Born Blind.

John 9.1-12 (August 2, 2015)

I.

Jesus, having escaped from the crowd following his teaching during the festival of Sukkoth, happens upon a man who is probably begging.  Somehow he and his disciples know that he was born blind.  Maybe he has a sign.  The man has never seen anything.

The disciples ask the technical theological question: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”  Instead of doing anything for the man, or even talking directly to him, the disciples stand there looking at him and talking about him.

Their question is based on assumptions then dominant in Jewish tradition, especially advocated by the Pharisees and other proponents of the Law of Moses, that all physical maladies were punishments from God for sin.  The interesting problem here is that this man was born blind, so unless he somehow managed to commit sins in the womb, or unless Jesus believed in reincarnation, it can’t be his own sin he is being punished for.  It has to be somebody else’s, which raises the question about God’s justice.  How is it just for this man to be punished with blindness because someone else sinned?

This is a recurring issue that the Bible actually wrestles with.  On the one hand, the Pharisees were pushing the standards found in the writings of the Deuteronomists, the books from Deuteronomy through 2 Kings, in which it is clearly stated that bad things happen as punishment for bad actions.  On the other hand, we find this view called into question in a book like Job, and in some of the prophets, who make the disturbing point that bad things do sometimes happen to good people.

Jesus is more in tune with the second approach, disconnecting illness and suffering from sin, and asserting that the man “was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”  In other words, suffering is not necessarily anyone’s fault; but it does create an opportunity for God’s goodness, salvation, and redemption to be revealed.  Jesus, when addressing a suffering person, is never about blame.

The standard way of interpreting his words here is that he is referring just to this man and this particular miracle he is about to perform.  However, I think we can hear this more broadly.  For in a spiritual sense no phrase better describes the state of humanity in general than being “born blind.”

In this sense the man represents all of us, for we are all born into a condition of ego-centric blindness in which we do not perceive the truth but proceed to live according to a very narrow, closed, limited, fearful, and distorted view of the world.  Therefore, the man’s blindness is itself his sin; that is, it is his condition of separation from God, from reality, from the truth, from creation, from others, and even from his true self.  When Jesus approaches him, he is approaching everyone, for we are all born, and exist, in a condition of blindness.

II.

In response, the Lord proclaims: “I am the light of the world.”  He is the One who brings God’s light into our darkness.  He is the One who enables true sight to happen.  He is the One who allows us to perceive what is true and real.

Jesus has just escaped being stoned to death for using this term, “I am.”  It refers to the self-description God gives to Moses: “I am who I am,” in Exodus.  To say “I am” in this way was considered to make ones self equal to God.  As God’s living Word, who spoke the universe into being at the beginning, Jesus says I am deliberately and repeatedly.

But Jesus is more than this, even.  He is also the Son of Man, the truly Human One, the revealed essence of our nature and identity as human beings.  He demonstrates in himself the unity of God and humanity.  He is the living example of the truth that the only way to God is within, through our own created and blessed nature.

When he says “I am the light of the world,” he means that what empowers us to see clearly is his living truth of God in him, in us, and in all things.  Once our minds are renewed to understand this, everything else starts to open up like blossoms.  The distortions of our perception fall away, and we are able to see clearly the truth of God’s love at the heart of everything.

In order to get through to the man born blind, Jesus chooses to make a tactile performance out of it.  He spits in the dirt.  He uses his finger to mix the saliva and the dirt into mud, which he then smears on the lifeless eyes of the man born blind.  Jesus can and has in this gospel healed at long distance, or with just a spoken word.  Here he does something different.  He mixes a fluid from his own body with the very soil of the earth itself.  

Perhaps it is a reminder of the very mud or clay from which we are all fashioned by God in Genesis.  Perhaps it is a reminder that light comes into the world through created matter.  Physicists tell us that in the emptiness of space light is invisible.  It only becomes visible when it is reflected off of something else, something more substantial.  What we see is reflected and refracted light, second-, third-, fourth-, or fifth-hand light.  It is almost as if Jesus is applying some kind of medium here to conduct the light and open the man’s eyes.

Is not God like this?  Only becoming visible in the living flesh of Jesus Christ, reflected in and through him?  Off of him God’s Presence shines in the whole universe, which had seemed dark and lightless and void.  

III.

Jesus applies this very intimate and even gross mud to the man’s eyes, and instructs him to go and wash in the pool of Siloam.  This was a pool in the southern part of Jerusalem which may have been used for purification rituals.  The gospel then connects the pool named “siloam” with the word for being “sent,” the point being that just as Jesus is sent into the world by the Father so also this man, and we, the disciples, are also sent into the  world by him.  God’s activity is the continual moving outward of sending and being sent.  God’s love is always overflowing, exploding, and, boiling over, in Meister Eckhart’s term.  It is never static or self-contained but ever radiates everywhere, like light, illuminating and enlightening everything it touches.

This sentness is something our mainline churches had largely forgotten.  When I was a kid a missionary was someone sent… but they were always sent somewhere else: Africa, Asia, the Middle East.  We American Christians may have done the sending, but we had little or no sense that we were ourselves sent into our world, our neighborhoods, our cities, our highways, our marketplaces.  We simply did not relate to Jesus’ words about being sent.

But there is no salvation, no liberation, no redemption without our understanding ourselves as having been sent into this life and this context, on a mission from God.  We are discovering that now, as the church disintegrates before our eyes, as we hold on to the view that we don’t have to do anything — people will come to us.  As if we were a retail store selling religion.  

For this man is not healed by Jesus’ word, or even by Jesus’ touch, or even by having his saliva-mud smeared on his face; he is healed by obeying when he is sent to do something.  And what he is sent to do is wash in the pool of Siloam, the pool of “being sent.”  The only way out of our blindness, the only way to have our original sight restored, the only way to experience the true light of all in the world is to immerse ourselves in our mission, our being sent into the world in Jesus’ name.

To be baptized in Jesus name is to be immersed in his mission; and only when we are actively participating in that mission do we see clearly who and where we are.  We only see clearly when we are moving out of ourselves in mission.  We only see the love of God when we are sharing the love of God.  If we effectively lock up God’s love in buildings and doctrines and polities and other institutional boxes, we kill it.  It disappears like an electrical current ceases as soon as we open the circuit and stop the flow.

The man born blind immerses himself in his sentness.  Somehow he trusts Jesus enough to get himself to the pool and splash himself with the water, washing off the gritty mud, feeling his eyes open, and experiencing the glory of light, true light, and seeing his world for the first time.

IV.

“He went and washed and came back able to see,” says the text with ridiculous understatement.  I imagine him completely overwhelmed by this experience.  Imagine having another whole sense opened up that you didn’t even know you had!  Imagine the blast of light streaming into new eyes.  Imagine your brain trying to make some sense out of this tsunami of new data.

Somehow he makes his way back to where he had met Jesus, which must have been difficult by itself.  And along the way people see him bouncing around in a combination of joy and terror.  They say, “Hey, isn’t that the guy?  The guy that just this morning was sitting and begging with all the other invalids?  Isn’t that him?  Wasn’t he, like, blind, or something?”  But others said, “Can’t be.  I mean look at him!  Must have been someone else.”

And when they ask him point blank, “Hey.  Weren’t you?  Aren’t you the guy.  From before?”  He says, “I am the man!”

I am.  In the Greek it doesn’t say “the man.”  It just says ego eimi: I am.  So the man born blind, after his encounter with Jesus’ saliva and after washing in the water of the pool of being sent, after his eyes are not just opened but created from scratch, now comes to share in Jesus’ — and God’s — very name.  I am.  Not to get too philosophical, but now for the first time not only can he see, but he is.  He exists fully and completely.  He shares in being, he participates in the divine nature, as Peter says.  He has entered into his full humanity.

Jesus is sent into the world to heal the blindness with which we are all born.  He gives us of himself to do this.  Here is it saliva; eventually it will be the blood he talked about extensively in chapter 6, and which we share in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.  He sends us to the place of sending and we are immersed in his mission, which is what the other sacrament is about, that of Baptism.  And in this encounter with him, with the living unity of true humanity and true divinity, with the I am at the heart of all things, the I am which calls into being all things that are, the realization that there is only One I am and to the extent that we are we all participate in him.

In the story, people ask the man what happened and he explains it to them honestly.  But when they ask where Jesus is he says he doesn’t know.  He was blind, he wouldn’t even recognize him if he sees him!  He could be standing right there for all he knows.

Jesus has disappeared.  Again.  I find it remarkable how in this gospel Jesus flits in and out of the scene, almost like some quantum thing that is only perceptible sometimes.  But he leaves the man on his own with his new eyes and his new being.  And in the next section of the chapter the man has to cope with the consequences of being healed, because the authorities never like people becoming whole and seeing the truth.  That cuts in on their action, which depends on people staying blind and needy.

V.

But the man does not now need some man named Jesus.  Jesus Christ communicated to him his self, his being, his I am.  He has caught Jesus’ I am from him like an infection.  Now it is Jesus Christ’s power and being that he lives from; he relies upon the One who sent him whose energy flows in and through him.  He will meet and worship Jesus later in the chapter, as we shall see.  But right now he has the grace and power of God flowing into and through him.  He doesn’t need Jesus because he has Jesus in his heart, in his eyes, in his body and soul.

The cure for our blindness is also in our courage and willingness to trust in Jesus and find ourselves being sent into the world with a mission.  The mission is to witness to the good news of God’s love revealed in Jesus.  It is only in carrying out that mission, that is, actually doing it and not just talking, theorizing, reading, and thinking about it, that we start to see it and everything else.

If we’re not sent we’re still blind.  And sometimes, if we can’t find Jesus, it’s not a bad thing.  It may be because in obeying him and immersing ourselves in his mission, he is now within us.  

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