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A Real Eye
Opener
by the Rev. Rich Smith
March 9, 2008
John 9:1-41
One of the more interesting
characters that peopled the town of Tombstone when we lived there
was a man by the name of Pete Acuna. Pete was in his
forties, had been blind most of his life, and made his living by tuning
pianos and entertaining in the local taverns. He was a
regular one-man-band, and something of a local celebrity. He was
doing just fine, coping quite well, and then one day the Lions Club
raised money and sent Pete to Tucson where he had surgery which
miraculously restored his sight in one eye.
When he got back to town, Pete did what he always
did each evening -- he went to one of the local night spots to
entertain, and then on a break went up to the bar himself for some
refreshment. And while there, one of the first things he
witnessed with his new-found sight was a murder! (In spite of
Tombstone's reputation, it was the first one in twelve years!)
It seems there was a young man in the bar,
celebrating the birth of his first son. In his alcohol-enhanced
excitement, he asked the woman closest to him to dance. Her
husband looked up from his umpteenth beer, and in a fit of jealous
rage, pulled a gun and shot the celebrating young father.
I saw Pete Acuna myself the next morning, when I
picked him up to go and tune the church piano. He told me all
about what he had seen the night before, and he wondered if receiving
his sight had been such a good idea after all!
Pete reminds me a bit of this man in our Gospel
lesson for the morning -- this man who was born blind, whose sight was
miraculously given him by Jesus, and who then got into such trouble --
upsetting the neighbors, his own parents practically disowning him,
getting expelled from the synagogue by the Jewish authorities -- that
he too must have wondered if receiving his sight was such a good
idea. When Jesus heals you it can be dangerous and costly!
Now a close look at this story, and its setting
within the Gospel of John, reveals that its author had something more
in mind than a simple tale of a healing by Jesus and the troubles it
precipitated for the man who was healed. The writer of John is a
consummate artist, a poet, a dramatist, and everything he writes has a
much deeper meaning than that which appears on the surface. For
unlike the other Gospels, which are closer to biographies, John is
written as a drama, and those who read it need to read it with that in
mind. And as in any great play, not everything therein can be
taken as a literal rendition of actual events; rather John uses
dramatic license to express the deeper meaning of those events.
This is an eye-opening story -- not just for the man, or the Pharisees,
but for us who hear it as well!
It is a drama in three acts. In act one, Jesus
and his disciples encounter a man born blind. The disciples want
to use it as an occasion to debate theology: "Who sinned here,
the man or his parents?" "Why did this happen in the first
place?" It is a familiar side-stepping of the real issue, an
evasion that Jesus is not taken in by. He simply says that who
sinned is not the point. The man's blindness will now allow God's
work to be revealed in him. And Jesus then does just that --
reveals God's work by restoring the man's sight, using a method that
was common to healers of that time: making a mud pack out of dirt and
saliva, rubbing it on the man, and sending him off to wash in a special
pool of water. He receives his sight; Jesus exits; the curtain
falls.
Act Two consists of four scenes, none of them
pleasant for the man, and from which Jesus is absent. The man
goes to his old neighborhood, where people were accustomed to relating
to him as a beggar. And things are thrown off balance, because
they don't quite know how to handle him now that he's not blind.
They can't just toss him a couple of coins and ignore him
anymore. So they do the only thing they can think of -- they take
him to the Jewish authorities.
So in Act 2, scene 2, the Pharisees question the
man, and their big concern is that whoever healed him broke the law by
doing it on the Sabbath. If they can get the man to confess, then
they will be able to make a "case" against Jesus. But he won't
confess to their liking. He simply says that the man who healed
him could not possibly be a sinner, because he was doing the works of
God.
On to the next scene: the Jewish authorities
find this quite unbelievable, and so they conclude that it must have
been a sham -- the man before them could not really have been born
blind. So they call in his parents to get the real story.
But they aren't much help. All they will do is confirm that, yes,
he is indeed our son, and yes, he has always been blind, but that's as
far as they will go. They don't want to get involved; they know
that if they acknowledge what has happened that they might very well be
excommunicated from the synagogue, and they don't want that. So
they turn it back to the Pharisees -- "Ask him yourselves," they
say. "He's old enough to speak for himself!"
Act 2, scene 4 finds the Pharisees calling the man
back in and trying to force a confession: "Tell the truth now; we
know this man is a sinner!" And in a clever bit of dialogue, the
man born blind answers, "Whether he is a sinner I do not know.
One thing I do know: that though I was blind, now I see!" And if
I were staging this, the man would immediately break out into a chorus
of "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like
me! I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see!"
But the dialogue continues, the Pharisees still
trying to get the man to help them condemn Jesus. They ask him,
"How did this happen? What did he do to make you see?" --
expecting that he will describe Jesus' physical actions that violated
the Sabbath laws. Once again he displays a clever wit and turns
it back on them, asking, "Why do you want to know? Does this mean
that you also want to become his disciples?" (Which is of course
exactly what they did not want to do, but should have.)
Still not getting the point, but doggedly pursuing
their questioning, the Pharisees continue: "You follow him, we
follow Moses. We know God has spoken to Moses, but as for this
one, we do not know where he comes from." To which the man, sharp
as ever, responds, "Why this is a marvel! You do not know where
he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. Such a thing has never
happened before in all the world -- if he weren't from God, he could
not have done it!"
Well, that's it, the last straw, and rather than
admit that they have been bested in the argument, or that Jesus was
indeed doing the work of God, the Pharisees have a fit of anger:
"You were born steeped in utter sin, and you would teach us?" And
they throw him out --excommunicate him -- from the synagogue.
The third act of the drama finds Jesus returning to
the man, who makes his confession of faith that Jesus is indeed the one
sent from God, and he worships him. And Jesus makes the point
that this is the real seeing, a sight far more precious than mere
physical seeing. And furthermore, the Pharisees who claim to see
so well are really the blind ones here. It is a masterful work of
drama, in which a man is led first to physical sight and then to
spiritual sight, and in which the refusal to see who Jesus really is is
condemned.
Now, as good a drama as that is, it is not the whole
story, for there is yet more that we can read out of it, something even
deeper. To do that, we need to ask: for whom was this
written? Who were John's original readers, and what would they
see in this? The answer is that they were that part of the church
made up of largely Jewish-background, near the end of the first
century, about 90 A.D. It was a church that was in conflict with
establishment Judaism, and living under Roman domination. It was
a time when to be a Christian was a very dangerous thing, when
persecution was a way of life, when to follow the Light of the World
put you in direct conflict with the powers of darkness. It was
also a "time between", an interim, between the first coming of Christ
and his expected second. Jesus had touched them, blessed them,
shown them the light; but then he had then gone away, "ascended into
heaven" as one of the creeds put it, with the promise that he would
return again someday to reign on earth.
So, let's look at this little drama again, with that
understanding: Act 1, Jesus blesses a man with sight, then
vanishes. Act 2, the man gets into all kinds of trouble
because of it; Act 3, Jesus returns as judge, vindicating the man who
confesses faith in him, and condemning those who persecuted him and are
really blind. Surely the church at the end of the first century
must have seen themselves in that man, for they had been blessed, or
enlightened by Jesus, who now had gone away. They were in a heap
of trouble, and must have been tempted to give in to the social,
political, and religious pressures around them to renounce their faith,
to simply get along with the world, to make things easy on themselves,
maybe even save their lives. They were in the midst of Act 2, but
as the curtain was about to fall, they could read this little drama and
be reminded, "Wait! There is yet another act to follow! Hold firm
in your faith and you will be vindicated! Christ will return and
you will see that it has all been worth it. Stand fast, take
heart, it's not over yet!"
And so this little eye-opening drama, while set in
Jesus' own time, is really about another time where it gave hope to
those undergoing great duress and persecution.
What might it say to our time?
There are still many ways in which those who follow
Christ find ourselves in the midst of the second act of this
drama. For Christ has blessed us, gifted us with sight, with a
vision of the world as it ought to be, with how God wants the world to
be. It is a vision of a world of peace, of justice, of community,
of humans acting like they really were created in God's image, where
all persons are treated with dignity and equality, regardless of race
or gender or sexual orientation or nationality, where no one "lords it
over another", where the first are last and the last are first, where
"they study war no more," and where the earth itself is respected and
loved. And Jesus has shown us how to enable that world: through
love and trust, forgiveness and personal integrity, courage and
compassion, caring and inclusiveness, and faith in things that cannot
be seen. We as Christ's followers are those who were blind, but
now through God's grace we see. And we are living in the "time
between", the interim between two ages, the no longer and the not
yet. We have been blessed by the past, we are pulled on by a
future hope, but at the moment, we're in a heap of trouble! Not
all of us, of course. Some of us adapt too easily to the world's
methods and the world's values, we go along to get along, we don't
really stand up for our faith in the face of challenges, and that does
keep us more comfortable and out of trouble. Some of us kind of
like blindness in that way, because there is a certain tranquility
about it.
But most of us are pretty aware of the world and its
travails. We know about poverty and inequality, we know about
global warming, we know about the suffering of Israelis and
Palestinians, we know about the terrible costs of war, in spite of the
fact that our government tries to keep that from us, by not allowing
any news coverage or photography of the coffins coming home. We
know all these things, and yet when we try to live out the demands of
our faith and act, we may indeed get into trouble. We may
understand that we really are in the midst of Act II. Like the
blind beggar in John's drama, sometimes life would seem easier for us
if our eyes had never been opened at all!
This is being played out in the larger United Church
of Christ just now – not only in the investigation into our tax-exempt
status by the IRS, because of Barack Obama’s speech last year at our
General Synod, but in verbal attacks on his home church, Trinity UCC in
Chicago, the largest church in the denomination. I am told that
the Wall Street Journal is preparing an article that will show us in an
unflattering light – saying something like, “Obama is not a
Muslim. It’s worse – he’s a member of the UCC!”
[Note: The article came out this week and was actually pretty tame,
focusing mostly on Trinity, rather than Obama or the larger UCC.]
Of course our history as a denomination has been one of being out on
the edge, the cutting edge really, taking stands that are at the time
unpopular, and which result in criticism if not persecution, but which
have proven to be vindicated over time. Our pioneering stands
against slavery and for women’s equality have become the accepted norms
of decency and right, as I believe our stands for peace and for justice
and equality for gay and lesbian people will become. We may face
trouble now, but we can take solace in the fact that Jesus himself was
always getting into trouble!
And so like the blind man whose sight was restored
by Jesus, and like the first century church that was in the midst of
persecution and conflict, we too are living in a time between. We
have been enlightened by Christ's presence; we want to see, and yet we
don't want to see; we are pulled on by a future hope and the assurance
that we are doing the right thing.
I don't want to be too literal about that future
hope, or simply say, "Well, Jesus is coming again and then all will be
love and roses." I think in many ways Jesus has already come
again, and continues to come. Our hope today lies not in some
future heaven or in Christ taking the world by storm, but in the
promise that Christ is with us whenever two or three gather in his
name; Christ is with us whenever we act on his promises in faith and do
what he calls us to do, whenever we open our eyes and shake off the
scales and refuse to give up the struggle.
A British politician once told how at the end of
World War II he was explaining to his niece that since there would no
longer be any more air raids over London, the windows would no longer
have to be blacked out at night. "I know it doesn't matter about
the light getting out," she responded. "But how do we stop the
night from getting in?"
You and I are the ones whom a living Christ calls to
do just that -- to keep the night from getting in. That’s always
our task. "You are the Light of the World", he said.
Or as one Sunday School lad misquoted Jesus' last words, but really
touched the truth: "Glow! I am with you always!”
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Last updated Wednesday, March 13, 2008
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