"Who Sinned?"

John 9:1-41

March 26, 2017

I.

Jesus and the disciples come across a man who had been blind from birth.  This man represents all of us.  For there is a strong sense in which all of us are “born blind.”  That is, from the moment we are are flushed into the world we cannot see the world as it truly is; we see, perceive, think, and feel according to the defenses and projections that our egos immediately begin constructing.  We become conscious that we are small, limited, vulnerable, weak, dependent, and apparently separate from everything else.  And our brains shift into panicked overdrive, trying to figure out where and who we are, and how to survive in this new environment, which we intuitively sense is unsafe.

The first thing the disciples say when they encounter this man who was born blind, is “Who sinned, that he was born blind?”  Whose fault is it that this happened to him.  Who is to blame?  It couldn’t be his own fault, could it?  Were his parents particularly bad people, and is his disability a punishment on them from God?

This question misses the point on many levels.  The disciples are treating the man, not like a person, not like someone with whom they share a common humanity, not with empathy or compassion… but like an objective theological specimen.  They think he is some kind of impersonal lesson on God’s justice.  They think he is not exactly like them.  They think that they can see quite well themselves, and their seeing separates them from the man.  The way they see allows them to imagine distance between them and the man.  He is over there, and we are over here, looking down on this other person and making evaluations about his situation.  Like he is an inanimate thing.

They care nothing about the man himself.  They are only theorizing about the larger circumstance which caused him to be born blind.  It would be like having a hungry child come up to you, but instead of giving her something to eat, you prognosticize about the irresponsibility of her parents, or the inadequacy of the economic system, or her own imprudence, or our responsibility to her, or whatever else avoids the issue and places you in a position of superiority.  Most of all you maintain your separateness, piously moaning perhaps about how “there but for the grace of God go I,” and how great it is that God does not allow you to be hungry.  You examine her even more carefully, and discuss her predicament and how she got that way and who is to blame for it… as you chew thoughtfully on a sandwich.

Jesus, of course, has exactly zero patience for such heartless nonsense.  He snaps at them in frustration over their callous cluelessness, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.  We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work.  As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”  It’s not about who sinned, you numbskulls!  Why is it always about blame for you guys?  You’re looking for the answers in the past and not seeing this person right in front of you.  Most of all you don’t see that you are as blind spiritually as this man is physically.  How he got this way is unimportant; what is important is the witness he will make when he realizes that I am the light of the world.

II.

Then, wasting no more time on castigations or explanations, he spits on the ground.  He mixes the saliva and dirt with his fingers to make a dark, gritty paste, and he begins to spread this mud with his thumbs on the man’s eyes.  It is an act reminiscent of the creation of the first human, in Genesis 2, whom the Lord God formed “from the dust of the ground.”  We are made of mud; we are made of the stuff of the planet itself.  Jesus is just applying to the man some of the substance of what we all already are.  It is a new creation, a kind of rebirth.

But this is not the end of it.  We might expect the man to open his eyes now and be able to see.  Instead, there is one more step.  Jesus instructs the man to “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam.”  The gospel writer then informs us that the word “siloam” means “sent.”  Jesus has just referred to himself as sent from God.  Now he in turn sends the blind man to Siloam.

Being sent means, first of all, that you act on someone else’s behest.  It is an act of obedience and trust that you go where you have been sent.  It is not on your own initiative.  The man could have washed his face in the pool of Siloam numerous times before, to no effect.  You have to understand yourself to have been sent.  Being sent makes all the difference.

This is a bit beyond our understanding, as Modern Americans who value individual initiative.  To paraphrase an old song, we go where we want to go and do what we want to do with whomever we want to do it with.  There aren’t too many pop songs that romanticize going where somebody else sends you, or about taking what you are given.  If Jesus did this to us I wonder if we wouldn’t complain about being smeared with spit-mud by a stranger, and when instructed to wash in the pool of Siloam, responded by saying, “who’s gonna make me?”

Hence, we remain blind.  Because the only way out of our blindness is obedience to Jesus Christ.  If the blind man could have healed himself by some self-improvement scheme, he would certainly have done it by now.  Having been born blind, though, he would not even have the ability to imagine what sight is like.  And neither can we.  We live in our own bubble of limited consciousness, thinking that this is the only and true world and who we think we are is who we really are, not even recognizing the possibility that it might be otherwise.  It is what it is, we say.

Even Jesus’ word and example that we may have another, deeper, truer, brighter life, is insufficient, though it might be enough to plant the idea in our head.  Only obeying, following, understanding ourselves to have been sent, and going where we are sent, will make us realize the truth of who we are.

III.

The man does what Jesus says.  Jesus doesn’t even make any promises; he doesn’t tell the man what will happen if he goes and washes in Siloam.  The man obeys without such assurance.  He has to.  He can’t possibly understand sight in the first place.  He just does it.  Maybe even simply out of curiosity and the lack of anything better to do; maybe it just breaks up the monotony to go to the pool.  He has nothing to lose, except his prime pan-handling spot on the sidewalk.

We do not obey Jesus because we have any clue about what we are going to receive.  We go because staying where we are is intolerable and unsustainable.  We go because life has become unmanageable under the current circumstances.  We go because we realize in truth that we really don’t have anything better to do.  We have nothing to lose.  We have become open to possibilities we can’t even imagine because life-as-we-know-it is not working for us.

As long as we think everything is okay, we stay where we are.  We accept as normal that we are sitting here accepting whatever coins passers-by drop into our lap.  We assume our limited, broken, alienated existence is all there is.  “No thanks!  I’m good!” we say to any offers of unheard-of alternatives.

The pool of Siloam represents the water of baptism, which itself represents the water of creation, liberation, and deliverance.  The pool of being sent is a pool you have to be sent to in order to see.  Just as God sends the Word into the emptiness and creates the universe, and just as God sends the Word into that creation in Jesus, and just as God sends the Spirit into the church, which is Jesus’ body, so God sends each one of us on a journey of renewal and wholeness, beginning with and symbolized by baptism.  Baptism is where our eyes are opened.  It is our second birth.

The man comes back from Siloam able to see.  “His neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, ‘Isn’t this the guy who used to sit and beg?’  Some were saying, ‘It is he.’  Others were saying, ‘No, but it is someone like him.’  He kept saying, ‘I am the man.’”

He kept saying, “I am the man.”  I am.  Apparently, Jesus doesn’t just give new sight to this man.  He gives him himself.  He gives him nothing less than his union with God, enabling him to say the same words Jesus says about himself repeatedly: I am.  In restoring the man to his true humanity, which he shares with Jesus, Jesus also restores him to his true relationship with and in God.  He becomes a “participant in the divine nature.”  He still doesn’t know where Jesus is because he has never actually seen Jesus.  But he receives from Jesus Jesus’ own relationship with God.  In obeying Jesus he receives from God by grace what Jesus Christ is by nature.  

IV.

The rest of the story is the panicked, hysterical, paranoid reaction by the human religious authorities whenever someone wakes up.  Nothing so threatens the leaders of the blind as someone who can see.  They drag the man and even his parents into court, the ultimate venue of hopelessness and exploitation.  And through it all the man calmly and confidently sticks to his story: “One thing I do know,” he states, “that though I was blind, now I see.”

Later, Jesus tracks the man down and asks if he believes in the Son of Man, the Human One.  When the man realizes who Jesus is, he worships him.  To see is to trust, obey, believe in, and worship Jesus… not as an object out there from whom we are separate; but as the Truly Human One, the One with whom we share a common humanity, the One through whom we participate in the same I am which is God’s very nature, alive, at work, and animating all the world.

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