to Live With Grace
Lent 4A | John 9:1-41
Jesus gives a man sight who has never seen anything before. This should be the focus of conversation, right? It is a miracle! And it is a kind of generosity we can hardly fully comprehend. Not without assuming everyone should be given sight. Ah! But isn’t that what we do, though? Tear at the fabric of understanding? Of knowing what is good? Pulling at the strings until the fabric itself unravels under our examination?
How else might we explain our conviction for doing the wrong things for the right reasons? Because we’re convinced we’re not just doing something that is right, but something that is good?
Misunderstanding and certainty of conviction. Sin and suffering. It is all here today, my friends.
The Plot
The plot of our story, in a nutshell, is this. Jesus gives sight to a man born blind. Some Pharisees disbelieve that the man was ever blind and pressure the man to come clean. The man continues to tell the truth. Then they pressure the man’s parents who throw it back at their son, who again tells the truth. They then cast the man out where Jesus invites him in.
In this streamlined version, we can see how easily the Pharisees play the role of the antagonists in the story. How fueled they are by their disbelief and how they gaslight the people around them to join them. And this is an active disbelief. We aren’t talking about a difference of opinion. It is refusing the eyewitness testimony of people who have first and second degree experience with the event. So in a very practical way, this story is very easy to understand.
Jesus heals a man who is a vocal witness to the very grace of God. And these Pharisees not only reject that witness, they attempt to manipulate and silence it. That is the definition of bad news, actually. This all seems very clear in the reading.
The Question of Sin
Another layer starts to complicate the story because it explains why these Pharisees are so convinced that they are, in fact, the good guys of the story. The question of sin. The Pharisees are operating under a particular assumption: that disability is a manifestation of sin. And before we continue down this road, we should acknowledge that this is very much not the definition of a good assumption.
Whether some people in the first century believed that disability was a punishment by God is not up for debate: many did and still do: but it also wasn’t the normal teaching everybody got. The point is to understand that these leaders were also taught from Scripture that rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. Sickness, disability, poverty, slavery — none is God’s punishment any more than health, ability, wealth, and slaveownership is God’s reward for good behavior.
Sin and misfortune aren’t related.
Even so, look at how easy it is, then, to cloud our judgement about anyone’s behavior when we can speak of blessing and curse! As easy as it is to say who the antagonists are in a simple story, we can complicate our sense of it when we say, well, they believed the man was ruined by sin! We like to call this “justification” because they are justifying their own gross response. But it also complicates the narrative. And we might have sympathy for their sincerity of conviction. Or, perhaps, start to take it at face value. Thinking maybe there is something to it.
The MASH Definition
In a famous TV conversation from the old show, M*A*S*H, Hawkeye asks the chaplain, Father Mulcahy, “Tell me, who goes to Hell?” The chaplain offers a fairly orthodox response: “Sinners, I believe.” To which Hawkeye responds:
“Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them – little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.”
This is Hawkeye’s way of saying that war isn’t hell: it’s worse.
While I long ago took it as a rule to not argue with Hawkeye, I think he makes a similar mistake to the Pharisees. Because sin isn’t related to torment. Because, as we see in war, people can do a fine job of tormenting each other.
Now, I don’t want to linger on the example longer than we need to, but this moment from M*A*S*H illustrates something we might call realized eschatology. Which is a fancy phrase to talk about the intersection of forever and now. That Heaven and Hell can be eternal and also present. That the Kin-dom of Heaven that Jesus promises is here among us and in the future hoped for. The same can be said for hell. Wherever there is suffering, war, famine, genocide. That is hell. Which means we can literally send our neighbors to hell and rain the fires of hell upon them.
The Restoration
We have the Pharisees as the picture of condemnation here. As the example of people who actually want the man to suffer. Rather than rejoice that he is no longer suffering, they want their assumed punishment of him to remain with him. So they gaslight him and turn his parents against him and finally cast him out of the community. Again, a man who has been given the gift of sight has met only rejection from those who would see themselves as the good guys of history.
Meanwhile, he is being accepted by the one who will become the scapegoat himself. The one would take the world’s sin upon himself as a sacrifice for it. The perfect lamb and the humble messiah.
It would be easy, then, to mistake our present witness to sin and grace, to suffering and restoration, for our own opportunity to be the judge and final arbiter of other people’s salvation. To receive this story of revealed grace in the giving of sight to the innocent man and of revealed sin in the tormenting of that man by the wicked religious leaders as an opportunity for own expansive judgment. To fail to see the lesson of restoration from the blindness of condemnation. Because it is all so tempting.
Yet here is the man restored. And here are the leaders, stymied by their own rejection. And only one knows the joy, the splendor, and the hope. Only one is given that sight.
Apophatic Grace
We might call this an apophatic teaching; which, I’m sorry, is another fancy word for a cool concept. Apophatic is the word we use to describe the act of looking at what something is not so that we can see what it is. It’s what we mean when we say “I’m learning what not to do!” from the middle of a bad situation. In this story, we are learning as much about grace from the way Jesus behaves as we are from the condemnation of the Pharisees. So the point isn’t to dwell on the bad itself, but what it shows about the good. What it means to trust and listen. To hear and respond. To be as the man born blind, whose eyes are covered with mud, who is told to go and have someone see him, and then when the mud is wiped away, sight, actual sight for the very first time.
And even though the Messiah has moved on, he finds him again, sees him for the first time, when he is alone, when he has gained his sight and lost his community, when he is yet full of faith. He, too is grace and vision, a hopeful disciple and reflection of God’s glory in the flesh. Like Nicodemus whose darkness is removed or the woman at the well, yearning for living water, here is another witness, another redeemed, brought in. Jesus keeps expanding the circle, inviting us to make room for them. Generously, yes. Gracious, of course. But always with hope and joy at another amazing opportunity to share this love in our neighborhood.