Fourth Sunday of Lent
March 1, 2 2008
John 9
The Rev. Barbara Schlachter

Back in the old days, when we lived in Ohio and had a teenaged son living at home, there were not many times we could get him to do anything with us.  He thought he had better companions than his parents and better things to do than to hang out with us old folks.

But there was one thing we did every fall that he never resisted.  We went together to a Renaissance Festival, a really good one.  The highlight every year was always the same thing:  an enactment of Beowulf done in a mud pit.  This was a huge bog of a mud pit.  And in it three grown men would tell the story of the monster Grendel, the hero Beowulf and the monster of all monsters, Grendel’s mother.  In the course of the story, the mud would get slimier and the men would be covered with it.  They would go down under it, they would come up like great whales spouting, and often the nearby audience would also be showered with the spattering mud..  Sometimes the mud men had to stop and wipe the mud from their eyes before continuing the story.

We meet mud today in the Gospel.  Jesus uses the mud to heal a man born blind.  He mixes mud with his own spittle and places it on the man’s eyes, and for the first time in his life, his useless eyes see.  Now we are accustomed to stories in the Synoptic gospels of Jesus healing the blind.  But this story, which could have been told by Mark in two sentences, becomes the skeleton for a great drama under the careful massage of the author of John.  The gospels are full of reversal stories.  The last shall be first.  The despised Samaritan woman becomes an evangelist who brings others to truth about Jesus.

And the greatest reversal of all, Jesus is crucified dead and buried and rises to life again.

This story is a beautifully constructed narrative.  The Pharisees who can see physically in the beginning become the ones who are revealed to be blind spiritually by the end.  The man who is blind physically at the start of the story not only receives physical sight but gradually receives enlightenment and illumination and by the end of the narrative is able to see the truth about who Jesus is.

In the middle are a lot of confused people, with a lot of questions.  Is this the man who used to sit and beg.  No, no—just someone like him.   He was blind, how can he see?  How were his eyes opened?  Who healed on the Sabbath?  Who is this healing man?

Oh, there is always plenty of mud to go around, then and now.  Don’t we say, “It’s as clear as mud” when we don’t understand something?

This Gospel is linked to baptism, which was also known as “illumination.”  The light of Christ is revealed here, with a couple of noteworthy things to hold up for our eyes to see.

The first is that in this story Jesus undoes the popular notion that illness or misfortune or disability was caused by someone’s sin.  He says that this man was blind not because of anyone’s sin, which was contrary to the best theology of the time. It was believed that misfortune was indeed the consequence of sin.   We still love to blame the victim.  What did you do to deserve this, we ask ourselves or think in regard to another’s situation.  Jesus dispels this view by saying, Oh, contraire.  You are not thinking like God thinks.  God wants to use the difficult situations of our lives to reveal his love and glory.  Because this man was blind, Jesus was able to illuminate the truth of who he was.

Jesus works to open our eyes to truth, to reality, to where God is present in life.  It is often in the very midst of adversity, suffering or confusion that we come to our  moments of enlightenment. So the right question is not who sinned, but what is God able to do in the midst of this illness or misfortune?  How is light able to be revealed through the cracks in our hearts and our lives?  How can truth shine forth?

This Gospel reveals to us a totally different idea of sin, in fact.  It is not breaking a purity code or a moral code.  Sin is refusing to see the truth, to live in the light, to move beyond our limited vision and denial.  This is sin as separation from God, sin as not seeing clearly.

This provides us with a different understanding of how Jesus saves than in the other Gospels.   In the others we have Jesus’ death and resurrection as the way we are given forgiveness and eternal life.  It is Jesus as the blood sacrifice that saves us, better known as the Atonement Theory.  In the Gospel of John it is Jesus’ life, his very life as God incarnate, that provides the way to eternal life.  It is not his death or resurrection.  Life is given through relationship with Jesus, which comes through our enlightenment.  Refusal to relate to Jesus as God incarnate is sin, which holds us hostage to the power of the fear of death.  Refusal to relate to Jesus as God made manifest, refusal to see where God is providing the light is sin, not breaking laws or moral or purity codes.

This understanding behooves us to see as clearly as we can, which includes admitting how much we don’t know or don’t care to see.  For we are always in danger of confusing our partial truths with absolute truth.  Often the closer we are to a situation, emotionally or physically, the harder it is to see it clearly.  Sometimes the more we have to lose in a situation the harder it is for us to see or admit the truth.  This is why we need therapists, spiritual directors, friends, a church community. 

Here is a story that we will all have no trouble shaking our heads about it; it is so clear to us now and yet it wasn’t so apparent in the 16^th c.  It is the story of Giordano Bruno, a priest, philosopher, cosmologist and poet, who in the year 1600 was burned alive after his tongue was spiked for silence. He had suffered eight years of imprisonment and torture by the Church in its efforts to get him to recant of his heresy.  His crime was to question the current religious and scientific belief that the Earth was the center of the universe and to postulate that there was, actually, an infinite universe.

Well, we now know the Church was wrong.  And it probably seems unbelievable that a man would be tortured for eight years and then killed because of what he believed about anything.  But it happened nonetheless and is not so terribly dissimilar from things that happen in our own time, only it is not the church but governments who wield such power.

When I hear stories like these, it always makes me wonder what we accept as truth in these days that history will look back upon us and judge us about.    Will we be judged about war as a way of solving human problems?  Will we be judged by being so cavalier with the earth’s life, human and otherwise?  Will we be judged for thinking bio-fuels are a solution and that corn should be king?  Will we be judged for thinking our way of life must be preserved at all cost?   

We do live in times where if we do not actually have physical blindness, we have only partial sight.  Yet we know the consequences of decisions we make are of the utmost importance for our continuation of life on this earth.

I think it is only with the light of Christ illumining our way that we can, as a people of faith, get hold of enough of the elephant to describe it.  This is true for both our individual and our corporate lives.  It is only this light that can illumine the Big Picture sufficiently.  Christ reminds us that God sees things differently than we do, than corporations or governments do.  There is another truth, a larger truth.

We are given an illustration of this in the lesson from 1st Samuel that we heard a few minutes ago.  God did not choose the eldest or the tallest (that is so reassuring to me) but choose the youngest to be the king to replace Saul.  God did not look on the things that humans deemed obvious, but looked instead to inner qualities.  David was a mere shepherd, and yet, because God chose him, he was able not only to be a fine king, but able to help us see that God is our shepherd.  Jesus in the next chapter of John, right after this enlightenment story, claims that he is the Good Shepherd.  The Good Shepherd cares for us, the confused and contrary sheep.  In all of our blindness and waywardness, we are given this assurance.  The Shepherd is still with us and caring for us. 

And how could we walk through the valley of the shadow without knowing it is the Light of God that is over us?  Without light there can be no shadow, only darkness.

This is also what the author of Ephesians is assuring us of: Paul, or one of his mentorees, wrote “For once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you re light.  Live as children of the light.”

 Here is a story of one man’s attempt to live according to the light. Robert Fulghum tells this story in “It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It.”  It is too long to relate in its entirety here, but it is the story of Alexander Papaderos, a man who dedicated his life to making a peace center on Crete on the site of two mass burial graves: one for Nazi soldiers and one for the Cretans who met them with knives and scythes.  At the end of one of the conferences he held there, he asked if there were any questions, and sure enough there was one.  A woman asked, “What is the meaning of life?  He replied by taking out of his pocket a round fragment of a mirror about a quarter in size.  It was part of a German motorcycle that had been wrecked near his boyhood home.  He had picked it up and had kept it with him all through the years.  He had been fascinated as a child how it could reflect light, and later as an adult, he came to see that that was his life’s purpose:  to reflect light into the dark places of this world, into the dark places in the hearts of people.

Is there a better understanding of what we as followers of Christ are to do?  We are not the light.  But as baptized Christians we are to bear witness to the light, to reflect the light that can reveal the truth.  And perhaps the more mud we have had to deal with in our lives, the more times when we weren’t sure, actually makes us better witnesses to the light.

I like the bumper sticker that challenges us to ask the questions, not to have to hold on to the idea that as Christians we have all the answers.   The bumper sticker is in response to “Jesus is the answer to all your questions.”  It says “Jesus is the question to all your answers.”  May we never settle for the little picture or easy answers.