Swede Land is a character in Leif Enger’s novel Peace Like a River. In the novel she offers this observation about miracles. She says that people fear miracles because they fear being changed, though ignoring them will change you also. She goes on to say that every miracle has to have a witness, someone to say, “This is what I saw. This is how it went. Make it of it what you will.”[i]
In essence, that’s what happens in today’s story. The healing takes about two verses to describe, but the controversy surrounding the healing takes over thirty verses. People are trying to make sense of the miracle. And true to Swede’s observation, how they respond to the miracle seems to have a lot to do with how they cope with their fear of change. The man who had been born blind embraces the change in his life. His journey is one of moving from spiritual blindness to spiritual sight. The other characters in the story were changed by ignoring the miracle, and their journey is one of moving from spiritual sight to spiritual blindness.
The man who had been born blind did not come to Jesus asking to be healed. He didn’t even know who Jesus was. Jesus came to him, made mud, put it on his eyes, told him to wash in the Pool of Siloam, and then the formerly blind man suddenly received his sight. His restoration of physical sight is immediate; his gain of spiritual sight grows steadily in the course of this story. At first he recognizes Jesus as the man who healed him. Then he decides that Jesus must be a prophet, and later he confessed that Jesus is Lord.
The early church found in this story a symbol of Christian baptism and the new life that it brings. In the frescoes in the Roman catacombs this story was used to illustrate the meaning of baptism.[ii] He is healed, after all, as he washes in water, and then after his washing his understanding of who Jesus is steadily grows. When we baptized Luke and Molly a few moments ago, they were told that it was for them that Jesus Christ came into the world and showed God’s love, though they do not know it yet. And so we pray that as they grow up their understanding will grow, and that one day they will embrace the faith that they have been taught as their own.
If the first journey in this story is one from spiritual blindness to spiritual sight, then the second journey is made by those who move in the opposite direction. Many of the townspeople who ought to have recognized the man who had been healed did not. Some of the townspeople did recognize him, but others kept saying that the new man in town must be someone like him. It reminds me of the story about the real Charlie Chaplin entering a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest. He came in third!
The townspeople who failed to recognize the man fell into the trap that many of us fall into when we encounter people with different abilities than our own. If all that certain townspeople ever saw was a blind beggar, then it is no wonder that they failed to recognize him once he was no longer blind. But those who had seen him as a whole person before were still able to recognize him after.
The Pharisees also embark on a journey from spiritual sight to spiritual blindness. Near the beginning of the story, some of the Pharisees seem to be more open-minded. Some of them were saying that no one who dishonored the Sabbath could be from God, while others were saying that surely no one who was a sinner could perform such signs. We wonder if Nicodemus was there. Remember Nicodemus? The one who came secretly to Jesus at night, back in chapter three. Is he still a secret believer? Is he on the verge of faith? Or, is he still hedging his bets? Was he the one who interjected, “How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?” before apparently growing silent as the debate got heated. We don’t know. But what we do know is that the Pharisees seem absolutely entrenched in their view that anyone who performed any kind of work on the Sabbath could not be from God.
The Pharisees had many good reasons for being strict about Sabbath observance. When the Israelites were slaves in Egypt, they were forced to make mud bricks for Pharaoh. But now that they were free, they could observe the Sabbath and refrain from mixing mud together. It wasn’t a bad rule. It provided for rest from labor, and it served as a reminder of how God had rescued them from slavery and the constant drudgery of making mud bricks.[iii]
But the Pharisees focus so narrowly on the rule against mixing mud on the Sabbath that they cannot make an allowance for Jesus to mix just a small amount of mud to make a healing salve. It’s what happens whenever a rule or a custom or a tradition that had once been a life-giving practice is wrongly applied to a new situation in such a way that it is no longer life-giving. At the very end of the story the Pharisees ask, “Are you saying that we are now blind also?”
It’s a good question for the church as well. It’s even a loving question. How is our own spiritual sight? Which of our traditions, habits, and practices are still truly life-giving, and which ones have we wrongly applied?
The season of Lent is an apt time for such examination. How are we bringing life to each other? How are we bringing life to our neighbors who desperately want to experience life? Are we seeing Jesus for who he is and where he wants us to follow?
No comments:
Post a Comment