Sermon - 4th Sunday in Lent (3/22/2020)
Eph. 5:8-14; Ps. 27; Jn. 9:1-41
This gospel passage illustrates, perhaps better than any other single story in Scripture, how knowing Jesus changes our understanding of God and our relationship to God. In this story Jesus especially subverts what most people assume to be the natural, religious understanding of sin and what it means to be a community of righteous people.
It all begins when Jesus notices a person, a human being, who happens to be blind from birth. And his disciples, being naturally religious people, ask Jesus: Who sinned, this man or his parents, that caused him to be born blind? Because of course, if there is something wrong in the world, someone must be to blame, right? God would not allow such a thing to happen unless someone deserved it, right? So who was it? We want to know, we want to know who to blame, because then we can keep ourselves righteous and pure by keeping ourselves pure from whoever did the wrong that led to this tragedy. This is what the disciples think. Luther called it the theology of glory: God is good, if we can avoid sin and shun sinners, we can be good like God.
Jesus, of course, rejects the premise of his disciples’ question. Neither this man sinned, nor his parents. For Jesus, that this man is born blind is not a question that needs any explanation at all, let alone one that assigns blame for this perceived problem. It is very human, when things don’t go the way we think they should, to look for an explanation and especially someone to blame. I remember when I first came out as gay to my family, one of the first things my mother said was, “What did we do wrong?” I know many of you have participated in that kind of conversation, on one side or another, and it’s not an uncommon reaction. This is bad, someone must have done something wrong, could it have been me? And fortunately by the time we had that conversation, I had stopped thinking that way myself, and was able to reassure her that, no, she had done just fine, this isn’t a problem and there is no need to look for fault.
I don’t think the man who was born blind necessarily thought that his lack of sight was the result of sin, his or anyone else’s. If he was born blind, he never knew what it was to see, and so he didn’t necessarily know what he was missing. I’m sure he knew that other people had an ability to perceive things in the world that he could not – but, precisely because he had always been blind, I’m sure he had ways of perceiving that are unknown to sighted people. If you’ve ever spent any time around blind people, you know what I mean; they are very aware of their surroundings and have keen abilities to perceive, just different from the abilities that sighted people have. This week I saw a reflection on this passage by Bishop Craig Satterlee, a Lutheran bishop in Michigan who is himself blind. One of the things he said was, I know that I don’t know everything, I know that I need help from other people. Some sighted people don’t know that they don’t know everything, and think they can do everything themselves. And they’re wrong.
So it’s not surprising that Jesus refuses to entertain the disciples’ question. Instead Jesus says, “In order that God’s glory may be revealed in this man, we must do the works of the One who sent me.” And what is God’s work in this situation? Jesus immediately spits on the ground and forms clay, and – without any request from the man or conversation of any kind – Jesus places the clay on the man’s eyes. You may know that there’s a play on words in the original Hebrew version of the creation story, where God takes clay (in Hebrew, adamah) and uses is to form Adam, the first human being. And now Jesus, the Word through whom the Creator made the universe, made flesh once again takes clay and resumes the work of the Creator, the work of the One who sent him.
That this man had been born blind is no sin, neither his nor anyone else’s. It’s just that creation is not yet finished, that none of us – blind or sighted, strong or weak, gay or straight, rich or poor, none of us is yet fully who God wishes us to be. We are all still fragile beings, in a world that still has viruses. In a world where none of us have all the gifts and all the abilities, so we need one another. All of us need each other. And yet we have divided ourselves. We call some gifts “normal” and others “abnormal,” and we convince ourselves that the “abnormal” ones are the result of sin, and if we are “normal” we must stay far away from the sinful “abnormal” ones and so we think that we are getting closer to God. And now Jesus comes to completely reverse this way of thinking.
The man who had been born blind had been cast out – reduced to sitting and begging outside the Temple. Not allowed to participate as a full member of the community. And now that his eyes have been opened, what will his community do? How will they receive this man who they used to think of as a sinner deserving of his fate? Will they find a way to include him fully in their community?
The short answer is, no. They will not. At first they are divided about what to think. But as the story goes on, the community and its leadership becomes more and more convinced that what has happened to the man who used to be blind is a Bad Thing. And the more convinced they become, those who might have supported this man, even his parents, grow ever quieter. But the man himself is growing in confidence, the more everyone else is ganging up on him. His answers become longer, more eloquent and articulate.
The final conversation between the man and the religious leaders is one that I particularly resonate with as an LGBT person in the church; it feels exactly like many conversations that I have been on the receiving end of.
- For your own good, we’re giving you one last chance to admit that what has happened to you is wrong and sinful.
- I don’t know anything about that. I know this: once I was blind, and now I see.
- And tell us again how that is a good thing.
- Do you really want to hear it? Are you really open to learning how it’s a good thing?
- We are students of the Tradition. We don’t know where you’re getting this stuff.
- Well, don’t we learn from the Tradition that good things and blessings come from God? So if this is a good thing, where else can it come from other than God?
- What!!? You are full of sin from your birth, and you presume to teach us? Get out of here!
And then, after he had been thrown out, for the first time he sees Jesus. He had met Jesus before, when Jesus put the clay on his eyes, but he had not yet seen him. And yet he had already walked the path of Jesus, who would also be reviled and rejected and excluded, “pushed out of the world onto the cross,” as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said. And so he was able to recognize Jesus as Savior and Lord.
And then Jesus says a most remarkable thing to the religious leaders. If you were blind, you would not have sin. But you say “We see,” and so your sin remains. Here’s what I think Jesus is trying to show us: Human beings assume that sin is the thing that gets you thrown out. Sin is the thing that makes you deserve punishment, that makes you worthy of being excluded from the community of the righteous. But what Jesus exposes is that sin really is participation in the mechanism of exclusion. That is so radical that I’ll say it again: Human beings assume that sin is a defect that excludes someone from the community of the righteous, but the sin that God cares about is participation in the mechanism of exclusion itself.
So, if you have ever felt excluded or defective in some way, the good news is that this feeling has nothing to do with God. God has no difficulty at all in bringing to the fullness of creation the person who is incomplete and knows it. None whatsoever. But if you think you’re finished, that you already have it all, and that you can save yourself by carefully distinguishing your completeness with the defects of others, then there is a problem. And all of us, I think, are in some way or another, excluded, judged, shamed by others. But all of us also, sometimes, are the ones who judge, who shame, who exclude. We are all, as Luther says, saints and sinners at the same time.
And in times of anxiety and stress – and if you aren’t feeling anxiety and stress these days, I don’t know what to tell you – these are the times when the temptation to find a scapegoat is the strongest. When it’s hard to resist the urge to blame and shame – whether it’s whoever’s buying all the toilet paper, whoever dropped the ball on making sure the hospital staff have enough masks, the people we’re cooped up with at home all day. I know, it’s hard.
So I’m grateful that in these times, we are given this Gospel narrative from John. In which Jesus exposes the sin within every righteous exclusion of a beloved child of God, and promises to all of us fragile people made from the clay, that God will complete our creation and bring us the fullness of life and joy. So, as Paul wrote to the Ephesians, “Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light . . . . Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.” And the best way to expose the sin of exclusion is simply by testifying to what we have experienced: Once I was blind, but now I see.