THE TRIAL OF ONE BORN BLIND
A sermon preached by
Rev. Dr. Randle R. (Rick) Mixon
First Baptist Church, Palo Alto, CA
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Text: John 9
Over the years we have been entertained recently by any number of sensational trials with outrageous antics and incredible legal maneuvering. I think of the O. J. Simpson trial or the trial of the San Francisco couple in the dog mauling death of Diane Whipple. We have been embarrassed and entertained by the antics of attorneys and witnesses, angling for public attention and notoriety. It seems there’s nothing like a trial to capture our attention, especially if the trial smacks of circus. We find ourselves fascinated by the breadth and novelty of the human capacity for mischief and evil. How could they have done THAT? What will be the rationalization for their behavior? How will they plead their case? How will the attorneys prosecute or defend them? We do love a good trial or even a John Grisham novel.
Today’s text leads to the trial of a fascinating case. The religious authorities are out to get Jesus. They don’t like what he’s been doing and saying. His teaching and actions threaten to undermine their already precarious power and authority - both with the people and with the Romans. This troublemaking rabbi from Galilee has been challenging them at every turn; then nimbly escaping their most carefully laid traps for him.
One born blind - the ancient texts don’t say if it was a man or woman, though we have traditionally identified this person as a man - is encountered at the side of the road as Jesus journeys. Seeing him sitting there, Jesus does a very Jesus thing – he reaches out to him and restores his sight. Isn’t this wonderful? Jesus finds someone along the way who is suffering, suffering physically, economically and emotionally and does the natural thing, he heals him. What a gift! What a blessing! The man is ecstatic, his family is thrilled, the crowd is amazed, the faith of Jesus’ followers is deepened; only the religious authorities don’t get the picture. They are so hell-bent on snagging Jesus in wrongdoing that they can’t grasp the meaning of the miracle that has happened here.
Since Jesus apparently moves on right after the healing, the religious authorities are reduced to calling in the one born blind for questioning. You see, he had been healed on the Sabbath, a clear violation of the law. Jesus had spit in the dirt and kneaded it to make the mud with which he covered the man’s eyes. Kneading on the Sabbath was work and thus illegal, deserving punishment. The trial, with all its legal jockeying, begins. “How is that you have regained your sight,” they ask, full well knowing the answer, but hoping to trick the man into saying something damning about his healer.
Now the one born blind seems to be a simple soul, one used to begging and subsistence living. His answer is plain and simple, “Well, now, let me see. The fella put some goo on my eyes; told me to go wash it off; now I can see. Yep, that about covers it.” You can imagine the learned authorities were not very pleased with this response. It throws them off for a moment; they start arguing among themselves about the merits of the miracle of sight restored versus the legality of healing on the Sabbath. To their credit, there were at least some who questioned the arguments and tactics of Jesus’ critics.
After the recess, it’s back to the one born blind. Maybe they can still get him to say something accusatory about this troublemaker. “Since it was your eyes he opened, how would you characterize him?” Another simple response, “Prophet.” Well now, the religious authorities did not like that response either - magician maybe, charlatan perhaps, but not prophet; that had far too many religious overtones. It was a potential threat to their authority.
So, they try a different tactic. They begin to question the veracity of the witness himself. “He’s a fraud. He couldn’t have been born blind. He’s one of the Galileans trying to set up a big con. We won’t fall for it!” With that, they call in the parents of the one born blind, hoping they can use his family to trip him up and foil the plot. “Is this your child? Was he born blind? How do you explain this sudden sightedness?” they badger.
Pity the poor parents. They must think, “Oh no, we don’t want to get involved in all this. We’ve been around long enough to know the consequences of crossing the authorities. We’ve seen more than our share of shunning and disfellowshipping, beating and crucifixion. We can’t afford to be banned from our synagogue. It is the center of village life.” So they respond by telling the authorities, “Yes, this is our son. We can’t deny that. And, yes, he was born blind, but we haven’t a clue as to how he has come to see again. Why don’t you ask him? He’s old enough to speak for himself.”
Curses, foiled again! “Well, bring the fellow back in. We have a few more questions for him.” But it’s not a question they begin with. Clearly leading the witness, they start out with an injunction for him, “Give glory to God!” “Well isn’t that what I’ve been doing?” he thinks in response to this new tactic. The authorities apparently have decided to tip their hand. Their command to “Give glory to God” is a set-up. They follow it with the statement that they know that Jesus is a sinner. If the one born blind gives glory to God how can he also affirm a sinner? Sensing the trap, he again gives a simple response, “Well, I don’t know anything about all that but I’ll tell ya what I do know. I was blind, and now I can see.”
Once again disarmed, sputtering to salvage the prosecution’s case, the religious authorities repeat their original question, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” Maybe in their frustration they were thinking that if they asked the same question over and over again, they would eventually get the response they wanted. It has a feel of desperation, though. And he just frustrates them further by saying, “Well, I already told you the answer to that. Didn’t you hear me? Why do you want me to repeat myself? Are y’all thinking about converting?” Hmmm. Maybe he’s a clever fool, a simple man with a sharp turn of mind, after all. Oh the delicious irony of those last questions he puts to the ones who have been questioning him.
The authorities were not at all happy! They begin to attack him directly, hurling the most hateful epithet they can think of, “You’re one of this faker’s disciples! But we, we are disciples of Moses! We know that Moses spoke to God, but we don’t even know where this fellow comes from.” Now the stage is set for our crafty witness to turn the tables totally. “Well now, you don’t know here he comes from, huh? And you think he’s a sinner? Like I said before, all I know is he opened my eyes and I don’t think the law allows for a sinner to do that kinda thing. I believe the rules say for a fella to do something like that he would have to be pretty well connected to God, wouldn’t you agree? Nothing like making a blind man see has happened in the whole wide world as far as I know. I doubt this fella could do anything like that if he hadn’t come from God.” The one born blind is beginning to see that, though it is significant to his faith that Moses spoke to God, this man, who touched his sightless eyes and made them see, is from God directly. Why can’t these learned religious leaders see this? “Knowledge [here] is not a cognitive category, but is a category of relationship. The true measure and model of knowledge is God’s and Jesus’ mutual knowledge.” They know one another intimately and the one born blind is being drawn into this very intimacy because his eyes are now open and his faith is growing by leaps and bounds.
Finally, their last nerve fried, the religious authorities drive the witness from the room, shouting, “You were born totally in sin and you dare to tell us about the law? Get out!” I imagine the one born blind is happy to leave that courtroom.
What lessons does this ancient and familiar story have for us today? For one thing, we have an important lesson about light and darkness, about vision and blindness, about knowledge and ignorance. Too often we think we have things all figured out, that we are in the know, like the religious authorities in John’s text. Nobody, especially some ignorant, down-and-out character off the street, is going to tell us about how things are, how life is put together, how God has ordered our universe. We already know everything we need to know. A too-simple truth like, “I once was blind but now I see,” threatens to undermine all of our learning, our certainty, our privilege and our presumed power.
This story also teaches us that sin is not necessarily about moral categories of behavior; sin can be understood as a theological category of relationship about how any one of us responds to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. In this story, sin is not seen in the presence of illness or in a violation of the law, sin is seen in the resistance of the religious authorities to Jesus as the Christ. Gail O’Day puts it this way, “Jesus ‘takes away the sin of the world’ by the fact of his coming into the world. By giving the world access to the light and love of God, Jesus takes away the world’s sin because he makes it possible for the world to redefine its relationship to God.” Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. He goes on, “Sin is fundamentally about one’s relationship with God, and…the decisive measure of one’s relationship with God is one’s faith in Jesus. This flies in the face of views that want to define sin in relation to right actions and thereby establish the norms for judgment….Judgment is…based not on what people do…but on people’s embrace of God in Jesus.” Here’s where the religious authorities in our story miss the boat. “The only way to be excluded from Jesus’ offer of salvation is to turn one’s back on that offer.”
This story also shows how, since it is the sick who need the physician, it is the sick who benefit from healing. Those who have no need of the physician do not receive the benefits of healing. To pray to God to “open my eyes that I may see,” is to acknowledge that I don’t know it all, that there is “yet more light to be revealed.” This is an exercise in learning humility, which, in our vulnerability, will bring us closer to God than we could have ever imagined. How is it that a Samaritan woman of ill repute or a blind beggar were recipients of God’s great truths in Jesus Christ? Is it because, in their very neediness, they were open to God’s coming in love and grace?
“…the man who had been born blind received his physical sight, but his true sight came as he moved through his ignorance to recognize Jesus as the Son of [Humanity], as the light of the world.” There is powerful irony in the movement of the beggar from blindness to his ultimate confession to Jesus, “I believe,” as he kneels in worship before the Word made flesh. At the same time, we watch the self-assured and learned religious authorities move from their position of power into deep darkness, utterly failing to see the light, a failure all the more poignant because the light is shining right into their unseeing eyes. “To reject Jesus is to reject the love of God in Jesus and so to pass from the possibility of salvation to judgment.”
No matter how hard it seems, love is about life and living not about rules and regulations. God gave life, Jesus affirmed its abundance in his compassion and witness, the Spirit empowers it. May we never be so arrogant as to think that we have any ultimate power over that amazing gift of life, that we know all about it, that we don’t have something to learn from the testimony of one born blind, a deceptively simple soul who sees in Jesus the Light of the World. May the light which has come into the world also come into our lives so that we glow with the love that made us and now makes us whole. Bathed in that light, may we move in humility and grace into a world where there are far too many dark corners of hatred and fear, of arrogance and judgment, of pain and evil, so that, in Jesus’ name, we might make a difference. Amen.
(Quotations from Gail R. O’Day, The New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume IX)