Lent 4A
Text: John 9:1-41
Sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
March 22, 2020
Seeing the Light
For this Fourth Sunday of the season of Lent, we get one of the longest gospel lessons of the church year, the story of the man born blind, from John chapter nine. It’s 41 verses long, but I point out that the event itself, the cure of the man born blind, takes only two verses for Jesus to accomplish. Jesus spits on the ground and applies a mud pie to the man’s eyes, and tells him then to go wash in the pool of Siloam. And no doubt Jesus told him to wash thoroughly there, at least twenty seconds and wash between all your fingers, and sing “Happy Birthday” twice as you do it, to keep everyone safe. Wash in the pool of Siloam, for healing!
But if the healing in this story takes only those two verses, the rest of the story, the other 39 verses, are all about the incredulity of the people all around – first the neighbors, then the Pharisees, the Judean authorities, even the guy’s own mom and dad, for heaven’s sake – as they try to take in what they just can’t believe: the magnitude, the greatness, the truth of what has happened here.
Our hearts are with them, for we know incredulity, disbelief. Weeks ago when my wife started coming home from the medical center where she works with stories, warnings, about what it would look like when COVID-19 hit, I kept asking questions, wondering if the concern wasn’t overblown. In retrospect, kind of reminds me of the Easter story, when in the gospel of Luke the women who have discovered the empty tomb come to the apostles with the news, and we’re told the apostles “thought it an idle tale, and they did not believe them.” That was me.
It was less than a week ago as I brought word to church groups that we would shut down social gatherings of any kind at our building, a few folks actually became angry – with me! – out of their disbelief and fear. And think of how slow some of our public leaders have been, to embrace the protocols of the “slow the spread.” When what’s happening is something you have never seen before, well, the incredulity, the unbelief, it just comes natural. You might even say it’s an appropriate and reasonable response. It has taken us all some time, to get our minds around something so far out of our experience, so scary, something we’ve never seen before.
In that way we are like the man born blind, for in the story even he has to move intellectually, evolve in his understanding, before he can get to the deep truth of it. In his first conversation, with the neighbors, they ask “Where is this man [who cured you]?” and he answers simply “I don’t know.”
But in the next encounter, with the Pharisees, when they ask what the man says about Jesus, he replies, “He is a prophet.”
By the time of the next challenge, from the Judean authorities, the man is defending Jesus and even starting to proclaim him: “If this man were not from God, he could nothing!”
And then finally, in his last exchange with Jesus himself: “Lord, I believe.” And he worshiped him.
The faith of the man evolves. It takes time, to get your mind around it. It takes time, and it takes openness, to the idea that there may be something coming at you here that is way outside any experience that you have ever had. It takes time; it takes openness; and, and, it takes humility.
We have all been made humble here. Booming economies have lost strength. Proud scientists at the forefront of medicine have proved inadequately prepared. All of us are aghast at the sacrifices required. We have all been made humble here.
But if this story of the man born blind is true, then there is something about the humbling that can help us see things. Jesus says that those who claim to see, who will see nothing except what they see, well, they have a blindness all their own. But the one who knows his own limitations, who knows himself to be blind in some ways – who comes to God in all humility – that one will see things beyond all human pride and strength. That one will see hope, where others see only darkness.
Can you, at a time of such humbling of human economic, scientific, and political endeavor, can you nevertheless see things beyond the human at work among us? I can.
I see it in the blessedness of shared undertaking. This is true at the institutional level. It’s the schools, and the businesses, the government, and the churches, pitching in together for the safety of the community. The message we have on our brand new sign out front says: “The Southland – we’re in this together.” It’s true at an individual level, too, at a level so personal and small that my health and safety depend on your commitment to keep washing your hands! It only works if we all do it. We’ve thrown in our life together.
Can you see it? I can. I see it in the courage and commitment of those working in the front line, medical people and grocery workers and on and on; the people essential, even in the outbreak, who cannot work from home, not if our society is going to respond and get through this thing. They are putting themselves at greater risk, for the good of all. “Greater love than this has no one,” says Jesus of such things. It is of God; can you see that?
I see it in the simplest things. I saw it this week in something so small as looking out from the window of my house, where I can look into the sun porch of my next door neighbor. She’s a preschool teacher, and she was out there being filmed by her daughter, carefully turning the pages of a children’s picture book and reading earnestly into the camera. Preschool online learning. I couldn’t hear a word, of course, but to see the picture was more than enough to blow me away. We are still community. We are still connected. We are still, in spite of it all, defiantly, together.
Have you ever wondered something about the Bible as I have, about how often it is that it takes three days for significant things to happen? Jonah spent three days in the belly of the whale; Jesus spent three days in the tomb; St. Paul spent three days blind – blind, you see! – in the city of Damascus.
I learned something about that 3-day business recently from the Christian writer Barbara Brown Taylor. “From earliest times,” she writes, “people learned that was how long they had to wait in the darkest night before the sliver of the new moon appeared in the sky. For three days every month,” she says, “they practiced resurrection.”
It will be longer than three days for us. But with eyes of faith we can see, that light will return to the land. Now I preach to an empty sanctuary. With eyes of faith we can see it populated again, filled to bursting with a grateful people. That will be a great day; I can’t wait. Cure our blindness, O God, and give us eyes to see, that in these days we may keep that vision before us: a world restored.
People of God, in these dark nights, let us continue to practice resurrection.