Silly us…we thought that the debate about health care was a new one…! Nearly 2,000 years before any presidential campaign or stump speeches or television debates had appeared on society’s horizons, Jesus and the Pharisees and the healed man and his family jump into the health care debate with full force.
The Pharisees represent “Tradition” with a capital “T.” We can almost see and hear the Tevye character in “Fiddler on the Roof” singing and dancing across our chancel, reminding us through his deeply-imbedded faith that tradition is the rock upon which he believes we must stand. And, to be sure, there is a place for tradition and rocks and foundations…that place is at a beginning of something greater and more apparent, more visible. The foundation is not the entire building. The mountain or cliff does not consist of just one self-important island rock. Neither is tradition the end-all or be-all of religious experience. Tradition is, as the Pharisees rightly chide, the place where we begin…
The Pharisees in today’s story were the faithful keepers of religious scholarship and temple practices. Their tradition boldly stated that when someone was born with some kind of physical or mental sickness, it was a sign that their parents or grandparents or even a distant ancestor had some kind of deeply-hidden sin for which this newborn carried the punishment. Now in our enlightened era, we would correctly refute such hurtful thinking. Who among us could, in good conscience, tell a parent that their one-armed child was born that way because of grandpa’s alcoholism? Or that the adolescent’s mental sickness is a result of great-aunt Mary’s affair? What kind of God does that theology suggest? Not one in whose world I would want to live!
Yet the Pharisees with their singularly-focused respect for tradition keep hammering away at Jesus, at the healed man, at his parents, and at any in the crowd of neighbors who will listen to them…surely there must be some secret sin that the man’s blindness is exposing. The Pharisees use all the usual reasoning tactics to make their point. First they claim that “we all know that sickness is a result of sin…our history tells us that…our leaders preach it…our scriptures confirm the point.” I’m guessing that, at some time in life, we have each been involved in a debate that utilizes such circular reasoning. Scratch a bit below the surface and you will see that the person arguing for the correctness of their position tends to begin from a well-heeled belief that, for them, is an absolute and unquestioningly accurate bit of truth. Coincidentally, that truth may very well be mistaken!
But wrong or right, the Pharisees stick to their particular brand of truth—that sin causes sickness in subsequent generations. They continue arguing that Jesus has violated another unquestioned truth by healing this man on the holy day of Sabbath. Sabbath was a day in which no work, and that meant not one iota of work, was to be accomplished. Cooking must be completed before the day began. Plowing or reaping or planting were forbidden on Sabbath. There were even restrictions on how much walking a person was allowed to do. The point of this rigidity was to force humans to take a rest…something we might want to re-consider in our day! For the Pharisees, and the tradition they represent, healing on Sabbath was definitely out.
Their argument is a typical use of deflection, is it not? They are unable to explain the healing, and are getting little support for their traditional theologizing about sin and sickness, so these clever, educated Pharisees deflect the attention away from themselves over to Jesus and his obvious sin.
Enter the healed man. While the Pharisees represent “Tradition,” the healed man represents all those who move and grow and change and yes, even repent, because of some new aspect of the journey that presents itself as an agent of change. Listen to the man’s uncomplicated response to the Pharisees’ attempt to corner him. “How were you healed?” they ask. He replies, simply and directly: “The man put mud on my eyes and then I washed and now I see.” Trying to trap Jesus, the Pharisees further question the healed man: “You know that this man—this Jesus—is a sinner…what say you?” “Whether he is a sinner or not, I do not know; one thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” The interrogation continues: “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” to which the healed man’s quick response cuts to the heart of the matter: “I’ve already told you…and you don’t believe me. Why do you want to hear again? Are you considering becoming another of this man’s disciples?”
Score 1 for the healed guy! The real matter here is not about whose sin contributed to the man’s original blindness. Nor is it about whether or not Jesus—or anyone, for that matter—ought to be violating Sabbath to benefit someone else. The heart of this story is about seeing and not seeing, about sight and blindness and about what constitutes each. And, as we might expect, it is the healer teacher Jesus of Nazareth who makes a way for us to see into the heart of the matter even as he gazes into the hearts of those debating. In contrast to both the tradition represented by the Pharisees and the twisty-turny journey of faith represented by the healed man, Jesus embodies much-needed grace, truthfully stated.
For the Pharisees, there is no judgment from Jesus about their far-too-narrow and rigid hold on tradition. They are, after all, doing their job. They serve in the role of a first-century Food and Drug Association. Someone must investigate and validate truth claims and health benefits, and these Pharisees are just the ones to do it. There are technical considerations to take into account. The veracity of claims made must be discussed. Witnesses must be interviewed. People expect that proper authorities will make informed decisions about public wellness and safety. There is no judgment from Jesus directed at these Pharisees, no railing about them being white-washed tombs nor is there any angry denouncement of their theology of sin and sickness. Jesus raises only one issue with them, and again, it is the heart of this story: what is seeing? What is blindness? What is sin and what is sickness?
To the healed man, Jesus shows immediate and personal compassion. Jesus seeks out the man, who is understandably weary of the interrogation and wary of further contact. We can almost picture Jesus looking around town for the man, asking about his home, his family, his friends, seeking him like a woman searching for her lost coin, or a shepherd diligently looking for the one lost sheep. If we are able to see ourselves in the place of this weary and wary healed man, the story offers us the insight that the journey is not about whether we, sighted or blind, find Jesus, but of Jesus finding us.
Here, with compassionate persistence, Jesus embodies what earlier gospel writers already have said about him. And when Jesus finds the healed man, there is a private party to which only these two souls are invited. Just as Jesus did in last week’s reading with the unnamed outcast Samaritan woman at the well, so he does now with this unnamed healed man who has just been thrown out of the Jewish community for his newfound faith in Jesus. To this unlikely congregation-of-one, Jesus reveals himself as the figure who will ultimately judge in God’s name. The term Jesus introduces into the conversation—“Son of Man”—is a technical Jewish term referring to the eschatological judge who was believed to be the one who would stand at the end of time. Here Jesus says, “it is I.”
We could easily spend another 15 or 20 minutes imagining what Jesus as judge of our souls might mean. Judging from his decidedly lack-of-judgmental response to the Pharisees and his bold compassion for the healed man in this story, I think it’s a safe bet that we, too, will be treated with grace and with truth. At least, that’s the rock, the foundation, the tradition upon which I stake my ministry!
What’s at stake in this long and winding tale of grace is just that…can we have grace towards one another as did Jesus toward the healed man and even toward the Pharisees. Are we able to be gracefully truthful—in our open questions about difficult and painful matters and in our collective seeking of answers to life’s complicated questions?
Throughout my years of active ministry, I have been accused of not believing in Jesus in the same way that other ministers or other Christians believe in him. And that accusation is as true for me as it would be if it were leveled against anyone in this congregation. The simple truth, brought into the light by this story, is that each one of us is on a personal journey with the one we know as Christ. Sometimes we turn aside and move away, clutching to some unbendable tenet of faith, resistant to change. To us, in those times, a loving and compassionate Jesus speaks truth, “yes, you are resistant…yes, you have need to turn around and face in a new direction…yes, your sight is impaired by your dogged determination… but no, in this you have not sinned any more than did your ancestors who birthed you to this place.”
At other times on this journey, we are like the healed man: wanting to believe, but finding the way difficult; needing comfort, but not knowing quite where to turn; seeking truth to replace the truth that is no longer true for us. At these times, Jesus takes the initiative, as he did in this gospel story today. He comes looking for us and into us…looking deep within our hearts and minds and souls, asking questions of us, leaving other questions of ours unanswered, showering us with the grace and the truth of his compassionate presence.
In these moments of grace, there is opportunity to ask the deeper questions this story’s light illuminates. What is the relationship between seeing and perceiving? How do our own needs and expectations determine what we will see? Does our position in society, our cultural standing, our gender, our race, our religion, our investments in the status quo, our need for change or our fear of change—do these rocks upon which we stand for security color our interpretation of what we perceive? Of course they do, and that is precisely what Jesus is seeking to illuminate by shining his light in this story today. As the light from Jesus reveals, the core evidence for belief is the healed man’s very personal confession that once he was blind and now he sees. That evidence for him is all the evidence he needs to trust in this power he cannot quite understand; this power of God, a power that is known, not by reading about it, or by years of study.
This power of grace to heal cannot be reduced to the written page or to a particular truth claim; this power of grace is experienced each time our eyes are open to see. Each time we feel our heart beat, each time we see the shimmering of leaves dancing with the sunlight, each time we initiate and gracefully talk through a troubled relationship, that grace of God shines a little brighter in the world. And like the healed man, our eyes are opened wider. What about when we fail or when we do not see these moments of grace? Have we sinned? Perhaps. Is our sin a burden that future generations must carry? No, apparently not. To the man accused of sin, Jesus speaks no word of judgment, only grace. As with this healed man, when we have sinned or been accused of such, Jesus seeks us out and meets us where we are invited to find ourselves again.
In his article in the Christian Century magazine about this passage of scripture, Frederick Niedner writes, “The Pharisees in the story, like the Pharisee in each of us, prove stubbornly blind to the reckless dispensing of mercy that takes place. It has come on the wrong day, to an unworthy recipient, from a maverick agent whom the Pharisees can’t see for dust…” It seems that in religion, whether it is organized or not, we gravitate toward structure and limits. Perhaps we do so because of the power of mystery; perhaps we are anxious about the immense and unexpected power of grace to change; perhaps we are eager to control and preserve what is. This “reckless dispensing of mercy”—this grace that Jesus throws around in the story, without regard for worthiness, plays havoc with our need for order and decent behavior. It also goes against our subconscious conviction that in some way, we deserve what we get (if it’s good, that is). Jesus’ reckless dispensing of mercy—in contrast to our desire to name and judge and punish sin—is perhaps the most daring challenge of all in this story. This most penetrating light of grace seeks us out, each one, especially when we are lost or wandering or marinating in our own guilt. This reckless dispensing of mercy illuminates our journeys of faith, just as it did for the healed man, so that seeing we might also believe.
In the midst of the strange twists and turns of dialogue in today’s gospel story, we finally turn again to the one character who seems to remain “clear eyed”—the healed man. Not once or twice but four times, he states the main action most directly: “All I know is that once I could not see, and now, because of this man Jesus, I can see. End of story. You go figure it out,” he says.
And, friends, in the beginning and end of God’s reckless grace, perhaps that’s all that can truthfully be said. |
