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Seeing for the First Time Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis April 27, 2008, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Genesis 2:4b-7 John 9:1-41
The man in John’s ninth chapter had been blind from birth. He lived in a darkness no sighted person has ever imagined. John tells us his story at the center of a gospel riddled with light and darkness, blindness and sight, truth and lie. Here is a man, says John, who was not about to recover what he had lost or to dust off his old self and start all over again or to return in amazement from the ophthalmologist with a new set of specks. No! Here is a man about to see for the first time. Imagine that! Yet John means us not simply to imagine what it would be like to be this man. He means to say that we are this man: born into pitch darkness without a hope in the world unless the light of the world should shine in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. As he walked along, the story begins, Jesus saw a man born blind from birth. That it to say, those who dwell in deep darkness cannot of their own volition see the God who has come to them in Jesus Christ. Rather God in Christ sees them…sees us in the darkness of our human condition without him. The disciples see the same man but they see in a wholly different way. “Who sinned,” the disciples ask at the sight of the blind man, “the man or his parents that he was born blind?” Of course they ask this question because this is how they have been taught to see. They see by the light of the institutions into which they were born. See the man born blind and begging at the gate, according to religion or family or nation, see him through the categories of culpability and blame. No doubt the only word pronounced over the blind man by the institution representing God in the world was word of his God-forsakenness. His sickness, his infirmity, his tragic circumstances are a sign of the sin passed down from generation to generation. God knows we see in just this way today: what did I do that my child has fallen ill, my mother has died too soon, my eyes have failed me, my life is in pieces? Is this the God we know in Jesus Christ? Jesus sees none of this. To repeat, Jesus sees a man born blind from birth, a human being dwelling in darkness without God in the world, a man who can claim nothing for himself and therefore a person radically open to the claim of the Living God upon his days. “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind,” Jesus says, “so that God’s work might be revealed in him.” “Really?” rants Annie Dillard. “The works of God made manifest? Do we really need more victims to remind us that we’re all victims?…Do we need blind men stumbling about…to remind us what God can—and will—do?” We do not and that is precisely John’s point! Rather here is a man, says Jesus, who evidently cannot mistake the darkness for light, whose condition does not allow him the illusion of sightedness. Therefore if light should shine in his life, the light can only be from God. “I am the light of the world” Jesus had just said to religious leaders a chapter before and now says to his disciples “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” The words are surely akin to the word God spoke in the beginning against the chaos and the darkness: “Let there be light; and there was light.” So like the great God almighty at creation, Jesus bends down and takes the dust of the earth, mixes it with living water and spreads mud on the blind man’s eyes. The act, do you not see, is an act of creation. You and I have been born into the world prematurely as regards our humanity, born with parts of us not yet fully formed, born as creatures who may exist but do not live in the fullness of life for which we were made. We look but do not see, said the prophet Isaiah, hear but do not listen, think but do not understand. We beg to receive life from the things and powers that may promise life but cannot give life. Our creation is incomplete, our humanity unfinished until the light of the world should see us and say, “Here’s mud in your eye! Let there be light.” “Go wash [your newly made eyes] in the pool of Siloam (which means sent)” says Jesus. He says this at the time of the feast of Tabernacles when the living water, the flowing water from the pool of Siloam--the waters of purification according to Numbers—washed God’s people clean in the Temple. No doubt they have become, in John’s understanding, the waters of baptism, the waters of birth by the spirit. Though thanks to Eun Kim, who reads in Greek while the rest of us read in English on Wednesday nights, we learned that the root word of Siloam, in Greek, is hermenuti: to interpret or to understand the meaning or to see through a particular lens. “Go wash in the pool of seeing…of understanding…of comprehending” the light that, according to John, “the darkness comprehended not.” That said, Jesus disappears from the story and the man returns able to see. How often this is the case with faith: light shines in the darkness, a moment of understanding is given, and then we are on our own. We are witnesses to what the rest of the world cannot see. “Like many of us who live between Christ’s coming and his coming again,” writes Barbara Brown Taylor, “the man has to make his own sense out of what has happened to him and decide what he will say about it, in the face of enormous opposition.” To wit, there is no joy in his hometown, but only questions and doubts. “He was formally well known among these people,” writes New Testament scholar and preacher Fred Craddock. “His stumbling and hesitant walk, his dependence, his poverty were his identity, they defined his place in the community. Now he walks upright, assured of place and direction, quite independent, only to discover that he has no place anymore.” No place because, you understand, to see him as he is in the light of Jesus, those who first taught him to see things their way necessarily had to acknowledge their own blindness. They cannot. Likewise he receives no affirmation from the religious community but rather accusation and judgment. The miracle, of course, happened on the Sabbath when healing is permitted in life and death situations. “What was the hurry?” they said. “The man had been blind from birth, for God’s sake!” Yet his life was hung upon a gossamer thread without Christ. To see this, religion would have to acknowledge its distance from God, its misunderstanding of Scripture, its blindness. Religion cannot. Therefore the one born blind, who now sees things differently, whose very seeing has transgressed the law, must be banned. As Richard Lischer goes on to observe, the church in the time between Jesus’ resurrection and promised return “has always been pretty good at investigating irregularities but not so good at acknowledging the power of God that can be contained by no religious premises.” We are, in Taylor’s words, “the consummate insiders—fully initiated, law-abiding, pledge-paying, creed-saying members of the congregation of the faithful.” Therefore when the man born blind attempts to bear witness to the light of the world in whose light he sees light, the authorities counter, “You were born entirely in sins, and you are trying to teach us?’ And they drove him out.” Thirty-nine verses later, says John, Jesus returns. He has heard, somehow, that the man has been excommunicated. So Jesus again seeks this man who has yet to lay eyes on him! “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” Jesus asks him point blank. In complete innocence and admitted ignorance the man simply says, “And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him.” Jesus says, as he has said to the woman at the well and as he soon will say to Martha at her brother’s death, “You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.” “I believe,” he says. “And he worshipped him.” You and I dwell in the time between Christ’s coming and his coming again. We dwell amid communities—both secular and sacred, religious and scientific, Western and privileged—that are pretty darned sure they see things as they really are. We have learned to look at our world through the lens of culpability and blame, of law and order, of fact not fiction, bolstering our considered political and social judgments with the imprimatur of the Almighty. Presently the 39 verses of controversy we inhabit overshadow the two verses of light shining through the darkness. Only the testimony of suspect witnesses counters our culture of certainty. For the most part they are characters who were dead and are alive to the Word, were lame and now dance, were deaf and now compose cantatas, were blind and now see for the first time, painting the world charged with the grandeur of God. For the most part, I have found these witnesses, these agents of the light, to be artists. They bear the mantle of the prophets! Go from this sanctuary, says Jesus therefore, and wash your eyes in Widener Hall where five young artists will invite you to see for the first time: faces kaleidoscoped and enormous feet bound, hands roughhewn and unblinking eyes staring forward; the shape of a pear will take you by surprise, the light on a flower may blow your mind, the solitary landscape just might return you naked and new to Eden. Earth’s colors mixed with oil and water wait to redeem your seeing from insignificance. “‘I never would have dreamed that yellow was so---so yellow,’ reports Robert Edens who was blind from birth until surgery gave him sight in his 51st year. ‘I don’t have the words. I am amazed by yellow’” read the email sent to me after Wednesday’s class by Red Johnston. “But red is my favorite color. I just can’t believe red…[and grass?] Grass is something I had to get used to. I always thought it was just fuzz. But to see each individual stalk, and so see the hair on my arm growing like trees, and birds flying through the air, and everything---it’s like starting a whole new life…. “I can’t wait to get up each day to see what I can see. I am still seeing most of it for the first time….And at night I look at the stars in the sky and flashing lights….You could never know how wonderful everything is….and did I mention I saw a falling leaf, just drifting through the air?” What is the praise of God but seeing and listening and living every moment of every day for the first time in the light of him who first has seen us? “O God! How beautiful!” exclaimed a twenty-two year old girl seeing for the first time. Scientists reported that they saw “…an expression of gratification and astonishment overspread her features and she repeatedly exclaimed: ‘O God! How beautiful!’” May gratitude and astonishment overspread your features every moment of every day, my friends. For it is the same God who said “Let light shine out of darkness” who has shone in your heart to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ! Thanks be to God. |