Receiving Sight

Receiving Sight

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

March 26, 2017

Scripture: John 9:1-41

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

The man was born blind. It’s not that he had had sight and lost it. That of course sadly happens sometimes. People suffer accidental injuries that take away their sight. Or they come down with a disease that takes away their sight. I have known people with blindness. There is a type of deaf-blindness caused by exposure to the rubella virus in utero in which a child is born deaf and loses her sight later in life. Many older people (and some younger ones) lose their vision from macular degeneration or some other optic condition like glaucoma. My granddaughter Calnan has a condition called aniridia, which means she was born without irises. She’s six years told, and she can see (although probably not as well as a six year old with normal eyes). Yet people with aniridia usually lose their sight by the time they are middle aged. And, like the man in the story we just heard from the Gospel of John, some infants are born blind, probably as a result of some genetic abnormality. We recognize all of these kinds of vision abnormalities as unfortunate, perhaps even tragic, natural occurrences that say nothing about a person’s value or about her or anyone else’s morals. Bad stuff happens. Blindness happens, but people with blindness are otherwise no different from those of us who can see. We never think that their blindness is the consequences of someone’s sin.

In Jesus’ world that wasn’t the case. In our story from John, when Jesus encounters a man who we are told has been blind from birth, Jesus’ disciples ask him who sinned and thus caused his blindness, the man or his parents? The assumption behind their question is clear enough. The man’s blindness was punishment for or at least a consequence of someone’s sin. No one in the ancient world understood the physiology of vision. No one understood illness as a possible cause of blindness. I suppose they knew that physical trauma could cause blindness. After all, they knew that when the Babylonians captured Jerusalem in 586 BCE they blinded the last kind of Judah, Zedekiah, by gouging out his eyes. So they knew that vision came through the eyes, but they didn’t know much else about it. So they attributed blindness to sin just like they attributed most any abnormal physical or mental condition to sin.

Jesus denies that the man born blind’s blindness was the result of sin, but he does it in a way typical of Jesus in the Gospel of John, a way that frankly can drive you a bit nuts because Jesus seems so often to be talking in non-sequiturs. He says that this man was born blind “so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.” I hear him saying that this poor fellow had to suffer blindness for much of his life so that Jesus could show off by giving him his sight. I don’t think God would ever use anyone like that, and I quite doubt that Jesus thought God would ever do that either. But the story is making an important point here. We see it in where Jesus goes next in his response to his disciples question. He says something obscure about a time of night coming, then says “While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” Jesus is here drawing a distinction between a world of darkness and a world of light, with himself as the light. He draws that distinction in response to a question about the blindness of the man he and his disciples have met along their way. I think there is an implication here that perhaps we wish were more obvious but that is still there. Jesus here is using the man’s blindness as a metaphor for a world that lives without sight. A world that lives in darkness. A world that he can “enlighten,” that is, can make light. In this story the man blind from birth receives his sight, but this story is about a whole lot more than that. It is about how Jesus came to lead the world out of a darkness far more terrible than physical blindness, to lead the world into the light of God.

Folks, it sure seems to me that the world lives blind, lives in darkness, all the time. Just look at the world around us. Yes, there is much love and caring in the world too, thank God; but so much of what see amounts to the world living blind, living in darkness. We live in the darkness of environmental degradation that we could slow down or even reverse but don’t have the will to do it. We live in the blindness of violence and war. So much of the world thinks violence can actually solve its problems. Major power nations like ours and others use their military to try to impose their will on other people, and it almost never works. People living in despair of a better life lash out in violence, usually against innocent people who have nothing to do with the cause of their despair. We live in the darkness of prejudice against people who are somehow different from us, different in race, culture, religion, gender, orientation, physical or mental ability, and so on. We live in the darkness of a society that values money over compassion, wealth over caring. I don’t know if the world was born blind or not, but there is an awful lot of blindness in it; and there always has been.

In our story from John Jesus gave the man born blind his sight. The religious authorities of his day called him a sinner for doing it because he did it on a Sabbath, thereby violating one of their precious religious rules. Jesus bestowed an immense blessing on this man who had never seen. I sometimes try to imagine what it would be like suddenly to be able to see when you’d never been able to see before. I imagine it must be both quite wonderful and quite disorienting at the same time. Still, there is no doubt that sight is a blessing, and Jesus gave it to this man born blind. Thanks be to God!

Thanks be to God indeed, but there’s a whole lot more meaning in this story than that. Jesus says here that he is the light of the world. Jesus came to bring God’s light to a world that lived in intellectual and spiritual darkness. He came so that we could lose our blindness, so that we could see the way God wants us to see. He came so that we could see with new vision, with vision transformed from the darkness of the world to the bright light of God.

That light of God that Jesus brought and that Jesus was has many aspects to it; but I just mentioned three ways in which the world lives in darkness—environmental degradation, violence and war, and prejudice against people who are other than us. Jesus’ light brightens all of those dark corners of human existence. In the light of Christ we remember that we are stewards of God’s earth not unlimited masters of it. So we see that we need to be a whole lot responsible in caring for it than we have been. In the light of Christ we see that violence is not the way. Violence is never the way, it is never God’s way. In the light of Christ we learn creative, assertive, nonviolent resistance to the evil that we see around us. In the light of Christ we see that all people are God’s beloved children, not just people who look, think, pray, move, or love like us.

Most of us aren’t physically blind. We don’t need our sight restored the way the man in John’s story did. We see, sort of; but the light of Christ opens our eyes to a new way of seeing. The light of Christ gives us sight into the ways of God, ways that are so often so different from the ways of the world. It’s so easy to close our eyes to the light of Christ. It’s so easy to stay stuck in the ways of the world, ways Jesus came to transform, ways Jesus came to call us to transform. In this season of Lent, then, let me issue a call to you and to myself. As we prepare to mark Jesus’ death on Good Friday and his glorious resurrection on Easter, let’s not close our eyes to his light. Let’s open ourselves to a new way of seeing. Let’s open our eyes to God’s way of seeing, the way of seeing that we see in Jesus. If we will do that this season of Lent can be a blessing to us the way Jesus was a blessing to the man born blind. May it be so. Amen.