Journey's Weekly Homilies

Homily by Joe
4^th Sunday in Lent, Cycle A, 10 March 2002
1 Samuel 16:1b,6-5,10-13a
Ephesians 5:8-14
John 9:1-41 

At the most recent, and probably final, incarnation of the Hamburger Mary’s restaurant here in Portland, the restrooms were one step up from the main floor. On the way out there was a sign on the wall opposite the door that read “please step down.” This struck me as a polite way of saying “don’t sue us if you fall and break something,” but something about this politeness made it impossible for me to resist another alternative reading: “thank you for not levitating.”

Now there is nothing in the law of Moses that says “thank you for not performing miraculous cures on the Sabbath.” In fact, the appeal to the no-work regulation for the Sabbath is just one of the means the crowd of observant believers uses to discredit this itinerant preacher and faith healer, Jesus, when he opens the eyes of a man born blind. This act, this “work,” is so disconcerting that they appeal to every sort of denial they can think of. At first they doubt that the sighted person among them is the same one who had to sit and beg for his living. Then they claim the cure itself can be, if not ignored, at least disregarded because it was worked on the Sabbath by a man who might as well be mad, a Samaritan or both. Finally, they cast the evidence for it, the healed man himself, out of their midst.

Why such virulence, such hostility to an act of justice and mercy? What makes it so threatening to good and upright people? On a superficial level, it first of all exposes them as judgmental. It shows that they define their uprightness in no small part by the presence of people around them who are – by God’s will – less well off than they are. The disciples’ question, “whose sin caused him to born blind?” clues us in to the prevailing mindset: “blind people are sinners. I’m not blind, therefore I’m less of a sinner.” A blind man, “born in utter sin,” who doesn’t stay in his place, who quickly shows himself to be the intellectual and moral equal of anyone in the crowd, and who doesn’t even fear being shunned, turns their world upside-down.

On a deeper level, Jesus is quietly telling them that everything they think they know about justice is wrong.  He isn’t even an actor in the body of this story, but his presence is felt throughout.  He takes the initiative – it is he who approaches the blind man, rather than the other way around – and sets things rolling. His words in Mark’s gospel, “the Sabbath was made for human beings, not human beings for the Sabbath,” are insinuated in part of the debate, and it is his boldness that in turn emboldens the man born blind, who, like the Samaritan woman in last week’s Gospel, becomes an evangelist himself. In all of this Jesus announces a new understanding of the Reign of God, in which membership is determined not by heritage or by scrupulous observance of regulations, but by the kind of radical equality to which Jesus raises the man born blind. It had to be threatening to those self-styled “keepers of the vision” to hear that the view from the outside was the valid one.

Some would say this story of the blind man’s journey through persecution to attachment to Jesus is addressed directly to the community for whom the Gospel of John was written, a community that had itself suffered the expulsion from the synagogue that his parents fear and he himself experiences. The story is reassurance that suffering is a necessary part of the passage to life in Jesus, reassurance that hope can remain alive. If we identify with the man born blind, if we see our own journey reflected in his, it is because we too have had some experience of being cast out or pushed to the edges, and from there we see a little more clearly what we might otherwise ignore. Whatever it is that sets us apart, whatever it is that resonates in us only in this circle is what sets us on the path to sincere discipleship. And what we learn from this exile is what pushes us along the road.

The question is whether we’ll keep learning. If we think we’re recovering authentic Christianity, recall that the Pharisees thought they were recovering authentic Judaism. And just as we can identify with the man born blind, we can as easily see ourselves in those Pharisees. The current pedophilia scandal centered in Boston is a powerful temptation for an “I told you so” moment. Our church has practiced – and is still practicing – a breathtaking denial of things many of us have warned about for years.  If you have any doubt of this, I encourage you to read what bishop Anthony O’Connell had to say even as he resigned from the diocese of Palm Beach, Florida this past Friday. It’s hard not to believe that this is what the letter to the Ephesians intends by “things done in secret.” But it’s not enough to say “you hypocrites,” to tell the jokes – and I’ve heard some doozies – or to congratulate ourselves for not entrusting our ministry only to unmarried males. Such thinking is a distraction from the self-examination, the renewal of commitment and the openness to change to which this season of Lent calls us. It is the poor in spirit who hear God’s name sound in their hearts and shoulder the word in their flesh.

The topic of discussion at Coffee People one day was, given the choice, whether you’d rather be blind or deaf. I answered “blind” of course, not only because I can’t imagine not hearing music, but because there’s an existing tradition of blind organists into which I figured I could adapt. But we don’t get to choose our challenges. We can only accept them when they confront us and hope to remember them if and when they pass. Whatever the man born blind became, no matter that he had been elevated to equal status in society, he must have carried his earlier life with him. And though never had it been heard of anyone opening the eyes of one born blind, he became a passionate witness to the presence of God even in what he couldn’t comprehend.  So if any of you feel the need to levitate, go ahead. I’ll try to keep an open mind about it.  And if you want to say what we have done and what our sin is, I’m all ears, too.