Seeing But Not Seeing

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 03.30.14

Scripture Lesson:  John 9:1-41

It happens with remarkable frequency.  You’d figure, after all of these years, I’d know better, or have figured out a way not to do this.  I’m pulling things together, typically on a Sunday morning.  Sermon text printed out? Check. Phone? Check? Bible? Check.  Pants? Check.

It’s important to have a thorough list.  Trust me on this one.

Everything will be together, and I’ll suit up, and be raring to roll, and I’m right on time.  I’ll go to the place where my keys are, that hook where I always hang them. 

 There’s the place they are meant to be.  But they are not in that spot.

I  know I must have put them there.  That is the place they go.  It is inconceivable that they might be anywhere else, absolutely inconceivable, I think, ignoring my inner Inigo Montoya, who chides me at the misuse of that word.  But they are not there.  The last time I saw them was the day before, at some point. And that means I have no idea where they might be.  I check the pants from the previous day.  Nope.  I dig around in one or another of the jackets I wear.  Nope and nope.  I look at the hook again, hoping that maybe they might rematerialize from whatever rift in space-time caused their disappearance in the first place.

This is where things start getting mildly panicked.  This is when I go to the wicker basket that lives in the kitchen, the one we called “the important bowl,” and which is now filled with random debris.  And in it I find mysterious keys and scratched-off iTunes gift cards, old pocketknives and Lego figurines, marbles and the wristband my thirteen year old wore when he was born.  Boy, it says, with a weight and a date and a number.  Yes, that is an important object.  Sure.  But Not. My. Keys.  So I go tromping down the stairs, the whole time wishing I didn’t have boots on that weighed ten pounds a piece.  Maybe by the computer?  I glance into the study.  And there’s nothing.  Not a thing.  Drat.  Then it’s tromping back up the stairs, faster this time, and starting to panic and sweat into my suit.  I need those keys.

My mind inevitably goes to into full on blame mode.  I always put them there.  Always.  Surely, surely, someone else is to blame. Someone is at fault!  There should be a Congressional hearing!  There must be justice!  Grumble, grumble, grumble.  Who moved them?!   But no-one has moved them.  Who took them?!  They have not been stolen by roving key-bandits.  Mischievous gnomes are in no way involved.  I simply have not placed them where they go.

I check the hook again.  Still not there.  I stomp to the bedroom, and check the pants again.  Still not there.  I return to the “important bowl.”  Still not there.

Only I realize, as I’m preparing to start weeping like a baby, that the keys may not be in the important bowl, but they’re sitting right next to it.  There they are.  They were right there, right underneath the hook, right next to the bowl, where I set them down without thinking. 

I had looked at them, not right at them, but at them.  And though they were right there, in all their reality, I simply could not see them.  My retinas sent a stereoscopic stream of signals down my optic nerve to my primary visual cortex at eleven point five frames per second, and there the keys were, right in the images my mind was receiving and knitting together.  But I couldn’t process it, couldn’t see it, even though it was right there in front of me.

Because there is seeing, and there is perceiving and understanding what we see.

Today’s extended passage from the Gospel of John shows us a remarkable exchange between Jesus and a man who has been blind from birth. 

It’s a striking tale, for several reasons. It starts with Jesus walking, strolling along with his posse, and catching sight of a man.  He’s a beggar, one who had never been able to see. If you were blind in ancient Judah, that would have been your destiny.  Unable to farm, unable to read, you’d pretty much be stuck. 

It’s a healing, of course, a miracle, one of the series of seven signs that Jesus performs in John’s retelling of his story. Like all of the stories that John’s Gospel tells, it’s deeply, personally human. It revolves around a series of conversations, exchanges between a man who was born without the ability to see.  

Jesus heals him, but in a peculiar way.  He takes dirt and spit and places the spit-mud on this man’s eyes.  It evokes, if we listen carefully to it with the ears of the Spirit, the story of creation, calling us back to Eden, and the God who sinks his hands down deep into the clay to make the creature of earth.  It’s less a story of fixing someone, and more a story of re-creating them.  

And that’s all well and good.  He’s made again, and made whole.

People can’t believe it’s him. Can this be him?  Suddenly he’s being challenged by some of the Pharisees. They can’t believe that Jesus has done this thing, even after the blind man tells them himself.  They grill the nameless guy, and he answers, holding his own against their questioning...in fact, doing so well that they can’t rebut him, and toss him out of the synagogue.  They can see him, right there, the guy who used to be blind, and now sees.

But though they see what is happening, they just can’t quite bring themselves to process what it is they’re observing.  Which makes sense, if you think about it.  Here you know a person to be one way.  It defines them.  It is who they are.  And then suddenly, the characteristic that you’d used to grasp who they are is shattered.  It can’t be him.  How can that be the person?   

What’s a particular challenge to them is that, as far as they were concerned, he was blind because he’d done something wrong.  He had to have done something wrong.  Somewhere, someone had messed up.  That had to be true.  Somewhere, sin had to be involved.  Someone was to blame.  Either it was the parents, or the man, or Jesus himself, working as the agent of some dark and sinister power that heals blind men on the sabbath.

They just can’t quite bring themselves to see the reality that is right in front of them.  Instead, they encounter a reality that reflects what they want to see.  For many of the Pharisees, that reality was the the inescapable truth that suffering is a punishment for sin.  The wicked perish.  The righteous prosper.  That was the whole point of existence.  They saw every human being through that lens, their success or their suffering, their triumph or their tragedy.

Which, as it so happens, is exactly how the disciples responded when they walked past the guy at the beginning of the story.  Remember the question, the one from the very beginning of the story?  “Rabbi, who sinned, the man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

And Jesus answers, neither.  What he says after that is actually a little different than the English in the New Revised Standard Version.  Our pew bibles have Jesus saying, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”

That just sounds all kinds of wrong.  If you take it all alone, it kind of bites.  God made this guy spend his entire life as a blind beggar, so that Jesus could heal him? Dude, that’s harsh. When I’ve been in conversation with aggressive online atheists, this is one of the Gospel verses they like to throw at me.  Look at this terrible, terrible, monstrous Sky-Daddy God of yours, who blinded a baby just so Jesus could make a point.  That God’s not real, of course, they add, but if that God were real, we’d hate that God.

But the story as John tells it...not just one verse, but the whole story...is very different.  In the verse itself, the words “he was born blind” are not there in the Greek of the Gospel.  It simply says, and here I’ll use the exact sentence construction of John’s Gospel:

Neither this man sinned nor the parents of him, but that might be manifested the works of God in him.

Greek is a different language, with a different way of speaking.  And as we wrap our heads around the oddness of that phrase, it begins to take us to a different place, and a different way of seeing.

It isn’t about the “why” of the man being born blind.  It’s about the response we have when we encounter suffering.  Do we blame the person, finding the ways we can justify their suffering to ourselves?  They aren’t doing well, because they aren’t right with God. They aren’t prospering, because they haven’t prayed hard enough or in the right way. They got sick, because they didn’t take care of themselves the way they should have.

That is the way that Pharisees think.  They look right at a human being, and find reasons to see why they deserve what they’re getting.  

What they do not see is what Jesus sees: that the only thing we should be thinking about in this encounter is how to use the life we have been given to show grace to such a soul.  Right now I’m the light of the world, he says. And seeing this man and his suffering through the light that burns in me right now, I know what I must do.

That way of seeing everyone around us is that lost key, for which we struggle and frantically search, the one that opens the door to new life.

That way of seeing is how Jesus sees.  It is the light by which we are to encounter the world. 

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.