Show Notes
We played “Pat-a-Cake” in church on Sunday. Then, we tried it with our eyes closed. Then, we “tried harder.” We learned three valuable lessons: 1. Blindness is not OK. 2. But yelling at blind people doesn’t help. And in fact, 3. “Trying harder,” while blind, actually makes things worse.
John 9:1-5, “As [Jesus] passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed [might shine] in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.’”
Why would anyone be born blind? Scripture is clear that we all suffer the sins of our ancestors, but it’s also clear that we don’t inherit guilt. “Each one shall be put to death for his own sins (Deut. 24:16).” “Little ones... have no knowledge of Good or evil” (Deut. 1:39); they haven’t yet taken the fruit from the tree.
Why would anyone blame the blind? That’s easy. It makes us feel better about ourselves (for a moment). It gives us a sense of control (We think we can choose differently.) And in this way, we don’t have to feel sorrow for them (“It was their choice; ‘Free Will,’” we say.)
Why would anyone choose to be blind — for sometimes we do? At the turn of the last century, many who had been born blind but received the newly perfected cataract surgery chose to return to blindness, for seeing was just too confusing. Ray Charles went blind after watching his brother drown. My wife once told me that she gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a man who died; she had forgotten that she’d done so and seems to have forgotten this once again. Would you blame her?
If you choose to go blind, you choose to “NOT see the light.” And you choose not to see the light because you don’t see that the light is The Good. All you see is death, guilt, confusion, and injustice. And so, your strategy is to close your eyes. Your strategy is to save yourself with blindness. This is why we don’t like pictures of the bombed-out remains of the Gaza strip, aborted babies, blind men begging, or a naked man beaten and nailed to a tree.... Have you ever seen that picture?
John 3:19, “This is the judgment: The light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the Light...” We don’t love the light for we have chosen darkness and perhaps because we haven’t yet seen just how good the Light (The Good) actually is. In Scripture, “the Good” (tob in Hebrew) is that which everyone most naturally and fully desires.
It’s like we all see Good Friday and then shut our eyes before Easter. We know about the good... (enough to see that what we have done is bad). We know about the good, but we have NOT known the Good until we see that the Good knows us and does not condemn us... That’s how good he is!
We all took His life on the tree, but when we see that He always gives His life on the tree, we see the Good and are drawn to the Good, for we were made for the Good. He is “our Helper.” Maximus the Confessor (~600 A.D.) taught that we each have a “natural will” that is naturally drawn to God, and a “deliberative will” that can stray from God but only because it is blinded to the Truth — blinded by a lie. “There is blindness far worse than mine,” wrote Helen Keller, “those who have no vision.” Those who can see and choose not to see, for they can’t see “the Good.” Sin is blindness, and to commit a sin is to act out of that blindness.
The disciples failed to see “the Good” in the blind man; they had the worst form of blindness — they were blind to their own blindness. “As you did it unto the least of these...” said the Light of the World, “you did it to me.” Perhaps He isn’t telling us to try harder but asking each one of us to ask some questions: Am I blind? Was I born blind? And if so, whose fault is that?
Jesu
More from The Sanctuary Downtown / Relentless Love
“The mere idea of you, the longing here for you. You'll never know how slow the moments go till I'm near to you. I see your face in every flower, your eyes in stars above. It's just the thought of you, the very thought of you, my love.” My wife and I have spent a lot of time on romantic vacations listening to those words sung by Billie Holiday or Nat King Cole.
Sometime around 1968, I learned about germs in school. They can be found in dirt and most of all, in the very pinnacle of depravity: poop. So, I began to wash my hands... a lot. I washed and washed, but I am a producer of human excreta, and so is everyone I know. So, it felt as if I was never finished. I was driven to cleanliness and then to the doctor, for my hands were red, raw, cracked and bleeding — open wounds susceptible to germs! I had been better off with no knowledge of “germs” and “not germs.” The doctor looked at my hands and said, “Stop (Shabat in Hebrew)! Stop washing your hands.” They hurt like hell, but it was hard as hell to stop.
John 18:38-40: “Pilate said to [Jesus], ‘What is truth?’ After he had said this, he went back outside to the Jews and told them, ‘I find no guilt in him. But you have a custom that I should release one man for you at the Passover. So do you want me to release to you the King of the Jews?’ They cried out again, ‘Not this man, but Barabbas!’ Now Barabbas was a robber [lestes: a taker].”