Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
The Rev. Samuel Kennedy
The Third Sunday in Lent, Year A - Sunday, March 19, 2023
While our lesson this morning initially appears to take this shape and pace we are accustomed to, we will discover rather quickly both the pace and shape of the narrative changing under our feet. Our author decides to linger for a bit in this story. In fact, for quite some time, Jesus drops out of the scene entirely, as John tightens his focus on the man who had this encounter with Jesus, is radically changed by this encounter, and then begins to work out the meaning of this encounter with his community.
As I worked with this text, I found it was inviting me to change the pace I brought to it. I wanted the text to move more quickly than it was, I wanted the message to be clearer than I was experiencing it to be. Instead, I was invited to sit with the story, to watch this encounter with Jesus play out in this man’s life and his community. I was going to have to slow down.
This story begins familiarly enough, Jesus is making his way somewhere with with his disciples, and they see a man, identified to us as one who had been blind from birth. The disciples, bless them, seem prepped for the standard narrative pace here as well – they jump right to theological deliberation.
“Rabbi,” they ask, “who sinned – this man or his parents that he was born with blindness?” Blindness, as their question reveals, was a complicated thing in first century Jewish thought. While the law of Moses required the protection and care of people with blindness, there were limits to their inclusion in Society – particularly in cultic life. In the popular consciousness of the time, bad things, like blindness, happened to people for a reason – usually sin – either their own or their family’s. The end result of this, of course, is a degree of objectification of the person with blindness. The man in our story quickly became a canvas for theological/metaphysical discourse and moralistic musing.
And while we might be quick to dismiss the disciples’ question as one that represents an antiquated and ableist perspective, I think we’ll still find similar impulses within us today. Some part of us seems to long to keep the people in our lives, the world around us, and perhaps most importantly, the world within us in categories that are clear to us, and help make sense of it all. Such organization of the world is certainly necessary, both internally and externally, and seeking to understand why things are the way they are is an incredibly important human task. However, from the very beginning our text seems to warn us against getting too settled with those explanations. It would seem that thinking we understand how it all works can lead us to miss out on the inbreaking of the Divine in our midst.
Jesus’ reply to the disciples can seem a bit problematic as well, if we approach it as a categorical response to the questions of theodicy. His disciples ask him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus replies to them, “neither this man nor his parents sinned; this happened that the works of God might be displayed in him.” If we try to apply Jesus’ reply too broadly, as an answer to the overarching question of “why do bad things happen?” we’ll find it to be overwhelmingly underwhelming. I was helped by a commentator here, who pointed out that the grammar would allow for a translation that more clearly reveals the imperative form used here, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, now may the work of God be revealed in him!”
Jesus then stoops down, spits, and kneads together dirt and saliva to make clay, much as John kneads together language that recalls the Creation stories in the Hebrew Scriptures. Jesus places this clay on the man’s eyes and sends him to go wash his eyes in the pool of Siloam. The man obeys and we are told that “he came home seeing.” This is often where the story would end, but in today’s reading, the story is just getting started.
What are the echoes of this healing in the man’s life? Is he welcomed into society, his good fortune celebrated by his neighbors and family? After all, the alleged root cause of his exclusion had been removed. Well, no. His life and everything around him gets thrown into disarray. “His neighbors and those who had formerly seen him begging asked, isn’t this the same man who used to sit and beg? Some claimed he was, others said, ‘no, he only looks like him.”
Healing can destabilize us, and the emotional and relational systems we inhabit. We seem to innately resist the idea that an encounter with the Divine might be real enough to change us or those we live or work with.
The man’s reply in the midst of this confusion is both simple and profound. He states, “I am the man.” Here, he is borrowing the formulation used over and over again by Jesus in this Gospel as he identifies with the Divine name, I am who I am. John appears to be linking the healed man’s growth in agency with his status as an image bearer of the Divine.
The man’s friends and neighbors, with their own world in disarray, ask for the religious leaders to weigh in on the matter. We see the same dynamics play out within that community as well. The leaders interrogate the healed man multiple times, call his family in for questioning, and do their best to force him to fit into their understanding of how the world works. Throughout it all, the man bears simple, clear, (and at times quite witty) witness to his encounter with Jesus. The religious leaders, much like his neighbors and family ultimately refuse to make their hearts and minds vulnerable to the shock that this healing offers to their hearts and system, and cast the man out.
Isn’t this so often what we do? And before we think about this in the framework of the systems in which we live and work – lets reflect first on our impulses toward ourselves. So often, after our hearts have been touched by an encounter with God, and we begin to shift our way of being with our selves and others, perhaps living with a bit more agency, perhaps taking steps into the freedom of newfound sobriety or just a bit more ease with who we are....when we do this, our internal systems begin to rage and deny this work of God. Sometimes the systems around us do too.
The ending of this story is not what we might expect or hope for. By virtue of this healing, the very thing that was supposedly keeping this man from full inclusion in the life of his community has been removed. We might hope that those around him would finally adjust and celebrate that. And perhaps some of them eventually did, but at first, he was even further rejected – utterly cast out of the community. This can sometimes be the cost of healing; the cost of true encounter with the Divine. But what we are told is that when Jesus hears that the man had been cast out of his community – the very thing we expected his healing would help resolve – he seeks him out and invites the man into deeper, more abiding relationship with him.
The cost of discipleship, healing, growth in your God given agency can be great, but I hope that our Gospel lesson today can encourage us all that healing is worth the risk.
May we be given eyes to see the places in our own hearts that God is healing, re-creating, and restoring. And may God give us the humility we need to watch, ponder, and listen to those around us as they share their own stories of healing. May we celebrate and uplift that work in their lives even when we don’t fully understand it ourselves.
At the end of our passage, Jesus says, “for judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.” May we confess our blindness in the hope that we will not miss out on the inbreaking of the Divine in our midst.
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