Interrogation.

John 9:13-34.    August 9, 2015.

I.

There is a scene in the film, The Matrix, where Neo, who is part of this horrific, towering network of sleeping humans being drained of their energy to feed the empire of the machines, wakes up.  He sits up and he looks around in wonder and horror at where he really is.  And immediately a levitating robot appears, assesses the situation, disconnects all his tubes, and flushes him down the drain, into a pool.  He is useless to them now that he is conscious.

There is nothing more threatening and frightening to an inhuman, oppressive, dominating, exploitative power than a human who is awake.

Last week we talked about how Jesus heals the man born blind.  The man, who can now see for the first time, is questioned by the people who want to know how this happened.  He tells them, but now they can’t find Jesus.  So their next response is, “Well, let’s take him to the Pharisees!  They’ll know what to do!”

Then, as they are off seeking these religious officials to get their authoritative opinion, the narrator gives us a tiny detail which had been omitted.  Oh, by the way, did I mention that “Jesus made the mud and smeared it on the man’s eyes on a Sabbath day”?

We already know from chapter 5 where Jesus healed the lame man about now anal the Pharisees are about the Sabbath day.  The reason the crowd feels they have to consult with the Sabbath police about this man is that when Jesus made the paste with his spit and some dirt it was considered prohibited “work.”  I kid you not. 

So they find some Pharisees who proceed to interrogate the man just as the crowd did.  And he honestly and simply repeats what happened: “[Jesus] put mud on my eyes, I washed, and now I see.”  

And the Pharisees get down to arguing about the legal principle at stake here.  Once again, and we see this over and over, the concern of the crowd and the authorities is about some abstract technicality in their Law.  No one seems to have any interest in this man and how his life is totally transformed.  No doubt he is still completely overwhelmed to the point of trauma by everything he is now seeing for the first time.  But the people are like, “Oh yeah, whatever, just sit over there while we decide whether the man who did this to you should be arrested or not.”

This is the way blind, unconscious, spiritually dead people think.  They are not present to their neighbors in their joy or grief or pain.  They only care about this dopey, ego-centric, fear-driven calculus going on in their heads.  And it is the same with us when, instead of relating or responding to the needs and suffering of others, we have this ideological matrix in our minds that takes precedence: “Well, if she wasn’t so lazy she wouldn’t be so poor.”  “Well, if he didn’t do immoral things he wouldn’t be sick.”  “Well, if they would just obey the law then the police would not shoot them.”  “Well, if we give them something to eat they’ll have no incentive to get a job.”

It goes back to the question the disciples have at the beginning of chapter 9.  “Who sinned that this man was born blind?”  Jesus is concerned with people and their blindness; blind people are only concerned that other people might get away with something.

II.  

The thing that is confusing and concerning the Pharisees so much is whether Jesus is a sinner who breaks the Sabbath, or a prophet who does unprecedented miracles?  By the Pharisees’ reasoning, he can’t be both.  They are divided about this.  Finally, they call the man back in for more questioning.  “What do you have to say about him, since he healed your eyes?” they ask.  I get the impression this is kind of a last resort.  As we will see, they don’t really care about what the man has to say at all.

The man’s opinion is that Jesus is a prophet, which is to say, a God-inspired worker of miracles like Elijah or Moses.

But that goes in one ear and out the other of the Pharisees, who proceed to the next phase of their investigation: Was he really blind to begin with, or is this all a hoax?  So they subpoena the man’s parents.  This should remind us again of that original question about who sinned that the man was born blind, he or his parents?  Which Jesus dismisses as nonsense.

Anyway, here his parents actually show up in the narrative.  And they want no part of this controversy.  They don’t even appear to be glad that their son can now see.  They are as blind and unconscious as everybody else, only caring about their own status in the community.  They know that people who follow Jesus are already getting tossed out of synagogues.  So they just give the basic facts.  “He is our son.  He was born blind.  We have no idea how he now sees.  He’s technically an adult.  Ask him yourself.”  They must have received advice from a lawyer because they basically leave their son out to dry to protect their own skin.

There must be a lot of backstory here we don’t receive.  I mean, the relationship of this man to his parents; the whole tale of his childhood; the stigma on the family of having a son who was born blind; and people imagining that someone in the family must have sinned for this to happen, and who was it?  I am sure it is not a pleasant story and includes a lot of heartbreak and stress and guilt.  I mean they left him to beg on the street for the rest of his life.

Our lives are just train wrecks because we are not present to one another in our pain and trials; we are too busy looking for someone to blame and applying punishment to each other based on our delusional assumptions about how things are supposed to work based on our ego-centric prejudices and our addiction to fear, shame, and anger.  All of which Jesus just cuts through in giving this man sight, waking him up, and flushing him into new life in the waters of Siloam.

III.

So the authorities call the man back again.  This time they are more forceful in their interrogation.  “Give glory to God!” they yell at him.  We know this man is a sinner!”  Stop giving credit to this guy who cares so little about the Law that he makes mud on the Sabbath.  Clearly God healed you and the sinful-Sabbath-mud-maker had nothing to do with it.  Worship and thank God alone!  It’s just a coincidence that he put that mud on your eyes.  It couldn’t have been him; how could a Sabbath-breaker do such a miracle?  It makes no sense.

It seems like a pious and responsible approach.  People don’t heal; God heals!  We should not be giving credit to some guy, when God is the One who did the healing.  It is an argument I can hear us making today.

To this the man just shrugs.  “I don’t know whether he is a sinner,” he says.  That’s for theologians to argue over.  “Here’s what I do know: I was blind and now I see.”  

It is an amazingly simple statement of his direct experience.  It makes everything else irrelevant.  In the end it is what we all have as followers of Jesus:  An incontrovertible experience of God’s grace and goodness, forgiveness and liberation, that transcends all theology and morality and doctrine and tradition that sends the authorities and officials scurrying back to the drawing board.  “Well, you couldn’t really be healed because you’re not a Christian.”  Or “How could this happen?  Calvin said it couldn’t.”  “God healed a sinner?  Nah, that can’t be right.  God only heals good people like us.”  And so forth.  They’re flummoxed.

So they keep pestering him with the same questions, imagining that if they keep asking maybe some detail of his story will change and then they can leap on that to challenge his credibility.  This is the way interrogations work.

But he just says, “I already told you, and you didn’t listen.  Why do you want to hear it again?  Do you want to become his disciples too?”

Oooh.  Sarcasm.

So they insult him.  “You are his disciple, but we are Moses’ disciples.  We know that God spoke to Moses, but we don’t know where this man comes from.”  A few days ago they knew he was from Galilee.  Now they don’t know where he comes from?  Maybe even they are beginning to realize they are dealing with more than some fellow from Nazareth here… but they don’t know who he is, and can’t know that because they don’t really know God.  All they know is their self-serving Law.

IV.

The man sees their dilemma and makes his point.  “This is incredible!” he says.  “You don’t know where he is from, and yet he healed my eyes!  We know that God doesn't listen to sinners.  God listens to anyone who is devout and does God’s will.  No one has ever heard of a healing of the eyes of someone born blind.  If this man wasn’t from God, he couldn’t do this.”

The proof of Jesus Christ and who he is will not be found in archaeology, or careful analysis of the gospels and other ancient texts.  It will not be found in the heights of dogmatic and systematic theology, or in lofty and airtight philosophical arguments.  It will certainly not be found in the successes and achievements of the church, like measuring membership, or assessing property values, or counting money.  It won’t even be found in great works of art, music, architecture, literature, or in the founding and management of human moral, political, or economic systems.  

The proof, the only proof, of Jesus Christ is in the healed, transformed, restored, forgiven, and liberated lives of people who have encountered him.  “I was blind, and now I see.”  That sums it up.  I have been delivered from blindness to sight; from slavery to my own ego- addictions to freedom in God; from the darkness of ignorance and prejudice to the light of wisdom; from a deathly unconsciousness to a wide awake, receptive, open, active life in the Spirit.  From being crippled by anger, fear, and shame, to being mobilized by faith, hope, and love.  From self-centeredness to community; and from injustice and violence to God’s shalom of justice and righteousness.

This is the whole reasoning of the early church in grappling with who Jesus truly is, after his death and resurrection.  They did not examine external evidence.  Of course, they listened to what he explicitly said.  But they proved it by looking in their own hearts, and they realized that no one could have wrought such a change in them but God.  No one but God could have changed them so profoundly for the good.  No one but God could have inspired them to love enemies, bless those who curse them, forgive each other, and give their lives for each other.  No one but God could have created this community of compassion, equality, and love.  Therefore, Jesus is God.

So here the Pharisees are, in part, right.  Only God could perform such a phenomenal, impossible healing.  But they were unable to get to the “therefore.”  The therefore that Jesus is God.  And that because Jesus, the truly Human One, the Son of Man, is also the Son and Word of God, that therefore we too are united to God in the humanity we share with him.  I mean this healing is like so many others where says to someone that their faith, their trust in him, something inside them already that he merely gets them to access, has made them well.

  

V.

The Pharisees, of course, can’t even begin to understand something so threatening to their power and control as all this.  Not even listening to the man who has advanced spiritually far beyond them, they spit at him, “You were born completely in sin!  How is it that you dare to teach us?”  And they expel him.  They do to him exactly what his parents were afraid would happen to them.  They throw him out of the synagogue for being a disciple of Jesus.  They excommunicate him.

That is always the risk.  Religious institutions are designed to accommodate blind, sleeping, unconscious people, people dominated by fear who need security, comfort, stability, boundaries, definitions, and rules.  The man who was born blind, who wakes up, has no more need of the structures and traditions and hierarchies and regulations of this system.  He is free.  

To him the synagogue was just a prison; now he is one with the Light, expanding in wisdom, and love, and truth.  I mean, this guy who probably couldn’t even read, just preached a brief sermon to these highly educated experts that silenced them, leaving them no recourse but to fulminate in frustrated rage.

We’re free too.  What the man born blind discovers in himself, is within all of us.  Everyone can wake up.  Like Neo, everyone can come to their senses, come to themselves, disconnect from the tubes and wires that both feed us our delusions and extract from us our energy.  Everyone can wash in the pool of Siloam, and realize that they too are sent into the world by Jesus Christ with the message of good news.

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