Enlightenment


  

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.

Few things in life can match the experience of suddenly understanding. It feels like a switch being flipped in your brain, with an almost audible click. It’s not only that you’ve learned something new, but also that this new idea changes everything else, before, behind, beyond, making connections that you never knew were there. For an instant, the mind within and the world without merge, becoming one, and the result can only be described as bliss. I was blind, but now I see.

Vision is a metaphor all throughout the Gospel of John. He begins by describing the Word of God as light shining within the darkness. When people encounter the Johannine Jesus, He invites them to “come and see.” Hearing is important; hearing calls us to Christ; but then we must see Him for ourselves. And the wonders Jesus works, for John, are not simply miracles but signs. They show us who and what Christ is. They show us the Kingdom of God.

When I served a parish in Boston, certain members of the congregation lived with varying degrees of blindness. They did not appreciate John’s emphasis on sight, and certainly I could sympathize. Blindness oughtn’t have the stigma it once held. But John of course is not speaking simply of physical sight, but of spiritual enlightenment. When John writes of light, He doesn’t mean literal photons, but truth, Truth with a capital T. Sight and light are metaphors for that eureka moment, that flash of understanding.

This is why kids are so happy, why they laugh 100 times per day. It isn’t just that they don’t have to pay taxes, or that they haven’t had their little hearts broken as of yet. It’s that everything is new and fresh and wonderful, constantly learning, constantly discovering, absorbing reality like a sponge. And it’s bliss. It’s ecstasy. We grope about in a darkened room and then somebody turns on the light. That’s how kids feel every day. And that indeed is how religion ought to feel.

There are no depths to God, you see, no limits to His horizon, no bottom to that ocean. In God there is always more to discover, always more to learn. For as vast as our universe has proven itself to be, the worlds of the spirit prove yet greater. No matter how well we think of God, God forever will be better, infinitely better. This is the source of the old adage that if the you of five years ago wouldn’t consider the you of today at least a little bit of a heretic, then we probably aren’t growing in our faith.

“The best thing for being sad,” wrote T.H. White, in the voice of the wizard Merlin, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails.

You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn … That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you.

In our Gospel reading this morning, Jesus encounters a man born blind. And of course His Apostles want to know why. Why was this man born disabled? Why was he born less? You can hear the horror in their voices, and their accusation. A sighted person receives some 90% of sensory information through their eyes. The notion of losing that is terrifying. But in classical antiquity, it might’ve been even worse. One couldn’t expect to find a job, or have a family, or live independently on one’s own.

And without a sighted son, parents had no hope of future support in their dotage. Children were social security back then. I mean, they still are, but a step removed by taxes.

The unfairness of it, the injustice of this man’s situation, rankles the Apostles. Surely a just God wouldn’t let this happen unless the man deserved it, or perhaps his parents. Yes, sin is the culprit here, sin and not a fallen world’s vicissitudes. It’s a very natural reaction for the Apostles to have, very human; but also very selfish. They want some divinely-sanctioned justification as to why this wouldn’t happen to them, or to their children. They need a little karma in order to shift the blame.

But Christ has little patience for the blaming of the victim. Nobody sinned here, He says, at least not any more than anybody else. He was born for the same reason that you were: that the works of God might be revealed to and through him. “As long as I am in the world,” Jesus says, “I am the light of the world.” And so, with a little mud and some spit, Jesus grants this man his sight.

This is the part of the story that I imagine to be the most wondrous. For here we have a man who was not blinded, who did not lose his sight, but who never possessed it to begin with. He has received an entirely new sense. For us it is impossible to imagine a new color; we can only come up with combinations of the ones we know. This man is seeing every color, all at once, for the very first time! He has never before known light, and so has never before known darkness. He saw nothing.

With modern medical miracles, people born blind have been given sight later in life, and at first they don’t know what to do with it. How could they? When shown both a cube and a sphere, they didn’t know which one might be which—not until they could familiarize by touch, to associate one vision as pointy, the other as round. Their brains had to make the new connection between the world they had known, through their other senses, and the world they now could see.

The reaction to Jesus’ healing is hostility. People know, or think they know, how to treat a blind beggar, but they don’t know what to make of this miraculous restoration. Clearly Jesus’ opponents don’t want to admit that this Galilean rabbi has done good. They would rather be willfully blind. So they try to make the beggar out to be a fraud, a huckster, an impostor, anything but what he truly is: a man immersed in wonder. He doesn’t know how this happened, only that his world is changed. He was blind, but now he sees.

I rather strongly suspect, in this story, that John is making a number of allusions to other well-known tales: to the Emperor Vespasian curing a blind man by spitting on him, for example; or to Plato’s universally popular Allegory of the Cave. In that latter account, a man born and bred entrapped in a cave one day emerges to see the sun, and by it everything else. Yet when he returns to the cave to tell his friends the nature of reality, the nature of what he has seen, none of them believe him.

Instead they go so far as to accuse him of having gone blind himself—for to them only the shadows could be real. That ought to sound familiar.

Yet for all of John’s talk about Christ as the light of the world, Christ bringing sight to the blind, what is it that Jesus reveals for John? What exactly is the truth that John would have us understand? For indeed, light reveals not only itself but everything around it. And to that, the answer is simple: Jesus reveals God. His life, death, and resurrection show us who and what God is. “Anyone who has seen Me sees the Father,” Jesus said.

As the sun shines its rays upon the earth to warm and to enlighten it, so the Father sends His Son into our world, that God the Holy Spirit, Jesus’ Spirit, might now dwell in us. Before this holy Gospel, we groped about in darkness, attempting to discern God in pagan myths or in philosophy. Then the Hebrew Scriptures called us to the Christ; so that now we see God for ourselves, in the light of Jesus. Jesus shows us God, for He is God on earth.

Once we see that, once we get that, it’s like an audible click in our heads, the bliss of sudden understanding. And it changes how we live, how we pray, how we read our Bibles. It changes who we are, for everything is different now, everything connected, everything enlightened. We were blind but now we see. For the light shines in the darkness. And the darkness has not overcome it.

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







Pertinent Links

RDG Stout
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St Peter’s Lutheran
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