn’t that why we’re here? We love God, we want to be what God asks us to be. Yet ultimately, we are all vulnerable to spiritual blindness – doing what the Pharisees did – taking something good, like the Bible, mixing it with our own preconceived ideas about how things should be, and coming up with the absolute certainty that we know who’s right and who’s wrong. There are certainly many religious fundamentalists who operate this way, but it’s not just fundamentalists. The controversies that erupt in the church on a regular basis don’t happen because some Christians want to throw away the Bible and write something new. They happen because people disagree on how to read the Bible, and which passages shed light which other ones.
Right now, the controversy du jour in the American Christian world is over a new book by an evangelical mega-church pastor, Rob Bell, who had the temerity to tell the Pharisees of our world that he doesn’t believe that all non-Christians are going to hell (in his new book, Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived). For his trouble, he got a lot of his evangelical brethren telling him that he was going straight to hell.
Rob Bell asks an important question, which I will talk more about in another sermon. But today’s gospel isn’t so much about the content of what we see, as how we see it. How do we determine what to believe when things aren’t as clear as they used to be, when we live in a time of huge transition, with furniture being moved all over the place?
Phyllis Tickle has written a book called The Great Emergence, in which she says that every 500 years, the church feels compelled to hold a giant rummage sale – getting rid of outdated beliefs and practices to make way for new ones that will help us face a new world. Talk about moving the furniture! She says that the transition we’re in now will be every bit as earth-shattering as the Protestant Reformation 500 years ago. And think about where our world is now. We are in a communications and technology revolution. Physicists tell us that time and space themselves are relative, so that we can’t even be sure of where we’re standing any more. And in the church, we can’t assume that we live in a Christendom world, where most everyone around us is Christian and our basic institutions are based on Christian principles. Around us, everything is changing and we have to find our way through the dark of a whole new world.
So here’s what I do when I think about the hard questions in a dark and murky world: I look at Jesus. When I look at Jesus, here is what I see: I see the Son of God who heals, who preaches good news to the poor, who loves others as he loves himself. Jesus’ story is not about a God who chooses to operate by use of power. This is the God who voluntarily chose to empty himself of power in order to give himself completely for love.
And this is the God whose last earthly command was for his disciples – you and I – to love one another as he has loved us. That means we give ourselves for each other, even if it means dying. That means we live according to the law of love, caring for one another, bringing healing to each other, shining light in the darkness of each others’ lives. That means we believe above all else that Jesus loves us and Jesus loves everyone who stumbles in darkness, looking for the light. Because God has given Jesus to us as the light of the world.
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