John 9: 1-38
The story of the man born blind is a one-act play in six scenes, with a large cast of characters, as biblical stories go: there are at least 12 disciples, a crowd of noisy neighbors, some Pharisees, two parents, the man himself and Jesus. These last two get most of the attention, but it is not the kind that either of them wants. The story revolves around them because they are the only so-called sinners in it – the man because he was born blind, which in a day was a sure sign of God’s judgement—and because Jesus broke one of the 10 Commandments by healing the man on the Sabbath.
These are the two who make everything else happen. But only the man stays put through the whole story. Jesus puts mud on his eyes and then he disappears. “Go wash in the pool of Siloam,” he says, which means that the man never even sees Jesus’ face. The healer vanishes before the cure is complete and it is the last anyone sees of him until the end of the story, when he returns to claim his new disciple.
In between times, the man is on his own. Something powerful has happened to him. He does not have a clue how it worked, what he did to get chosen, or who the man who smeared mud on his eyes really was, but all of a sudden those are the things everyone around him wants to know. Like a White House aide who has just received a subpoena from the House and Senate, he is besieged by reporters who assault him with questions from every side.
How were your eyes opened? Where is the man who did it? How could he do that? What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes? What do you say about him, since he has opened your eyes? Not one living soul said Alleluia! Or Thank God! No one asked him what it was like to see for the first time in his life, or whether the light hurt his eyes. Just How Who What and Where?
They all assume he is mixed up in something unsavory. For all he knows, they are right, but the fact is that he can see for the first time in his life, and that the miracle has severely compromised his certainty that he knows anything at all about how the world works. He does not know what to believe about what has happened to him. All he knows is that it happened, and while everyone around him wants to know whether it is right or wrong, those are not the categories that concern him at the moment. The categories that concern him are blind or not blind! If his inquisitors are going to insist that blind is right and not blind is wrong, then he will gladly consent to being wrong.
His answers are timid one liners at first, “I am the man,” he says, “I do not know,” he says. “He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see.” But as the questions go on and on until even his own mama and daddy back quietly into the wings, the grows in both eloquence and courage, finally answering the Pharisees so sharply that they expel him from the congregation.
“Here is an astonishing thing!” he says to them. “You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not of God, he could do nothing!”
When he says that, everyone in the room stops breathing. A nobody from nowhere who was blind until about forty-five minutes ago has just told the board of elders that they could not see God if God bit them on the nose! They do not let the insult go unreturned either. They raise up to their full height in front of him, look down their unbitten noses into his furious new eyes, and say. “You were born entirely in sin and you are trying to teach us?” and they drive him out – out of their presence and out of their congregation. Because he has just proven himself to be a heretic.
While his parents and neighbors may consider this a terrible disgrace, it has a happy effect. Another heretic hears about it and comes to see the man born blind—a perfect stranger, as far as the man is concerned. A face new to him, although there is something familiar about the voice. “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” the stranger asks him, which makes the man wince. It sounds like more of what he has just had to endure. Only the voice changes the way the words sound. The question does not sound like an acquisition this time, but like an offering, from one heretic to another.
“And who is he, sir?” the man asks the stranger. “Tell me, so that I may believe in him.”
“You have seen him,” the stranger says, “and the man speaking with you is he.”
If you read mysteries, then you know what happens next. There you are just ten pages to go and you do not have a clue—or you have all the clues, but you still don’t know what they mean. And then comes that moment of revelation—just the sound of a familiar voice, maybe, just asking the one question that makes sense out of all the other questions, and you know—you know—who did it.
“Lord, I believe,” the man says, and right then and there he worships Jesus.
He has come a long way. At the beginning of the story, he called Jesus a man, a prophet, then a man come from God. It’s almost as if his vision keeps on improving so that he sees more and more clearly who has given him sight. Finally, he gets the name right, as well as the response, “Lord, I believe.”
What is hard to remember is that this confession does not take place in a church before an altar. It does not involve anyone in a clerical collar. It is in no way sanctioned by the community of the faithful, who have spit both of these men out. It happens, instead, outside the bounds of religious society, in complete defiance of its rules, as one heretic confesses faith in another.
And yet, here we are reading it in church, claiming it as a story about us—which means, I suppose, that we imagine ourselves in the role of the man born blind. The only problem with that reading, as far as I can tell, is that we still have to decide who the Pharisees are. Its too easy to go on tapping the Jews for that role. Actually, plenty of Jews followed Jesus who was a Jew himself. Peter, the head of the church was Jewish and so were all the apostles. So “Pharisee” means something other than “Jew.”
Since we are in John’s gospel here, it helps to know that for him the Pharisees operate sort of like a board of examining chaplains. They are the religious authorities who are devoted to ritual purity and the preservation of the law. Not to mention that fact that they are trying to survive under the Roman Empire.
They are the keepers of the faith, and—by extension, they are the prosecutors of those who do not keep the faith according to their standards. So, if you want to know who today’s Pharisees are, here are some questions to ask.
Who are the religious people who follow the traditions of the elder, and who—based on that tradition—believe they can tell the true prophets from the false ones? Who are the guardians of the faith, the fully initiated, law abiding, pledge paying, creed saying, theologically correct people who can spot a heretic a mile away?
According to John, these are the people to watch out for, because they think they can see. Furthermore, they think they can see better than other people, and they are not shy about telling you that you are not seeing what you think you see, or that what you are seeing is wrong. They do not do this to be mean, either. They do this because they love God and maybe even because they love you too. They are doing it to protect you from believing the wrong things.
There are a lot of astounding things that happen in this world that may or may not have anything to do with the power of God. They may only have to do with the power of the human imagination, or the power of suggestion, or—worse yet—the power of darkness. What if something is not God and I believe that it is?
That is a good pharisaical question, and the answer is: I will get into trouble. My wrong belief will displease God and place my soul at risk. In official terms, I will become a heretic. But according to the story of the man born blind, there is something worse than wrong belief, and that is wrong DISbelief! What if something is God and I don’t believe that it is?
That is the question the Pharisees forgot to ask. They were so sure of everything: that God did not work on Sundays, that Moses was God’s only spokesperson, that anyone born blind had to be a sinner and ditto for anyone who broke the Sabbath, that God did not work through sinners, that God did not work ON sinners, and that furthermore, no one could teach them anything.
Meanwhile, the man born blind, who was not sure of anything—he was the one who eventually saw the light. It was the one and only thing he was absolutely sure about: that he could see. If that made Jesus a heretic, then he sincerely hoped that he would be allowed to be one too.
What if it is not God and I believe? What if it is God and I don’t? I do not know which question the blind man asked himself when Jesus was rubbing mud on his eyes, or whether he was too busy being healed to ask any questions at all, but I do know what he had to say afterwards.
“I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, and though I was blind, now I see.” Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor