The Landscape of Lent: Mud

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.