Suddenly I See

In the next few weeks you may see a new ad on TV. It’s a spot that the United Methodist Church is running for Lent and to reach out to people ahead of Easter. The ad features people going about their daily business but hanging from each of them, right over their heart, is a monitor that shows how they’re really feeling inside. There is a beautiful woman modeling clothes for a photographer with a smile on her face, but the monitor shows the same woman with tears streaming down her cheeks. There is a couple smiling and talking to friends at the bowling alley, but the monitors show them arguing with each other. A teenager sits down at his desk at school, looking normal, but there’s the monitor that shows how withdraw and alone he feels. Finally there’s a woman walking down the beach and on her the monitor is of a little girl. We’re supposed to get the idea that this is the woman as a child and she’s holding hands with someone we can’t see because the rest of their body is outside the frame. Here is someone who has found joy and security and connection to God.

I hope we can live up to these ads, because what they are saying about the United Methodist Church is that we are a place where it is safe to take those places inside us that are hurting. It is saying that United Methodist people, as followers of Jesus, are not afraid of those feelings. It is saying that we have a connection to someone who can make us feel as safe and joyful as that little girl, walking down a beach hand in hand with a trusted guide.

That’s a lot to live up to…especially since, most of the time, I think we are tempted to act like the religious leaders in the gospel lesson we had today. Can you believe those guys? Jesus comes and does something absolutely amazing – he gives sight to a man who had been blind from birth – and they want to know why Jesus was breaking the blue law and healing on the Sabbath. It’s kind of like going up to Ryan Newman and saying, “I hear you won the Daytona 500. Here’s a speeding ticket.” They just don’t get it. The disciples are not much better in this story. At the beginning they see this blind man and their first question is not, ‘How can we help this man?’ but ‘Jesus, who sinned to make him blind?’ They can’t SEE what’s really going on here. Ironic, huh?

Here’s what I worry about, though. I think we can be equally unable to see what’s really important. We can get so caught up in the ways things are and the way things are supposed to work that we can forget what’s truly important. Then when people come to us with their lives in a shambles, with pain in their hearts, with strife in their families, with too much month at the end of the money, with addictions that keep them down and sleepless nights that keep them up…well, then do we offer them ourselves? Are we people who have open hearts, open minds, and open doors? Or do we find some things too painful to acknowledge? Are some wounds too deep for us to take to Jesus? Are we just too caught up in making judgments that we can’t trust God to make things right? Because one day, not only might it be us, it will be us. We all find ourselves at moments when what’s going on on the monitor over our hearts is a cry to God. Who will walk with us in those moments? Will it be the church?

Over the last few weeks we have been hearing gospel stories about people who were looking for salvation and finding it in Jesus. Two weeks ago we talked about Nicodemus, a respectable man, who came under cover of darkness to meet Jesus because he suspected he was from God. Then last week we talked about the woman at the well, who met Jesus on the edge of town and at the edge of respectability, and how she discovered that Jesus was the savior of the world. But today Jesus brings it right into the light and right into the middle of the religious council.

It all happened because the disciples were who they were. You remember that last week they didn’t get what Jesus was telling the woman at the well because they were so upset that he was speaking to a woman at the well. They haven’t gotten it yet that they are living in a paradigm shift. They were getting ‘change they could believe in’ but they weren’t believing it entirely yet. They were hung up by their expectations of how they were supposed to behave and what they were supposed to say. So it probably seemed appropriate for them to ask, as they passed the blind man, “Jesus, who sinned so that he was born blind, this man or his parents?”

To them the man was a theological problem. But Jesus saw him as a theological opportunity. He was a child of God waiting for God to do a great thing in him. So Jesus rebukes the disciples and says that sin is not the issue here. The man’s blindness is an invitation for God to be revealed. It reminds me of the moment early on in the gospel of John when Jesus is asked by his mother to do something about the wine, which was running out at the wedding they were attending in Cana. Jesus seems a little resistant, but when he does respond and turns water into wine, it is an opportunity for God to be revealed.

Here Jesus is once again prompted to do a sign. He is the Light of the World. He shines in the darkness and the darkness does not overcome it. He is the true light enlightening everyone. While he is in the world he is the Light of the world. And he invites others to believe in the light, so that they can become children of light. These are all things that John says about Jesus. But he also says, “This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light” [John 3:19, NRSV].

The people loved darkness rather than light. The resistance starts as soon as the healing happened. Jesus spits in the dirt and makes a paste of the mud and he puts it on the man’s eyes. Actually what the Bible says is that he anointed the blind man’s eyes with the mud and he tell him to go wash in the pool of Siloam. Once again there is water. Jesus told Nicodemus that you can’t enter the kingdom of heaven without being baptized by water and Spirit or wind. Jesus tells the woman at the well that he has living water to give. Now Jesus sends a man to a pool of water to wash. Each of these people is being invited to a baptism that will give them new eyes to see and sure enough, that’s what happened to the blind man. His eyes were opened and he can see. Then the troubles begin.

The people who had known him are upset. “Hey, isn’t that the blind guy who used to sit and beg all the time?” “It sure looks like him.” “It’s me,” the man says. “But you can see. What happened?”

So the man tells them about the mud and the anointing and the washing at the pool. The response of the people is to take the man to the Pharisees, the religious leaders. They ask the man the same questions. Once again he tells them about the mud and the anointing and the washing at the pool.

The Pharisees are upset that Jesus has done this on a Sabbath day, but they are also feeling threatened. A man who can use mud and water to change the world is a dangerous man. The blind man hasn’t called him the Messiah yet, but he has called him a prophet. Somebody’s got to repudiate Jesus.

So they call in the man’ parents and they refuse to stand up for their son because they are afraid of the leaders. They had heard the word that anybody who called Jesus the Messiah, the savior, would be cut off from the synagogue, which meant being an exile in their own community. So they say, “Ask him. He’s a grown man. He can tell you how it happened.”

The Pharisees call the man back a second time and tell him that he needs to praise God instead of Jesus. “We know Jesus is a sinner,” they say.

The man is not going to be drawn into their controversy. “I don’t know if he is a sinner or not,” he says. “The one thing I know is that I was blind and now I see.”

“Who did this? How did he do it?” they ask.

“I’ve already told you and you didn’t listen. Why do you want to hear it again?” And here he begins to put in a dig at them. This blind man is getting it. He can see and the Pharisees can’t. “Do you want to become his disciples, too?”

This sets them off. “You are that man’s disciple. We are disciples of Moses. We don’t know where this Jesus comes from!”

“You don’t know where he comes from?!” the man says. “He opened my eyes. A sinner couldn’t do that, could he? It’s unheard of, what he did. If this man weren’t from God he wouldn’t be able to do that.”

With that they go back to where the disciples started. “You were born in sin and you want to teach us?!” Then they throw the man out.

Jesus finds him and says, “Do you believe in the promise of a coming savior?”

“Who is he, Lord? Tell me so that I can believe in him.”

Here I imagine Jesus lifting the man’s face so that he can look – a blind man looking! – so that he can look in his eyes. “You are looking at him,” Jesus says.

The man says, “I believe.”

It’s all clear now. The blind man sees and the folks who think they are the clear thinkers, who can see things clearly, are blind. They think the man is a sinner but Jesus says that they are the ones entrapped by sin. This is the judgment. The light came into the darkness and we chose darkness. We loved darkness too much.

What would it look like if we gave up the darkness and tried to live in the light? What would it look like if we stopped hiding the pain and gave it to Jesus? What would it look like if we cared a little less about the rules of respectability and started living out of the law of love? What would it look like if the monitors that are hanging around our necks that show what’s really going on in our lives were on our faces? What if we believed that Jesus was not just a traveling teacher with a nifty bag of tricks, but that he really was the light of the world? That he really is the light of the world? That he is our light come to bring darkness. What would change?

This week I heard about a campaign that the campus ministry at the University of Richmond participated in. They have noticed, as many others have, that one of the ways youth and young people, especially young girls, have responded to the darkness of the world and the darkness in their lives is through cutting. It’s not suicidal, but they will draw blood by making marks on their arms or legs. Why? There are lots of reasons, but tied up in it is an unhealthy way of dealing with emotional distress and with spiritual pain. If you are a young person you have probably heard of people or know people who have done this. Maybe you have done it.

Well, some young people at the University of Richmond saw what was happening with their classmates and said, “We’re not going to let this go on in silence.” So they decided to work with a campaign against self-injury called To Write Love on Her Arms. The campaign asked people to literally write the word ‘Love’ on their arms or their hands, in a visible place. So they took Sharpie pens and wrote in the same places where people will sometimes cut themselves. And when people asked about it they could help connect people to resources for help but they were able to say that there is hope for those who are depressed, there is help for those who feel compelled to injure themselves, there is light in the darkness and there is love to cover us all.

That’s just one of the ways that Christians are confronting the darkness of the world with the light of Jesus. There are so many more ways that we are called to be a light in this world and to lift up Jesus. Why Jesus? Why, of all the names that we could call on, have we placed our hope and trust and belief in Jesus? Because in Jesus we have found light and life. In Jesus we have found sight. In Jesus we have seen God and known that God’s name is love. Thank be to God.

John 9:1-41
Now as he was passing by he saw a man who had been blind from birth. His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned so that he was born blind, this man or his parents?

Jesus answered, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned. This happened so that the works of God might be revealed in him. As long as the day lasts we must be about the work of the one who sent me. The night is coming when no one will be able to work. As long as I in the world, I am the light of the world."

Having said this, he spit on the ground and he made mud from the spittle and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the mud. He said to him, "Go, wash in the pool of Siloam, (which is translated 'Sent'). So he went, washed and came back seeing.

Then the neighbors and the ones who were used to seeing him around, (for he had been a beggar), said, "Isn't this the man who used to sit and beg?" Others said, "This IS the same one." Others said, "It looks like him."

He said, "It's me."

So they said, "How were your eyes opened?"

He answered, "The man called Jesus made mud and anointed my eyes, saying to me, "Go to the pool at Siloam and wash.' So I went and washed and I could see."

They said to him, "Where is he?"

He said, "I don't know."

They brought the man who had been blind to the Pharisees. Now it was a sabbath when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. So the Pharisees asked him again how we received his sight. He said to them, "He put mud on my eyes and I washed and I can see."

Then some of the Pharisees said, "This man is not from God because he doesn't observe the sabbath." Others said, "How can a sinner do signs like this?" They were a divided group. So they spoke to the blind man again and said, "What have you got to say about him? He opened your eyes."

He said, "He is a prophet."

But the Jews would not believe this about him, that he had been blind and received his sight, until they sent for the parent of the man who had gained his sight. They asked them, "Is this your son who you say was born blind? If so, how can he now see?"

His parents answered them, "We know that he is our son and that he was born blind. But we don't know how he can now see nor do we know who opened his eyes. He's a grown-up. Ask him. He can speak for himself." His parents said this because they feared the Jews, for the Jews had already agreed that anybody who professed him as Messiah would be expelled from the synagogue. This was the reason his parents said, "He's a grown-up. Ask him."

So they called the man who had been blind for a second time and said to him, "Give God the glory instead. We know that this man is a sinner."

The man said, "I don't know if he is a sinner or not. The one thing I know is that I was blind and now I see."

They said to him, "Who did his to you? How did he open your eyes?"

He answered them, "I have already told you and you didn't listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples, too?"

Then they went off on him and said, "You are that man's disciple. We are disciples of Moses. We know that God spoke to Moses, but we don't know where this man comes from."

The man responded to them, "This is a wonder! You don't know where he comes from and yet he opened my eyes. We know that God doesn't hear sinners but God does hear the one who fears God and does God's will. From the very beginning it's unheard of for someone to open the eyes of someone blind from birth. If this man weren't from God he wouldn't be able to do anything."

They answered him, "You were totally born in sin and you want to teach us?!" Then they threw him out.

When Jesus heard that they threw him out, he found him and said, "Do you believe in the Son of Humanity?"

The man replied and said, "Who is he, Lord? Tell me so that I can believe in him."

Jesus said to him, "You are looking at him. The one speaking with you is the one."

He said, "I believe, Lord." Then he worshipped him.

Jesus said then, "I came into this world for judgment so that those who can't see could see and those who see would become blind."

When they heard this, some of the Pharisees who were with him said, "We aren't blind are we?"

Jesus said to them, "If you were blind, you wouldn't have sin. But now that you claim to see, sin remains in you."