Image Source (interesting insight about these struggling brick makers in India) |
March 30, 2014 - Fourth Sunday in Lent
John 9:1-15, 24-34, 39-41
9 As he walked along, Jesus
saw a man blind from birth. 2 His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who
sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” 3 Jesus
answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that
God’s works might be revealed in him. 4 We must work the works of
him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. 5 As
long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” 6 When he
had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread
the mud on the man’s eyes, 7 saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool
of Siloam” (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to
see. 8 The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar
began to ask, “Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?” 9 Some
were saying, “It is he.” Others were saying, “No, but it is someone like him.”
He kept saying, “I am the man.” 10 But they kept asking him, “Then
how were your eyes opened?” 11 He answered, “The man called Jesus
made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’ Then I
went and washed and received my sight.” 12 They said to him, “Where
is he?” He said, “I do not know.”
13 They brought to the
Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. 14 Now it was a
sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. 15 Then
the Pharisees also began to ask him how he had received his sight. He said to
them, “He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see.”
24 So for the second time they called the man who
had been blind, and they said to him, “Give glory to God! We know that this man
is a sinner.” 25 He answered, “I do not know whether he is a
sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” 26 They
said to him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” 27 He
answered them, “I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you
want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?” 28 Then
they reviled him, saying, “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses.
29 We
know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he
comes from.” 30 The man answered, “Here is an astonishing thing!
You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. 31 We
know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who
worships him and obeys his will. 32 Never since the world began
has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. 33 If
this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” 34 They
answered him, “You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?”
And they drove him out.
39 Jesus said, “I came into
this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do
see may become blind.” 40 Some of the Pharisees near him heard this
and said to him, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” 41 Jesus said
to them, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We
see,’ your sin remains.
Sermon: “The Landscape of Lent: Mud”
I detest
scary movies. Well, today’s scary
movies, that is. I have no interest
whatsoever in seeing anything with
saw, horror, haunting or Halloween in the title. Give me Hitchcock over Hannibal Lector, any
day. My favorite scary movie, though,
admittedly drawing from the tiny pool of those I’d actually watch, stars Audrey
Hepburn. In this movie by Terence Young,
Audrey plays a blind woman who unfortunately finds herself in a game of
cat-and-mouse with murderous drug dealers.
She accidentally winds up with a doll stuffed full of drugs and the
criminals searching for it discover she has it and break into her apartment.
Anyone
know the name of it? Wait Until
Dark. It’s creepy, right? Her blindness that could be seen as a
disadvantage becomes her advantage as she evades those trying to attack her by
breaking all of the lightbulbs in the house, plunging it into darkness that
doesn’t phase her, but will keep them from being able to find her. But just when we get certain she’s outwitted
them, that downfall of many an American on a diet proves a threat: the
refrigerator! It has a light of course,
and she forgot to unplug it. The clever
drug dealer opens the door and can find her, but finally she overcomes him and,
in the act of unplugging the fridge, plunging the apartment back into total
darkness, she saves her own life, of course at the very last possible
minute. Now, that is a scary movie, y’all.
Her blindness was her salvation, in the end.
The
blind man in our reading from John this morning also found salvation through
his inability to see. He had been
reduced to a life of begging to survive, and Jesus disciples decided to use him
as a guinea pig for figuring out Jesus’ understanding of sin. “Who sinned, Rabbi,” they asked, “that this
man is born blind: him or his parents?”
But Jesus wasn’t in the business of using people on the margins of
society as pawns for a theological lesson.
He was in the business of healing them.
“Neither,”
Jesus said. “But because he happens to
be blind, my glory is going to shine through him even brighter.” And then, to prove the point, Jesus spat on
the ground and made mud. Those disciples
might have been thinking this was an odd moment to choose to make mud pies, but
Jesus knew what he was doing.
He
smeared that earthy substance on the man’s eyes and told him to go, wash in
pool of Siloam, and he would be healed of his blindness. And he did.
And he was. Healed of his
blindness. If only it was so easy to
heal the Pharisees – the religious elite – of their blindness.
But, I’m
getting ahead of myself: I want to think a moment about that muddy
miracle. Why the spit and dirt? Why the mud?
Was such an (admittedly gross) exercise really necessary for Jesus to
heal the blind man?
It’s
really fun, actually, to hear the different theories people have for why Jesus
used mud.
Some say
saliva was used to treat blindness in Jesus’ day (ew, but this still doesn’t
answer the question of mud).
Others
make a connection with Genesis our reading today, making people out of dirt of
the ground.
A particularly
creative person said rubbing mud on someone is offensive, just as the gospel is
offensive to some people.
My
favorite blind interpretation (forgive the pun) is that the blind man probably
had no eyes to begin with, so Jesus showed his divine nature by actually making
them out of the clay (like in Genesis).
Jesus the Eyeball Sculptor! A bit
creepy, isn’t it?
The
truth is, we don’t know why Jesus used mud.
And we don’t know why that blind man had to go wash in the pool of
Siloam to be healed, either. Jesus did
not need mud to heal that man. He could have done it without sticking mud in
his eyes. But he chose not to. Which is really fascinating to me.
He chose
to use something tangible, something that could be explained and seen and felt,
something as ordinary as mud, to do something that could not be explained or
understood. And I don’t think this is
because Jesus needed to heal that way. I
think this is because the blind man needed to be healed that way. And those skeptical religious leaders needed
to see it happen in that way.
When God
uses earthly means to bring divine wholeness – such as mud, or medicine, or
doctors, or counselors, or the small kindnesses of strangers – this isn’t
because God can only work that way,
it’s because we need such
things. We do not need the sort of
healing that is experienced on some spiritual plane, far above and beyond the
struggles and trials of this life. We
need a healing that is tangible, tell-able, transformative in the muddy,
everyday grittiness of this life.
And God
knows this. So God, who is so far beyond
us, who did make us out of the dirt of the ground (in whatever way we
understand that to have happened), sheds a little bit of glory to kneel in
front of us, get God’s hands dirty and bring wholeness. And God, who doesn’t need our help at all to
do this, chooses to involve us in our own healing and the healing of others.
This is
why I believe that blind man’s healing was half what Jesus did in putting mud
on his eyes, and half in going himself to wash it off in the pool of Siloam,
meaning Sent. The blind man had a part
to play in his own healing. We have a
part to play in seeking the wholeness God has for us, our community, our
nation, our world. Because healing
absolutely has to be earthly. How can
someone believe in the sort of spiritual peace God brings if another human
being hasn’t ever shown them compassion or love on this earth?
I wish
that the blind man had experienced a bit of that before he met Jesus. We have reason to believe he hadn’t. And worse, after his healing, the religious
leaders were even more hateful to him.
They called his parents in for questioning, grilled him on how this
so-called healing happened and eventually chucked him out of the synagogue,
continuing to exclude him from worshipping God, naming him as some sort of
con-artist. All of this is because they
were blind to the wholeness God could bring, blind to the fact that Jesus was
capable of acting outside of the carefully-orchestrated religious establishment.
This
story ends with one man being cured of his blindness and many, many more
continuing to fumble around in the dark because their vision of God’s work in
the world was all black-and-white, all certainty and no mystery, all power and
no vulnerability, all cleanliness and no mud.
Jesus
ends this story just as it began, with a question of who sinned to cause such
blindness. Jesus began by saying that it
was not sin that made the blind man unable to see from birth. He ends with quite a different statement – it
is exactly that, sin, which makes the Pharisees blind to God’s glory right in
front of their eyes, in the eyes of one they could only ever see as
“other.”
And so
the question for us is, are we sinfully clinging to a narrow vision of God and
our neighbor and thus blind to God working in the mud and mire of this
world? Or are we desperately seeking
after the wholeness God brings, using every possible earthly means to discover
it, and playing our role in the healing of ourselves, our neighbors and our
world?
Choosing
the first means a black-and-white world where people only get what they
deserve, grace is an extravagance we can’t afford, and wholeness is just a mud-pie-in-the-sky-dream. But choosing the
second (which I hope we will) means we are all of us sinners fumbling in the
dark toward salvation, but people who know amazing grace, people who once were
lost but now are found, who were blind but now, in ways we cannot explain or
understand, see. Thanks be to God! Amen.