Sermon: More Than a Metaphore, More Than a Miracle

Preached at Middlefield Federated Church in Middlefield, Connecticut on May 29, 2016

Scripture: "Healing of the Man Born Blind" (John 9:1-41)

Sometime, the Bible is difficult.

And I don't just mean difficult to understand—I think we all know the Bible is not always easy to make sense of. I mean just plain hard. We come to this book with understanding of what it is, what it teaches us as Christians, and what's just plain right, and sometimes, that's not what we find. Let's just look at some things Jesus says:

"I have not come to bring peace, but a sword" (Mt 10:34). And the verses that follow it, talking about discord between family members, and how if you love your family more than Jesus, you are not worthy of Jesus. I don't know about you all, but I don't like that. The Christianity I try to practice brings people together, peacefully.

Or what about Jesus's teaching on divorce? In three out of the four Gospels, Jesus specifically prohibits divorce. In Matthew, he does it twice. Now, divorce isn't my favorite thing in the world, but I wouldn't say I'm three gospels opposed to it.

The good news is, we are not actually obligated by our particular faith or faiths to believe wholeheartedly in every single word of the Bible. We can say no to these verses if we want to. (I like saying no, it's been one of my favorite words since I was a small child). But the thing is, if we said no to everything in life that made us uncomfortable, we would actually miss out on a lot. Everything from that strange food at the restaurant that turned out to be delicious, to the friendships we make when we push through our social anxiety. At my school, we call these "leaning into discomfort," and we try to do it whenever we're learning about something that is making us uncomfortable, or changing our understanding of the world. And usually, if we do it right, the way we think about the world changes, if only just a little.

So, this chapter in John we've heard part of today is a difficult passage for me. It's the kind of passage that I'm tempted to just say no to, but today I'm going to lean into the discomfort of it, and I hope you all will do so with me, even if not all of you can see yet why I find it uncomfortable. Let me take you through it.

Jesus is walking along, doing his Jesus thing, and he and his disciples see this man. At this point we know literally nothing about him except that he was born blind. How we can tell when he became blind just by looking at him, I don't know, but the disciples see this guy and go, "Hey, hey Jesus! Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"

And ... this is the first part of this story that makes me uncomfortable. We've gotten to verse 2 and I'm uncomfortable. See, in Jesus's day, disability was assumed to be related to sin. If you lost your sight, or became paralyzed or chronically ill, clearly you'd done something to piss off God. Now if you were born this way, obviously you couldn't have committed any sin yet, so many people assumed your parents had sinned, to be burdened with a disabled child.

Anyone see a problem with this?

So, for one thing, not really down with the assumption that I, my parents, my disabled friends, or their parents, are automatically sinners. But more than that actually, I have a problem with this because it assumes that being disabled is a bad thing, that the life of a person with a disability is inherently worse than someone else's. Here's a bit of disability justice 101: for some people with disabilities, they do see their condition as a problem, one they would like a solution to, please and thank you. But for some of us, it's so much a part of us that it's just how we live. For me personally, I don't think my life is any worse than anyone else's just because I'm legally blind, and I refuse to judge my eyesight as a positive or negative aspect of my body. It simply is. To put it theologically, Genesis tells us that God created humankind in God's own image, and to me, that means that at least one of the many aspects of God is legally blind.

And, to a certain extent, Jesus agrees with me. He says to his disciples: "Neither this man nor his parents sinned." (I ran a sin check, none here). Rather, "he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him."

I'll admit, I have some problems with that statement too, but I'll get to that later.

So the next thing Jesus does is he heals the man. Without asking him. To be specific, he makes mud with his saliva and spreads it on the man's eyes, without asking him. Now, talking as a real blind person here, if you're going to spread dirt and spit on my eyes, I'd at least like you to ask first. And frankly, I'd like to be asked before you change anything about the way I see, too. Think about it. If I don't judge my eyesight positively or negatively, and if this is one way in which I was created in the image of God, why should someone just assume I want that changed?

But anyway, we're just going to assume here that this man wanted to be healed, because I think if he didn't he probably wouldn't let a stranger put spit mud on his eyes. And he goes and washes in the pool of Siloam, and he can see! And everyone in his hometown is so amazed that some of them don't even believe he's the same guy. Because, I mean, come on, this guy can SEE, and that other guy well .... And this is where we learn something else about our friend the man born blind: before he met Jesus, he was a beggar. And this isn't really surprising. In Jesus's time, there weren't really a whole lot of trades or professions for people with disabilities. While there certainly are and were crafts that could be done by touch alone, how many craftsmen do you think would want to take on a blind apprentice? Not many.

This is the context in which I like to place the vast majority of Jesus's healing of people with disabilities. He wasn't just giving them the apparently prized commodities of sight and mobility; he was giving them economic opportunity. A future that included something other than begging.

So the next thing that happens is the Pharisees start investigating this whole healing thing. Partly, this is because the healing happened on the sabbath, and partly, it's just because the Pharisees just have it out for Jesus. So the man tells them how he was healed, and declares that he thinks Jesus is a prophet, which the Pharisees don't like at all. So in the next part of the story which you haven't heard yet, they decide to bring in the guy's parents to investigate this whole "was he really blind anyway?" conundrum. So his parents come and confirm that this is their son, and that he was born blind, but they kind of plead the fifth on the question of his healing. The gospel tells us that they're afraid. They don't want to say anything good about Jesus, because they'll be put out of the synagogue. Instead, they let their son do the talking, and get in all the trouble.

Now I really want to underscore this. He has parents. He has living parents, plural, and yet he was a beggar. Now a lot of you are parents, right? How many of you would knowingly and willingly let your child become a beggar? In your hometown? It's not like he left home and they didn't know what was happening. He was right there! This is not how family is supposed to work. Not in our time, and not in Jesus's. In biblical times, often, your family was your only support network, but it doesn't seem to be doing its job here, does it? This guy's family isn't supporting him in any sense, not when he grows up and needs a way to support himself, and not when his community leaders are persecuting him and the man who did support him.

So the man born blind gets called back by the Pharisees, and I'm going to read this part to you, because it's great. This is verse 24 following.

24 So for the second time they called the man who had been blind, and they said to him, "Give glory to God! We know that this man is a sinner." 25 He answered, "I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see." 26 They said to him, "What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?" 27 He answered them, "I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?" 28 Then they reviled him, saying, "You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. 29 We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from." 30 The man answered, "Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. 31 We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will. 32 Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. 33 If this man were not from God, he could do nothing."

And after that, all they can find to say is, "You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?" They retreat to the old disability-sin framing, because he's argued them into a corner, and that is all they can come up with.

Well, they can come up with one more thing. They drive him out of town. So he goes to find Jesus and Jesus reveals himself as the Son of Man, and the man born blind worships him. And now Jesus has some more weird, uncomfortable lines. He says, "I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind." And apparently the Pharisees have been following him around, because they're kind of off to one side, eavesdropping, and they hear this and go, "Surely we are not blind ... are we?" And Jesus says to them, "If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, `We see,` your sin remains."

And this honestly is my least favorite part of this story. The section title in my NRSV Bible for these verses is "Spiritual Blindness." The idea, it seems, is, the man who was born blind was never blind in the spiritual sense. He knew, accepted, and believed in Jesus. The Pharisees, on the other hand, although they can see, are blind because Jesus is right in front of them, but they deny who he is. This metaphor, equating vision with knowledge, is one we should all be familiar with, since it shows up everywhere in our language: "I see what you mean," "She's got real insight," "He sees more than those around him." And on the other side of the coin, "Are you blind? It's so obvious, what she's talking about. Don't you see that ..." Thing is, this metaphor doesn't actually work as well as we think it does. Often, when we talk about metaphorical blindness, what we're talking about is ignorance. The Pharisees refuse to see who Jesus is. That's not blindness. I don't refuse to see the faces of the people at the back of this congregation; I can't. The other problem with this is that these kinds of metaphors have absolutely no relationship to the lives of actual people with actual disabilities. What am I supposed to do with this equation, this blindness equals ignorance. No one claims that that means I'm ignorant, and yet the potential is there, in the metaphor. Beyond that even, it equates me, and the man in this story, to the status of a walking metaphor. Think about how Jesus answers his disciples question about sin: "No, no one sinned. He was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him." In the context of this story, we might be tempted to think that this man was born blind so that Jesus could heal him and spark this whole debate. And not just the debate, but the metaphor as well.

But the thing is, this man is clearly more than a metaphor. More than a miracle. He is a man embedded in a social context. He is a man forced into begging because of his physical condition, a man from a family that would not or could not give him other options. He is an intelligent man, who speaks clearly and persuasively and knows enough about his religious tradition to debate with his community leaders. He is a brave man, who is not afraid to risk the consequences of speaking his truth. And, not least, he is a man with an open spirit, ready and willing to accept the power of Jesus. He is far more than a metaphor. So why does Jesus seem to reduce him to this at the end?

In all honesty, I don't know. I can't tell you how metaphorical or how literal Jesus is being with his "the blind see and the sighted blind" talk. But I can tell you how I'm choosing to read these last few sentences of Jesus's. What I'm reading here is that Jesus is here to reverse things, to take one thing (blindness, specifically) and make it another thing (sight). And he's here to subvert our understandings of the world. Blindness isn't related to sin; rather, he says the sighted people have sin. And I think back to some of those difficult passages we were looking at earlier, and I see the same pattern. Jesus is here to reverse things, to do the opposite of what we expected. We thought he was here to bring peace? He's got a sword. He's here to reinforce normal family relationships? No, he's here to set mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, brothers and sisters—against one another. His teaching on divorce first appears in Matthew in a whole list of teachings found in the Torah that he's changing. "You have heard it said that X, but I tell you that Z." "You have heard an eye for an eye, I say turn the other cheek." "You have heard you can have a divorce, I say you can't."

I'm not saying that this pattern makes some of these sayings any easier to understand, because it doesn't. But what I'm saying is, we should be paying attention to patterns. This pattern is telling us that Jesus came to change things, and not just a little. He didn't just come to heal a few people and argue with some officials. He came to turn the world upside down and change it forever. And he did. The existence of Christianity proves that. But the thing is, Jesus also came to call us to follow him, to be like him. We have to turn the world upside down too.

And there are a million and one ways we could do that. And any number of ways we could choose to follow Jesus in doing that. But if I might make a few suggestions in light of today's story.

First, Jesus didn't let expectations stand; he broke them apart. What expectations do you have about people with disabilities? About what we're like, what we want, or what we can do? Do you have some of these expectations about yourself? Break them apart! Turn them upside down. Sometimes the biggest things holding someone back are the expectations people have about them, or the ones they have about themselves.

Second, this story showed us one way that someone at an economic disadvantage was given an opportunity to address that disadvantage. Well, we don't have Jesus to cure all the disabilities for us, even if we'd want him to, and while our medical technology is improving, it's not doing it that fast. What other ways do we have to turn the world upside down for people living in poverty? From our very own towns to cities and villages across the world, people are homeless or in need everywhere, and people with disabilities make up a disturbing proportion of that population, including many of our own disabled veterans.

Third, the story we read shows the man born blind as a whole person. He's not just an example of a miracle. And he's not a metaphor. How many times have you, in your language or your attitude, reduced someone with a disability to one of these categories? We are all whole people, created in the image of God, and we are called to treat others that way. And trust me, when someone takes the time and energy to relate to me as a full human being, that turns my world upside down in the best way possible.

And finally, remember that perhaps the greatest thing Jesus taught us is to love one another. Don't think for a minute that what I've said about changing expectations and turning things upside down reduces the importance of love. Love is the driving force behind all of this, powerful and radical. Love itself subverts expectations. Love turns things upside down. Love is when we go beyond the miracles and metaphors and find fellow human beings. Love is how Jesus changed the world, by laying down his life for his friends. And love, my friends, is how we will do it, too.