BETTER THAN ANSWERS
JOHN 9:1-41
MARCH 2, 2008—LENT FOUR
THOMAS H. YORTY, WESTMINSTER PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
“If you were blind,” said Jesus, “you would not be guilty, but because you say ‘We see,” your guilt remains.”
It is a remarkable story we just heard Marcia read. Full of suspense, irony, injustice, willful authorities, and an honest, brave protagonist. The whole thing starts with a theological debate among his disciples in which Jesus refuses to participate: who sinned this man or his parents? Jesus just heals the man. But then the Pharisees get into the act with a major investigation of the alleged healing.
It would be like doctors making grand rounds standing over your bedside debating the role your moral character plays in your illness. A colleague who was starting to get a cold, said he recently attended a meeting. The group proceeded to debate cold prevention and the intelligence of anyone who would allow himself to get sick in the winter season.
Today’s story is not about the role of moral character in sin—that’s as hard for us to accept as Jesus’ disciples because we have defined sin for so long as corrupt actions.
Today’s story is not about the role of intelligence in sin since Jesus clearly informs the Pharisees that their superior “religious” knowledge does not absolve them of their guilt.
Rather today’s story, and what I’d like to explore, is an account of how being open or closed to Jesus results in salvation/healing or further sin/separation. Even though the blind man does not know Jesus he is open to the man who says he is God’s son and his offer to heal him.
A few weeks ago we talked about Nicodemus’ visit to Jesus in the night and how Nicodemus wanted to peg Jesus, to identify him in no uncertain terms.
The impulse is the same today. The Pharisees cannot determine who he is or where he comes from. He eludes their categories. They cannot pigeonhole him and therefore they cannot control him. He remains outside their grasp.
Yet, the blind man is open to a relationship with Jesus. He remains securely in Jesus’ embrace. After the investigative council rejects and bans him from the synagogue, Jesus reappears in the story seeking out the man.
I wonder sometimes if we don’t get caught up like the Pharisees in an intellectual quest for Jesus that actually, like their quest, ends up distancing us from him.
I wonder if we don’t back off from associating with Jesus, like the fearful parents of the blind man when someone puts it to us and asks us if we know him.
That’s what John’s Gospel (and John Calvin) defines as sin: whether or not having heard the Good News—that Jesus Christ is the way of life—we respond to him. Calvin said the job of the church is to proclaim Good News and that it is finally only God who can determine whether you or I have appropriately responded to the Good News we have heard.
It’s not a bad definition of sin and salvation. Either we accept that this Jesus is the way of life and follow him that is, trust him and live like him; or we don’t that is, we let our unenlightened egos drive our decisions and actions.
One writer put it this way, he said, “I am a part-time Christian because part of the time seems to be the most I can manage to live out my faith: Christian part of the time when certain things seem real and important to me and the rest of the time not Christian in any sense I can believe matters much to Christ or anybody else.
Any Christian who is not a hero, Leon Bloy wrote, is a pig, which is a harder way of saying the same thing. From time to time, this writer says, I find a kind of heroism momentarily possible—a seeing, doing, telling of Christly truth—but the rest of the time I am indistinguishable from the rest of the herd that jostles and snuffles at the great trough of life.[i]
If you probe them, most theologians, like most novelists, use autobiography to write their books. Aquinas, Calvin, Tillich working out their systems are telling us their stories—telling us of some experience of flesh and blood, a human face smiling or frowning or weeping or covering its eyes before something that happened once.[ii]
And while theology can be helpful pointing to, if not articulating, great spiritual truths it can also obscure or dilute that human experience which embodies the encounter with God where a human life and the Spirit meet.
For my money—today’s story from the Gospel of John advocates sticking with the experience itself—of a human face smiling or frowning or weeping or covering its eyes which is of course your face and my face at some moment of joy or sorrow or pain or healing when we meet God.
If we could learn to talk about God in the terms of our everyday experiences—where God meets us, or where we long for God to meet us, in our blindness or hunger or fear or joy—if we could talk about such experiences with each other, rather than keep them to ourselves, or endlessly dissect them, we would ground our encounters with God and I suspect inspire one another.
Part of the problem is that we fall so easily into debating someone else’s experience or the language they use. When perhaps the most helpful response would be to simply accept the confession itself, “I was blind and now I see.”
I’m talking about the way we talk with one another about our experience of God’s presence in our lives. Often we relegate that topic to the province of a structured book discussion with an expert managing the conversation rather than over coffee with a friend or on a walk with a family member.
What would happen if we explored new sources of learning about God; if we tapped into the vast experiential library of one another’s daily living?
I don’t mean we have to have some lightening bolt revelation or born again experience or go out knocking on doors but just be open to one another and how it is or how we wish it was God meets us in our daily living.
I know, there’s reticence to talking that freely and openly for fear of rejection, or lack of confidence in the experience itself. But if we could give ourselves permission to go deeper with each other, great things, even miraculous things would start to happen here.
I’d like to raise the spiritual bar for us. The days of confining God to a liturgy or hymn or sermon or book review are over. Churches that are growing and thriving are churches where God is filling human hearts and restoring sight and hearing, restoring broken relationships, restoring hope where some loss or defeat has done its worst.
Churches where those who have had such healing and transformation and then share that experience are churches where God’s spirit is on the loose.
They pulse with life and energy. There is a sense of the possible. Faith emboldens members to take risks they never before imagined themselves taking. People act with a beguiling combination of confidence and humility. Resources for ministry are discovered and offered in abundance. Miracles start occurring.
And the deep embrace of compassion and justice.
For those with wounds, for a wounded world, communities that have responded to the good news with open hearts keep defying the darkness that so quickly enshrouds the grief-stricken and broken-hearted and down-trodden.
The light of this Jesus keeps seeping in and welling up everywhere. As more and more people respond to its presence in their midst, the community is illuminated. You can see and feel it.
The title of the sermon today is “better than answers.” We have such an answer-oriented culture. Not only do we believe there are answers for everything because our scientific categories can dissect and define all of life. We also quite naturally want answers to our deepest emotional and spiritual questions: explanations for our pain, our loss, for the things that perplex and frighten us.
But when the focus is so overwhelmingly on the answers, as it was first with the disciples today then with the Pharisees’ investigative council, either we are blinded to the need for healing in our midst or blinded to the healer himself standing before us.
What’s better than answers? The presence of Christ in the life of that blind man – who in the end had very few answers but who encountered the light of the world. It is the same Christ who is with us today, waiting for the opportunity to restore your sight and my sight, your life and my life.
So come to the table, meet him in the bread and wine, in the company of your neighbor, in your own blindness or pain or character defect that has plagued you all these years.
Let him change that, let him change you, let him change us. Amen.