Lit Up

Propers: Laetare Sunday, AD 2023 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Try to imagine a new color. Did you ever have that thought exercise in school? Try to imagine a color unlike any you’ve seen before, differing not simply in shade or tone but in quality. You can’t do it, can you? I certainly can’t. Even devices that allow us to view portions of the electromagnetic spectrum beyond the range of normal human eyesight only do so by translating those wavelengths into existing visible colors, so that infrared looks red and ultraviolet looks violet.

When I was a kid, we were taught that the tongue can detect four different basic flavors: sour, salty, sweet, and bitter, right? It was a big deal when they added a fifth flavor, umami, or savoriness. But again, that wasn’t actually a new taste, was it? It had always been there. We simply hadn’t classified it as such. It’s hard to imagine—perhaps impossible to imagine—any sort of flavor that can’t be described as some combination of sour, salty, savory, sweet, or bitter. That’s just not in our toolbox.

What must it have been like, then, for this man born blind? It’s not just that he couldn’t imagine a new color, but that he could not conceive of any color, of color itself. How could he? He had never seen anything in his life, ever. His was a world of sound and scent and taste and touch but not light—and not even properly darkness, for if you’ve never seen the light, how can you know what darkness is? How could someone know silence if they’ve never heard a sound?

Out of nowhere this fellow, this Jesus, this Rabbi, comes along, spits on the ground, spreads mud on your useless eyes, and tells you to go bathe in the Pool of Siloam, the end point of the tunnel built by King Hezekiah to provide water to Jerusalem. And then your world explodes! My God, what must it be like, never to have seen a thing, and then to have one’s eyes wide open? Light, shape, color, movement. Faces! 90% of a sighted person’s sensory information comes in through the eyes. This man’s world has expanded tenfold in an instant.

And he is overcome with gratitude, wonder, and joy. I once was blind and now I see. And I see everything: the sun, the sky, the clouds, the temple, my people, my parents. This quite understandably created something of an uproar. He was, after all, a local, a well-known fellow, and here he is crowing about someone repairing his eyes. And when the crowd asks him who, who did this, what can he say? “I don’t know.” Of course he doesn’t know; he was blind. And this upsets the Pharisees.

Now, the Pharisees get a fairly bad rap in our reading of the New Testament, but it should be pointed out that there appear to have been as many Pharisees for Jesus as against Him. Paul is a Pharisee. Many of the early Christians were Pharisees. A Pharisee warns Jesus about King Herod. So who were they?

The Pharisees were a school of thought or social movement within Judaism, which emphasized the Law over the Temple, everyday piety over social position. Generally they embraced what Jesus called “the traditions of the elders” or the Oral Law, a hedge of laws beyond the written Law of Moses meant to ensure holiness. Fairly or not, I tend to think of them as the middle-class “moral majority,” over and against the Sadducees, who were the institutional establishment elite.

The Pharisees are upset because here occurred a miracle, a hubbub of a healing, on the Sabbath day, and no-one is to work, to do labor, upon the Sabbath day, not even healing. So they say whoever did this must’ve be an ungodly man, a lawbreaker. The man born blind says, “Hey, I don’t know anything about that. I hardly knew his name. All I know is that I was blind and now I see. And how could such a good thing not be of God?” To my reading, he has this air of dazed ecstasy about him.

And that quip just cheeses the Pharisees off. “You were born entirely in sins,” they snap, “and you presume to teach us?” Aye, there’s the rub: sin. The Pharisees are making the same first-century assumption that Jesus’ disciples did at the beginning of this tale: namely, that the man’s blindness must be the result of sin. It’s karma. He’s blind because he deserves it. They want to blame the victim.

And we mustn’t be too hard on the Pharisees because we tend to do the exact same thing, don’t we? I think it’s a very natural, knee-jerk, human response, to look at a tragedy and immediately say, “Whose fault is this? Who sinned here?” Very human, but also very selfish. It’s a way for us to explain the pain away, to rationalize reasons for why it shouldn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t happen to us.

A hurricane hits a major city, and televangelists blame the sinners. Wildfires wipe out Californian communities, and we say, “Why would they build there?” Bad things happen and we want to blame the victim, because the alternative frightens us. The alternative is that ours is a broken world, a fallen world, where bad things happen to good people, and material security is largely an illusion.

Jesus’ response to tragedy—which is to say, God’s response to tragedy—is to fight it: to heal the sick, feed the hungry, free the oppressed, restore the outcast, rebuke the sinner, forgive the repentant, and raise all the dead up to life. Not to make excuses. Not to cast blame. But to open the doors of the Kingdom to all.

Now, much more could be said about this man’s healing—the fifth of Jesus’ miraculous signs in the Gospel according to John—regarding its symbolic or allegorical value, of darkness to light, blindness to sight, unbelief to faith in Christ. Moreover, this man’s tale can be seen as a shadow of Jesus’ own. The passage which we read this morning, an entire chapter of John’s Gospel, is the longest stretch in any of the Gospels, apart from the nativity narratives, that does not have Christ in it.

It’s like a side story, or perhaps a theatrical drama, in which the man born blind represents Jesus Himself. Both are questioned by the crowd; both boldly assert that “I am”; both speak clearly and honestly yet are treated as unreliable witnesses; and both, when accused by the Pharisees of sin, respond with sarcastic truth. All in all, it’s an effective little literary device. And it displays for us how those who have been healed by Christ are conformed naturally to His image and continue His work, becoming “little Christs”—literally Christians. And that’s all well and good. That’s all true.

Yet I keep returning to that moment of shocking enlightenment, of unmitigated joy, when for the first time in his entire life this man could see the world, and what that must have been like. How could he even have categories for what he was seeing? Of course gaining his sight in no way invalidated what he knew from a lifetime of careful observation, of scent and sound and taste and touch. But how much more must now be added to his understanding, his experience, his elation? He has not simply discovered a new and unimagined color; he has discovered all colors.

And honestly, that’s what religion should be like. Religion should be a light from above that explodes our world in wonder, in color, in undreamt of vibrant life. I’m not saying that everybody gets this eureka moment, struck with a bolt from the blue. For most of us, faith is a lifelong journey full of patience, discouragement, tedium, and trust, punctuated by flashes of insight, fleeting moments of spiritual bliss. In seminary they spoke of glimpsing the truth in the shards of a shattered mirror.

The life of faith should make our world brighter. It should intensify rather than contradict the truths that we already know. It should fill us up to bursting, suffuse our very being, with gratitude and delight. We should say, “I was blind but now I see!” Christ is the Light of the world, shining in our darkness, illuminating the beauty of Creation, revealing the pure and utter goodness of our God, which cannot be overcome by the pains and tribulations and tragedies of this world, but which ever responds in selfless, self-giving, depthless, deathless love.

My whole life, as a pastor, as a Christian, I have sought and fought and striven to communicate this: in preaching, in teaching, in liturgy and life. God is the Light who fills us with light. And once we see that, once we see Him, our world in brilliance bursts. No-one can take that from us. No-one can snuff out that flame. And someday the little light that we hold will burn and bathe the cosmos in the white-hot grace of God.

I was blind but now I see, and I cannot ever close my eyes.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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