Now I see – 28 March 2014, Lent IV

This Sunday the lectionary chooses another lengthy and complex story for us --  Jesus’ healing of the blind man, and all that followed.  The man was blind from birth.  The disciples ask Jesus whose fault it is.  Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents…?  Typically we have to know who to blame.  It is very convenient for some to blame God, a tyrant and an arbitrary God who declines to stop cruel things happening.  “He didn’t deserve that… an innocent child…” reactions we constantly hear when things go wrong.  Jesus says categorically, Neither this man sinned nor his parents…  Contemplative, mature understanding does include leaving behind these infantile and idolatrous concepts of God and the world.  It does entail making peace with our own frailty, vulnerability and mortality.

The story then throws up another infantilism in the church.  The man had been healed of his congenital blindness.  That, you would think, is something to be glad about.  But in the church it is seldom so simple – and this story, scholars think, in the way it is told, reflects quite serious problems in the early Christian Jewish and Gentile communities.  People were skeptical and critical of what the man was telling them, but when they demanded to know from him, How were your eyes opened…?  who did it…?  where is he…? the man tells them all, I do not know.  People want answers, explanations, perhaps a reason to show that it’s all a hoax.  The man has not become a disciple. Better people than him have not been healed.   All he knows, he says, is that he encountered the man called Jesus, and he doesn’t know where Jesus is now.  But the fact is, he can now see.

So the Pharisees take a hand in it – and believe me, that is not good news.  What interests them is not so much wonder and gratitude that a blind man can now see, as that it had been done on the Sabbath.  That is against the rules.  The rules must be reasserted and strengthened.  And what follows is a good old-fashioned religious melt-down, an inquiry, an inquisition.  The man himself is interrogated twice, his parents are interrogated, everyone gets exasperated and the Pharisees become pompous and indignant.  It is all set in contrast by the storyteller when the man once again encounters Jesus.  Jesus had heard that he was in trouble with the church, and had come looking for him.  Jesus makes this remarkable statement:  I came into the world… so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.  It was a straight confrontation between those who are sure they see but don’t – and those who may be unsure about many things, but who in their hearts actually see and know, perhaps in irregular or disapproved ways.  That sight, that knowledge – and it is contemplative knowledge – is always humble.  Those who really see are not worshipping law and observance, they are the least likely to assume the moral high ground, they are slow to condemn, and what they are most likely to dislike is judgementalism and lack of compassion.  The eyes of your heart being opened, wrote St Paul, that you may know…  That is contemplative, mature knowledge, the knowledge of the heart.