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The Man Who
Came to See
Message from Ben Gregory on May 30, 2004
John 9 (20:19-23)
The lectionary has us in John’s
gospel this morning--chapter twenty,
verses 19-23–-but before we get to that I’d like to jump back several
chapters and look at the text I was supposed to handle last month.
There’s a story in the ninth chapter of John’s gospel that’s intriguing
to me, involving a blind man and Jesus. They’re the principals anyway,
but there are also appearances here by our old friends the Pharisees, by
the blind man’s neighbors, and by his parents, (whose behavior won’t earn
either of them Parent of the Year nominations).
John didn’t build any chapter
breaks into his Gospel (and I think
sometimes the one’s we’ve added do us more harm than good in our reading)
but chapter nine opens with Jesus walking with his disciples. John
doesn’t tell where they’re going, and in fact in the translation I’ve got
John just says they’re "going along," perhaps with no particular place to
go. (That does seem to be when Life happens.)
As they walk they see a man whom
John describes as blind from birth, and
immediately the people traveling with Jesus make some assumptions. (And I
know this wasn’t John’s point when he wrote this, but can we agree
together, once and for all, that it’s not a good idea to assume things
about people based on whatever limited information we have?)
Will you forgive me a tangent? I stumbled onto a heavy conversation at
work several weeks ago. One of my friends was talking about the day
twenty years ago when her brother died. He’d been farther into drugs (and
they into him) than is healthy and was too Quaaluded to swim when he fell
out of the boat. Drowned. Her big brother was gone. What she remembers
most vividly all these years later is going to clean out his apartment
and finding a plate of peanut butter and crackers neatly arranged,
wrapped in plastic and set in the refrigerator for a later that never
came.
She talked about how hard it was
for her idolized (if flawed) big brother
to be gone. Then she talked about how just six months before that her
husband had left her for a younger woman. My friend was twenty-four at
the time. Twenty-four. What does a year like that do to someone? Who
might she have been? How did she find the grace to forgive?
We’ve worked together for nearly
four years now and, come to find out, I
never knew her at all. I suppose I still don’t, but suddenly many things
she’d said and done before make more sense. It’s amazing how you can
spend forty hours a week with someone for years and talk and leave so
much still buried. It takes a long time to begin to know someone. And I
think this is part of why judging people gets so tricky—you just never
have all the information. God give me patience.
Okay, tangent’s over. That was
for free.
Apparently (and we’ve talked
about this before) conventional wisdom back
in the day said that physical challenges like being born blind were the
direct result of some specific, personal sin. So the disciples ask Jesus,
"Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" And Jesus’
answer may be worth looking at.
He tells them that this man’s
condition was not the result of someone’s
sin, but that it has happened, "so that the work of God might be revealed
in this man’s life." (Note that he doesn’t say that everything bad that
ever happens is for that reason–that may or may not be true, but Jesus
doesn’t address it here.) So if this blindness, this encounter, this
conversation has happened so that the work of God could be revealed in
this man’s life, it may be worth asking...
What is it that’s revealed? What
does Jesus, who’s just said, back in
chapter five, that he does only what he sees the Father doing, do? He
gets down on his knees and, almost to remind us that love is dirty work,
and that there’s life when God breathes into the dust, he mixes his own
spit with the ordinary dirt they were standing on and he smear it on the
blind man’s face.
Now as far as I can tell, Jesus
hasn’t said word one to this guy. He just
makes a mess all over his face and then tells him to go wash it off. I’m
not sure he needed anyone to tell him to do that. Some guy just put mud
in his eyes. And Jesus doesn’t say anything to him about being healed.
There’s no promise made here–no demand on the man’s faith. Jesus sends
him to do the very thing he would naturally have done on his own–"Go wash
your face." He doesn’t say, "Go wash and you’ll be able to see." Just,
"Go wash."
I don’t imagine that this guy was
excited as he slowly found his way to
the Pool of Siloam. Maybe he’s confused. It may even be that he was a
little annoyed. I wonder if he found someone to help him to the pool and
if he told his side of the story on the way. I doubt it sounded as nice
as John’s version does to us. I imagine it was a good deal more colorful.
And he makes it to the pool. And
he stumbles down to the edge of the
water. He drops down to his knees, bends forward and begins to splash
double handfuls of water up into his dead and muddy eyes. Still
irritated. Still grumbling. He rubs them to get all of the mess out.
Raises his robe to his face to wipe away the water. And when he lowers
it, he–for the first time ever--can see.
And maybe he looks down into the
pool. And maybe the water had stilled.
And maybe, for the first time in his life, he sees himself. (An encounter
with Jesus can do that–usually when you’re not expecting it.)
The rest of this story has to do with the Pharisees’ trying to decide
what it all means. It happened to display the work of God, but they
aren’t content to leave it at that. They’re so afraid of Jesus and what
he might represent and what he might do to their religion that they’ve
blinded themselves to God’s presence right there in their midst. Jesus
has clearly healed this guy and to compound things he’s done it on the
Sabbath, and that’s problematic for them. His idea of doing what he
called, "the work of him who sent me," doesn’t fit into their religious
matrix and so they get mean. Some things never change.
They ask the formerly blind man
twice how he received his sight and what
he knows about Jesus, and the man’s answers are refreshingly simple. He
doesn’t pretend to understand what’s just happened or to have Jesus, whom
he’s barely met, figured out. He seems to say, "He’s at least a
prophet–past that I’m not sure. All I know is that when I woke up this
morning–like every other morning–I couldn’t see, and now I can." He
doesn’t presume to be some kind of expert now. His experience was what it
was and he doesn’t demand more of it than is there.
But they keep badgering him–they
even involve his parents, who’re so
scared of being disciplined that they hang their son out to dry–until
finally he comes back at them and says, "I’ve told you already, do you
want to hear it again?" He has yet to even have a real conversation with
Jesus and they’re asking him to make definitive statements about his
identity–or at least offer an opinion. Be careful expecting people who’ve
never seen the work of God in their lives to relate to Jesus the way you
do. That seems unreasonable.
Finally Jesus gets word of what
this poor guy is going through on his
first day with good eyes and he goes looking for him (which is typical)
almost as if to show him something worth looking at. Jesus asks him if he
believes in the Son of Man and this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking
about. What he does know is that he’s ready to believe in anybody this
guy who just healed him believes in. And Jesus says, "You have just seen
him–(wow)–in fact he is the one speaking with you." And "then the man
said, ‘Lord I believe,’ and he worshiped him." (I wonder what that looked
like.)
They taught is in college how to
prove to people that Jesus was who we
said he was and how to persuade them to behave accordingly, which we had
all figured out (which does seem to have a parallel in this story). But
as best as I can tell, people aren’t interested in what you can prove or
document, and they don’t respond well to the inherent disrespect in our
attempts to persuade them. Maybe what people need in order to believe is
to see the work of God displayed in their lives.
And maybe I don’t know what I’m
talking about, but early in chapter nine
Jesus tells his followers that as long as he was in the world he was the
light of the world. And later in John’s gospel we see Jesus, as he’s
wrapping up his time on Earth, telling some of these same followers, "If
you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive
them, they are not forgiven." And shortly after that he left them.
And I wonder if he hasn’t left it up to us to extend the forgiveness
that’s so important to him and to us, knowing that when people see that,
when they see the work of God displayed in their lives–when they see this
forgiveness, this healing, this Kingdom kind of life--they may want to
know who it is that they’ve met. |
