This week’s story is a few things at the same time.
- A healing story
- An evangelism story
- A persecution story
How we tell the story can really depend on what our own focus is.
However, I don’t want to give the impression that each of these ways into the story are equal. Or necessarily adversarial.
It is all three. At the same time.
And I think what makes it problematic for some is that it is a healing story that goes really negative. That a man is persecuted for being healed. Or, if you like, gets caught up in their hunt to kill Jesus.
Most of the preachers I know personally aren’t keen on doing “this week in persecution” as the theme. Ever. Let alone every week. But it is clearly there.
At the same time, most of us are trained, not in the old “three themes” structure, but to find a single theme and work on that. So this story, which we call the story of a man born blind (notice the intentional focus), is a healing story. And we focus on that.
But the bulk of the forty-one verses we will read on Sunday are taken up with Judean leaders harassing this man and his family. Once. Twice. Thrice. Twisting the logic of it all just because they are keen on hating Jesus. And more importantly, silencing his ministry of justice, equity, and love for the people the church persecutes.
In a sense, then, to focus on this as a healing story is like calling The Lord of the Rings trilogy a story about Bilbo’s birthday party. Yeah, you can try to make that argument, but it’s actually quite ridiculous.
The heart of the story
The heart of this story is about this contrast between the genuine commitment on the part of Jesus to the love of God and the obsession of the leadership to preserve a perverted vision of love through hate, abuse, and violence.
In this way, it becomes very difficult to separate what we see in this story from the national headlines. Those numerous state governors and legislatures who are actively going after marginalized groups on the basis of sex and gender, claiming that they are protecting culture. Even saying it is about faith.
This story, like our own, offers a reminder of the blinders we wear. The ones which prevent us from seeing the effect of our own obsessions. Or the ways we live out “the wrong side”.
And in the same way, how often our refusal to treat a thing that scares us with respect and dignity (rather than fear and loathing); which then leads us to do awful and unholy things. Our fear of the unholy begets the unholy in us.
We are then left choosing to celebrate the miracle that they refuse. Or naming their unholy refusal. Maybe, though, if we’re up for it, we can try to do both.