The Fourth Sunday in Lent

There is a question at the beginning of today’s gospel that has echoed through centuries of religious life. Jesus and the disciples pass by a man who has been blind from birth, and the disciples ask, “Rabbi, who sinned—this man or his parents—that he was born blind?” It is a question that reveals far more about the disciples than it does about the man. It is the question of people who want the world to be neat, predictable, morally tidy. It is the question of people who would rather assign blame than sit with mystery. It is the question of people who fear that if suffering can happen without a reason, then none of us are safe. Jesus refuses the entire framework. He does not answer the question. He dismantles it. “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” he says. “This is a place where God’s works can be revealed.”

As if this poor man had not suffered enough humiliation having to resort to begging on the street corner, now he becomes the object of glib conversation around the question of his morality. But there’s more embarrassment to come—even after he is cured. His neighbors no longer recognize him when he returns from the pool of Siloam. “It looks like him, but it must be someone else,” they say. Even his parents distance themselves from their son out of fear of reprisal from the religious authorities. In fairness to these confused people, we should acknowledge that such occurrences as this—the giving of sight to a person born blind, especially in the first century—simply don’t happen. And for the Jewish community of that day, they certainly shouldn’t happen on the Sabbath.

When they became privy to the fact that Jesus has reportedly given the blind man his sight, the Pharisees decided that the best course to take was to undermine this so-called healing by calling Jesus a "sinner" as well because, by their definition, he had broken the Sabbath. Their logic: you cannot break God's law and at the same time be one sent from God. This doesn't work for them, however, because as the Pharisees knew well, no one other than a servant of God could cure a man who had been blind from birth. And what made their argument fall apart rather quickly was that this formerly blind man was standing, fully-sighted, right in their midst—acknowledging that all this did, indeed, take place. He could see.

Then he really ticked them off. When the Pharisees, these elite men who not only prided themselves in keeping the faith but were self-appointed prosecutors of those who did not keep it to their standards—when they pressed this man, who to them was a nobody, a beggar, a nuisance—when they pushed him to declare that Jesus was a sinner, the man essentially told them that they would not recognize God even if God bit them on the nose. So the Pharisees in their outrage  disparage him as one born in sin—they out him as illegitimate—and they drive him out of the congregation. Yet, one more humiliation for this man.

Jesus began this story by rejecting the disciples' false assumptions about sin and he concludes the story by unmasking the real sin of the Pharisees. Jesus knew that the Pharisees saw and understood the implications of this healing. Their rejection of Jesus came not from blind ignorance but willful, prideful sin. Now the shoe is on the other foot.

The real tragedy of this story is that all of this bickering and spiritual pretentiousness kept everyone from appreciating the marvelous miracle that happened. They were all blind to the miraculous event and the manifestation of God’s grace right in their midst. Let’s now do the same. Let’s not get too caught up in the debate between the Pharisees and the neighbors and the parents and let’s certainly not get caught up in the tendency of the Pharisees of our day to associate bad, even horribly tragic events in the world with the “sin” of any targeted group of people.

But let’s do take a closer look at the healing story we hear today. Unlike in other such occurrences, this blind man did not approach Jesus. Jesus approached him. The miracle here comes not in a gentle touch or wave of the hand but in an earthy, messy way—mixing dirt and saliva and smearing that glop on this man’s eyes.  The man never saw the face of Jesus. He only heard his voice but he followed the orders and went to the pool to wash.

Can you imagine the trouble it must have been for him—still blind, with that mushy, wet mess dripping from his eyes—to navigate his way to that location? Do you think anyone stepped up to help him? Certainly not the disciples or his neighbors or even his parents. Yet he persisted. He went to that pool in spite of the difficulty getting there and the uncertainty of the outcome.

There is a sequel to the miracle Jesus performs in this story—itself a kind of miracle. It happens after the man, now fully sighted, has been expelled from the religious community by the Pharisees. Again, Jesus goes after him, seeks him out, and not the other way around. Now the man’s vision has improved more than in just a physical way. Now he sees Jesus in a whole new way. “Lord, I believe,” he declares.

This recognition of God’s grace in his life did not come in the temple or at an altar. It did not involve the priests. It happens outside the boundary of religion and in defiance of the rules of the religious society of the time. Two people designated “sinners” by the religious leaders of their day meet and the one confesses the other as his Messiah.

Jesus did not just assure that the first believers would hear this story. He wanted us to hear it as well—perhaps even more so. It is easy for us to become comatose to the dynamic energy contained in the Gospel. Jesus challenges his church to awaken those who hear this story today and to bring sight to those of us who don’t see the truth it brings us. So what is in this story for us?

This passage is a huge caution to those who attach personal or global misfortune and catastrophe to the sins of others. The Pharisees, through their convenient dismissal of both Jesus and the blind man as sinners, remind us that it is possible for those in religious authority to use sin as a way to avoid people and turn them away, people who, if only we would listen, have something important to teach us. This Gospel contains more than a suggestion that sometimes the very people who talk the most about other people's sin, are themselves the most blind and most sinful. The really Good News for today is that sickness and death are the evils from which Jesus has come to liberate us. By God's grace, none of us get what we otherwise deserve and in healing so many, many people Jesus affirms that none of these folk suffered because of the will of a harsh God or because they sinned.

But it is the blind man that teaches us something very unique: our part in the healing process is less about having faith—no where in this story does it indicate that the blind man initially had it or believed anything. It is about being radically willing and completely open to God’s invitation to be transformed, to be healed, to be the receptor of God’s grace—even when it comes in earthy things like bread and wine or something as messy as a mix of dirt and spit.  God’s ways are sometimes very strange to those who cannot see even with 20/20 vision.

Fred Borsch, retired Bishop of Los Angeles, writes in his book Power in Weakness: New Hearing for Gospel Stories of Healing and Descipleship: “The Gospel stories are full of surprises, not the least of which are the people who now claim to put their faith in Jesus: the man who once could not talk, another who was crazy, the foreigner who insists the Lord healed his daughter, the head of the local tax office. Somehow one would expect to pick up the Gospels and find there, for the most part, good common sense. Instead there are unexpected occurrences and often outlandish parables…in a world where it was often assumed that wealth and status were signs of God’s approval and illness and poverty of divine disfavor, striking reversals take place. In the kingdom, things do not work out the way we might expect. Impossible things happen to improbable people.”

Bishop Borsch goes on further to say that we are offered a new orientation through the encounters we find in the Gospel—encounters like Jesus had with Nicodemus, with the Samaritan woman at the well, and with the blind man. They are the lenses through which we see in a new way God’s hand at work in the world around us. Anything can point us to Jesus, even the earthy, messy things in life, if our minds and senses are fully engaged in seeking—if we ourselves are willing to be the “improbable people” who are radically open to his changing us. It’s risky business sometimes but the rewards are simply divine.