Ephesians 5: 8-14 (CEB)
John 9: 1-22 (CEB)
Today’s gospel reading packs an important message, not only to the literal reading but also to the background to which it was written and what it tells to Jesus followers today.
The Jewish people of Jesus’ time equated illness with sin. If you were an epileptic, you were diagnosed as being possessed by a demon because of your sins. If you were blind from birth, your family must have done something in the past to anger God. But we all know personally, from even this faith community, people were stricken with fatal health problems. These were good people from families who loved God. It’s a difficult subject to explain. But in the 1981 book and best-seller, “When Bad Things Happen To Good People” by the Rabbi Harold Kushner, he does a good job as best as he humanly can about this difficult subject. I have a copy in the pastor’s office if anyone wants to read his book.
But what the gospel story asks us, who were the ones who were truly blind and could not see the Light? Was it the blind man that Jesus healed or the Pharisees who blamed the man or his family for his condition?
John’s gospel was written 58 years after the crucifixion of Jesus, during the last decade of the 1st century. A lot has changed since then. The Temple at Jerusalem no longer existed, it was totally destroyed by the Roman army in 70 AD. There had been a strict fundamentalist doubling down within the Jewish religion. Those in control of Jewish synagogues began to excommunicate those Jews who believed that Jesus was the Messiah. In other words, the Light was excluded from the synagogues.
But the blind man that Jesus healed saw the Light while his skeptics did not. His first reaction was to see Jesus as a great prophet and there is much to be said about that, in the time of Jesus and our own time. What does a prophetic Jesus have to say about us, our nation and our world? What is his judgment? In the Light of Jesus what is to make of what is happening with refugees, hunger, poverty, violence and war? How do we respond to these problems? Private charity can only go so far. Protests seldom work with politicians who have sold their souls to Mammon and the military-industrial-complex that a good Republican president named Eisenhower warned us about 60 years ago. We face these questions and issues as individuals, a nation and a world.
Real prophets often do not work within the system. They speak outside the system and against the injustices perpetrated by the system. Needless to say they speak words people do not want to hear. And they certainly ask us to repent, to change our conventional views. They challenge the status-quo unlike one very famous and popular evangelist, when asked about the civil rights movement during the early 1960s, his reply was, “I guess Black people will have to wait until they get to Heaven to have civil rights.” I call that a cop-out.
We can think of true prophets in our own time. Erin Brockvich is still one, alive and active. Remember Archbishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa and his struggle against apartheid? And Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador who gave his life to preach the Light of justice. Certainly Mohandas Gandhi of India was a prophet. And of course Martin Luther King Jr. was paid the ultimate price of being a prophet. On a smaller, more personal scale, think about people who have spoken an authentic truth to you and in doing so opened your eyes to a new life, a new vision and a new understanding. They too were prophets within the tradition of Jesus. And so was the English poet William Blake (1757-1827) who the author Aldous Huxley quoted in his famous book, “The Doors of Perception.” The quote was, “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
We often don’t speak of Jesus as a prophet, but that was what the man cured of blindness first saw. But that is what true prophets do. They open our eyes to see what is and cast a vision of what might be. Their vision stands in the gap between those two visions. They call us back to our true selves. Prophets remove the cataracts from our eyes. They challenge us to look deeper, to see as Jesus views things and look on the heart of the person or situation that needs healing.
When we live with our eyes closed, we withhold mercy, live in fear of others and let anger control our lives. Sometimes we either refuse or are unable to see the pain or needs of one another. When we love ourselves more than our neighbor, we are seeing with eyes closed, blind to the value of the other’s life. When violence becomes our automatic response, blindness becomes toxic.
Other times we recognize the injustice of a situation, we feel the other’s pain as our own. In those times we are seeing with eyes opened, which is called empathy. When we advocate peace, forgive and act with compassion, we have seen the Light. Our eyes are opened when we see another bombing in Ukraine and we shed tears when innocents are killed. Then we are seeing as God sees, and looking into the heart of the people suffering. Jesus always cast his judgment with an eye toward change and transformation. Its purpose is to show us the way, the truth and life.
The judgment of Jesus is not a once and forever judgment. And there is no one as blind as the one who chooses not to see what is right before their eyes. We recently have experienced a TV news network, supposedly the most watched news source in America, perpetuating lies and disinformation to downplay the violence done by terrorists on January 6, 2021 at the US Capitol. The real evidence was right before their eyes. Tell me, what is the difference between that supposed “news service” and the Pharisees who tried to downplay the healing of the blind man by Jesus, even though they saw the evidence? I see little difference. Unfortunately, regular viewers of that news service still view it with blind eyes. Let’s not be closed eyed people. Let us see the beauty, the hope and the good along with the pain and injustice. Then by God’s grace, let’s begin to close the gap between what is and what may be.
As it says in the letter to the Ephesian Church, followers of Jesus are the Light of the world. Light and darkness cannot coexist at the same time and place. The status of the believer has changed and a new nature that is the opposite to the old has taken place. The Light guides the Realm of God into belonging, inquiring and transforming the society we live in. In other words, be troublemakers like Jesus and the prophets, past and present.
AMEN
