Sight is a powerful spiritual metaphor because it is such an elemental function of human life, deeply linked to perception and understanding, both our experience of it and its lack.
Those of us in the sighted world have seen how the light of morning can change everything that seemed so consuming, so unknowable the night before.
We have had moments of clarity when something is revealed to us that had been there all along—in plain sight, as we say—and yet had escaped us: a truth, a person, a need, a solution. How did we not see it? Sight is a mystery that way.
Buddhists often talk of the need to “clean the lens” or “wipe the mirror.” To take an honest look at ourselves and our own motivations and assumptions to make sure we’re getting an accurate read on any given situation. It’s a process of learning and relearning how to see.
Some of us have seen how our flawed vision can be improved. A friend of mine remembered to me once how, as a child, when she received her first pair of glasses, the world, which had been a blurry mess, was suddenly alive with precision and texture. She pointed to a tree in awe and told her mother, “So those are leaves?!”
And those who suffer physical blindness often know better than the rest of us how there is so much that our sight can keep us from seeing.
I.
Of the 41 verses in this chapter, it takes John exactly seven to tell how Jesus gave sight to the man born blind. Seven out of 41!
If we were judging solely from the number of verses, this would appear to be the easy part, healing the man’s physical blindness. The more difficult miracle, it seems—judging by the 34 verses that follow—is addressing the spiritual blindness of all the people around him. Or, we should say, “blindnesses,” because there are multiple.
This is a long story, like so many in John’s gospel, but also a winding one, with different characters, scenes, and dialogue. It all feels fractured, or perhaps we should say refracted.
This is a community struggling to see what has just happened in their midst, looking past one another in the process—and it begins with the disciples.
They’re walking along with Jesus when they see a man who has been blind from birth. They ask Jesus a question that sounds strange to us today, but seems to have been the subject of some debate then: whether this man’s condition was some kind of punishment, either for his own mistakes or for his parents’. The breadth and width of scripture is mixed on the issue, but whenever Jesus is asked about this kind of thing, he always dismisses the idea, which he does here, saying, This man’s blindness doesn’t have anything to do with sin. And then he reframes it, saying: It isn’t the result of sins past, but today it will be an occasion for God’s work to be revealed.1
Even after all this time walking with Jesus, the disciples still struggle to see the person apart from his condition. Where they see just another poor soul to pity, suffering because of his mistakes or even his parents, Jesus sees another potential disciple to invite into this new world he’s bringing—a reminder for the church. When we engage those in our community through the lens of their needs, are we keeping our eyes open enough to see the whole person? A person whose life, as much as our own, is a vessel for God’s work to be revealed in the world? This is the first blindness in the story, on the part of the well-meaning but ultimately shortsighted disciples and their limiting assumptions. The next case comes later, after the man has been healed, and word begins to spread as the community processes what has happened among them. Some are in awe, while some are unsure. And then the news reaches the religious folk, and that’s when it takes a turn for the worse.
II.
Why does it always have to be the religious folk?! I say this, of course, with all love and understanding as a religious folk myself, even a pastor, of all things—a bona fide religious leader. But I’m also a reader of the gospels, and so I know that there is no one whom Jesus is harder on than religious folk. Lawyers, maybe. But mostly religious folks, and their leaders in particular, who take the stage here.
Everyone has their blind spots, to be sure. But the one we religious folk are most open to is the blind spot of self-righteousness. It is always lurking not too far away, whether we’re reading scripture or the world around us. It is the blindness of certainty. The blindness of the comfort we get from sharing in this certainty with others. That blindness that would say that because we are right, everyone else must be a different kind of wrong. This is often the blindness of religion—not faith, mind you, but religious practice: these patterns and forms and movements designed to bring us into the presence of God, which, if we are not absolutely careful, have a way of, instead, separating us from others.
Here, for the Pharisees, the supposed crime was healing on the Sabbath, that old saw that all four gospels agree seems to have been a major point of contention between Jesus and his opponents.
Now, how best to keep the Sabbath remains a live question in Judaism today, as it was back then. But what Christians have failed to appreciate through the generations in reading these stories in the gospels is that at no point in the history of Judaism was it the norm for it to be wrong for someone who is suffering to be healed on the Sabbath. This would have been a very restrictive minority view—an unfortunate myopia on the part of the gospel writers, who, we must remember, were likely Jews themselves, as Jesus was and his disciples certainly were. Meaning that we’re reading one side of a close family dispute. In fact, it’s likely that John’s gospel was composed within a small Jewish-Christian community that was at odds with the wider Jewish community—families and neighbors split and turned against each other; a pain you can see in this story if you look closely.
The Sabbath is meant to be a regular, weekly return to first things; a reminder for God’s people of who we are and why we are here. At its core, Sabbath is about healing—the body and the soul. But the Pharisees presented in this story see it differently; maybe an instinctual reaction against this country preacher and his large crowds has clouded their vision. Religious conviction can do that.
Conviction can be a great strength—a little backbone, a little grit, a little fire. But fire can be destructive if not contained, and the brightest lights can be the most blinding if pointed in the wrong direction. It’s a testament to our human frailty that we can blind ourselves with what’s intended to help us see.
III.
I recently reread a poem that I love by the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai that speaks to these things, called “The Place Where We Are Right,” and I’m most interested in the first nine lines:
From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.
The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.
But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
Isn’t this it? That place where we are “right,” or certain, is closed to us and closes us to others—it’s as dead as a compacted dirt yard. It needs to be worked, to be turned over—what by? “Doubts and loves.” Not two things we would naturally understand as linked, and yet both doubts and loves leave us unsettled, unfinished. They leave us tender and open. And it’s this tenderness and openness that create room in us for something new to grow. For the poet here, the opposite of being right is not being wrong. It’s being open. It’s being willing to grow. This turns it on its head—which is what Jesus often did.
This story is finally not about sight being restored; it is about something deeper than that.
Did you see how Jesus heals this man? He spits on the ground, on the dirt in front of him—Jesus spits! This is the favorite Sunday school lesson for 8 year-old-boys. He spits on the ground, mixes his saliva with the dirt, scoops up this holy, muddy mixture, and pats it on the man’s eyes—an odd thing to do, but with echos of another time and another place in scripture where God’s own hands reached down into the dirt—like a mole, like a plow—and mixed it with a little river water, and from this muddy mess, formed…us. Creation then, re-creation here.
Jesus tells him to go wash it off, and when he does, where there once was blindness, there is sight. Where there once was shame, there is glory; where there once was suffering, there is now a sign of Christ’s presence in the world.
It’s telling, I think, how in the gospels, Jesus rarely touches people in places apart from their wounds. Not in their places of strength or confidence or conviction, but in those places where they are most exposed, most vulnerable, most uncertain. We talk a lot in church about spiritual gifts, the special ways God has blessed each of us that we’re to use to bless the world. But what we perhaps don’t say enough is that spiritual gifts often don’t look like other gifts—special talents or abilities. They’re not often celebrated in that way, and at first they may not even feel like gifts—they may feel like anything but. Very often, in fact, the spiritual gift you have to offer the world is your wound. Your place of pain, of trial. Where you are still tender. Grief, loss, disappointment, failure, doubt, love. Something that has given you new sight, better vision to see the world in its beauty, to see other people in their wonder. Whatever has taught us compassion and understanding, whatever has turned over the soil of our hearts—which can be a painful thing—and left us open for something new to grow. Very often, it’s true that we would not have wanted this turning to happen; we do not want this new vision. But now that we have been given it, it is ours to do something good with it.
Jesus touches the man’s wound, and his place of pain is revealed as his gift to the world.
IV.
And this is quite a transformation. When we first met this man, he was little more than a prop in someone else’s story: silent and passive. It was Jesus who approached him, the disciples who talked about him, and the community who talked around him. Heck, Jesus mixed dirt and spit and rubbed it on the man’s eyes without even asking! But now this man, who was born blind, is the only one in the story besides Jesus who truly sees. And not only does he see, but he has slowly found his voice.
And more than simply his voice, he’s found his testimony—is this too Baptist a word for us? If we could reclaim it for just a moment, we might think of testimony as that one thing, for you, that can’t not be true. It’s the one thing that you know deeper than anything else. That one thing you can’t not believe. It’s not where you are right, but where you have been deeply opened.
They ask him what happened, who Jesus is, and where did he go, feeling around for something to dismiss and discredit, and the man cuts through it all with some of the most honest words in all of scripture, bringing this whole refracted story into utter focus, telling them:
I don’t know who Jesus is or what this means. One thing I do know, he says, though I was blind, I now see.
And the question they’re left with is perhaps the same question for us: How about you? What is it that you have seen? What is it that you know underneath everything else? And will you tell us?
1 Grateful for the SALT Project and their commentary on this passage. https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2020/3/17/now-i-see-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-lent-4