Eyes Wide Shut

Lent 4A: John 9:1-41

Sight, the ability to perceive things outside ourselves, is a very important sense. The most important sense of our five senses actually. Psychologists who have studied the senses say that over 80% of the information we take in comes from our sense of sight. The importance of sight can be seen even in how animals develop. Often the eyes of the embryo develop before other systems, like the skeleton and digestive system. I once came across a chicken egg in my coup that was cracked open and in it was an undeveloped chick. Even before it had a skeleton, you could clearly see the eyes. They were huge, far bigger than the brain, which I guess is not all that surprising considering we are talking about a chicken brain.

We take eyes for granted, but they are amazing. The eye itself can take in 10 million pieces of information per second and transfer them to our brain. Simply by looking at something we gain an initial impression of its form and color, size and distance, as well as their state (solid or liquid). Organisms that can see have a distinct advantage over those that can’t. Sight allows us to recognize prey, or an enemy, at a distance. If we had to wait until we could taste, smell or touch them, it’d clearly too late to get away. At the same time, sight is very useful for judging things that are close to us, like food. Sight can tell us whether our meat is well cooked, or how sour a piece of fruit might be. Pinkish strawberries are rather sour, whereas we associate deep red with a much sweeter taste. We can also see when food is past its prime - moldy bread or cheese, for example. Point is, sight is indispensable for our getting around in the world, and keeping us safe.

And yet not everyone is able to take advantage of the joys of sight. Some people, like the man in today’s Gospel lesson, cannot see. In this guy’s case, he had never been able to see. He was born blind. He had gone his whole life cut off from the visible world, never knowing what his parents looked like or able to recognize the smile of a friend. He had never read the Torah, never saw to the beauty of a sunset or the splendor of the Temple in Jerusalem. He missed out on all of that, never knew it.

But then Jesus comes along. The encounter happens in part in response to the disciples’ curiosity. They see the man as they walk by him and it sparks a question: “Jesus, who sinned—the man himself or his parents—that he was born blind?” The disciples were giving voice to what many Jews in Jesus’ day believed, that disease and suffering were due to sin. To Jesus, though, they are asking the wrong question. In the first place, he understands that their question comes not from compassion, but from speculation, wanting to understand the ways of God, why bad things happen to good people, in a general sense, not because they particularly care about this guy. In fact, the way they pose the question, who sinned?, serves only to distance the disciples from this man and his plight. If they could figure out who was at fault, where’s the justice in it, then they could walk away secure in the knowledge that things are working out just as God intended. Jesus had declared, “I am the light of the world.” But the disciples are more concerned with explaining the darkness.

But Jesus is not interested in going along with that way of thinking. Instead, Jesus means to make an illustration of this man, a positive example, a sign of God’s power and glory. I mean, what better opportunity to show what it means that Jesus is the light of the world, than to bring light to this man, who’s lived his entire life in the dark?

And so Jesus bends down, makes some mud with his spit, rubs it on the man’s eyes, and has him go wash in the nearby pool. When he comes back—miracle of miracles!—the man is able to see for the first time ever. The man is understandably amazed, overwhelmed. Never before had he been able to see the world, but now he could.

And then “there was much rejoicing throughout the city.” Well, not really. Not everyone is thrilled by the miracle. Some are stuck in disbelief, but the stick-in-the-mud Pharisees couldn’t accept it even if they wanted to. And as a point of fact, they didn’t. Ok, maybe the man was healed, but Jesus didn’t do it the right way. He had no credentials, no license to perform miracles, and he did it on the wrong day, on the Sabbath. It just isn’t proper.

It’s a shame that the whole rest of this passage is taken up with the Pharisees’ dispute over the legitimacy of Jesus’ action, whether the healing proves Jesus comes from God, or whether it shows him to be a sinner, because he healed on the sabbath. It’s a shame that the petty Pharisees couldn’t look beyond their own nose. But it’s even more of a shame because it obscures the significance of the act of healing itself.

The healing of the man born blind is significant if only because it had never been done before. No one had ever gained sight when they were born without it. Not in the Old Testament, nor in any stories from ancient times that I can recall. It was a miracle without parallel. It entailed not just fixing a damaged organ but essentially creating new ones, new eyes.

But beyond the physical healing, more important is what is signified by the miracle. You see, as with other passages in John’s gospel, there is the literal level – congenital physical blindness; and also a figurative level—spiritual blindness. The man born blind suffered, we assume, from both conditions—he couldn’t see and he had no vision, no spiritual sight.

This is not his fault, mind you—at least not in the way the disciples suggest. The fact that the man had no spiritual sight is a universal condition, something we all suffer from. None of us comes into this world bearing any spiritual competence or giftings. Contrary to common assumptions about the “inherent goodness of humanity,” spiritual virtue does not come naturally. As Northrop Frye observed: “We’re not born loving: we’re born sentimental and gregarious, and vociferously demanding to be loved. We’re not born with hope: we’re born with an instinct for survival; and we’re certainly not born with faith: we’re born credulous, gullible, and superstitious.”

Insofar as we are born of the flesh, then, we are by nature spiritually blind. And it is only because God has intervened, has shed light on the world, that we are able to see spiritual truth at all. What this means is that, contrary to how we often treat it, Christianity is not something that’s natural, that we can extrapolate just from looking at life. You can’t come up with it from long walks in the woods or ruminating in your thoughts while sitting quietly in your study. It’s not something you can calculate or test or devise. It’s got to be shown, revealed to us. We’ve got to have a revelation—it’s got to come as a gift.

And that is what Jesus offers, what following him brings us, the light of the world that illumines and reveals the truth of the way things are. It is by this light, his light, that we are able to truly see.

This is why Jesus suggests that the Pharisees are in fact blind. The effect of Jesus’ coming is to throw light on our situation, to reveal God’s work in the world to us and to spotlight our sinfulness, our shortcomings and need for God. But there are some who prefer to stay in the dark, to keep out of the light. Either because they want their crooked hearts and misdeeds to stay hidden, or because staying in the dark means they don’t have to deal with reality, with the truth of Jesus.

This is where the Pharisees are at in this passage. Rather than reckon with what it means that Jesus can heal a man born blind, they’d rather come up with all the reasons why he couldn’t have done it, dismissing Jesus and the formerly blind man as sinners, so as to protect their rigid view of the world. But as Hellen Keller observed, “The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.” That was the situation the Pharisees were in, having sight but no vision. And for all their focus on sin, the Pharisees fail to understand what sin is, what sin looks like here. Here sin is not primarily the presence of illness in a person, or violations of the law. Rather, it’s failing to be open to the revelation of God in Jesus. And so by refusing to open their eyes to what God was doing through Jesus, they were proving their own blindness and sin. The Jewish book of the Talmud points to the reason for their blindness: "We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are." Because the Pharisees were spiritually blind, they couldn’t see Jesus for who he is. He tried to show them, but their eyes were wide shut.

This is a serious failure, because seeing, having spiritual sight, is necessary for knowing God. As Rabbi Harold Kushner writes in his book, Who Needs God: "Religion is not primarily a set of beliefs, a collection of prayers or a series of rituals. Religion is first and foremost a way of seeing. It can't change the facts about the world we live in, but it can change the way we see those facts, and that in itself can often make a difference."

Bishop Robert Barron says much the same thing about the Christian faith:

Christianity is, above all, a way of seeing. Everything else in Christian life flows from and circles around the transformation of vision. Christians see differently, and that is why their prayer, their worship, their action, their whole way of being in the world, has a distinctive accent and flavor. What unites figures as diverse as James Joyce, Caravaggio, John Milton, the architect of Chartres, Dorothy Day, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the later Bob Dylan is a peculiar and distinctive take on things, a style, a way, which flows finally from Jesus of Nazareth.

Before Barron, you have Origen of Alexandria, who remarked that holiness is seeing with the eyes of Christ. Teilhard de Chardin said with great passion that his mission as a Christian thinker was to help people see, and Thomas Aquinas said that the ultimate goal of the Christian life is a "beatific vision," an act of seeing. And in the past century, you have CS Lewis who remarked, "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.”

Lewis explains his point more vividly in his parable about a toolshed. He was once in a dark toolshed. Outside the sun was shining and he could see a bit of it, coming through a crack above the door. From where he was standing, he could see the beam of light with specks of dust floating in it. It was the most striking thing in the shed. Everything else was pitch back. But then he shifted his position, so that the beam struck his eyes straight on, and he could no longer see the toolshed or the beam, but he could instead see the world outside, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90-odd million miles away, the sun. In the first instance, he reflected, he was “looking at” the light, but with the second he was “looking along” it. The same thing can happen with Christianity, he notes. It’s one thing to “look at” Christianity, at Jesus, but it’s completely different thing to “look along” him. But, Lewis contends, only by “looking along” him can we really know Jesus and his ways.

And so we understand that, in declaring himself to be the “light of the world,” Jesus invites us not simply to look at him, to bathe in his radiance, but more importantly to see the world through him, “along” his light, to see the world and God and ourselves in light of what Jesus reveals to us. For only in his light, his marvelous light, can we see the world as it really is. Thanks be to God!