The Rev. Sara Warfield
Scriptures: John 9:1-41
Blindness, Part 1
He spends his days stationed at an intersection heavy with foot traffic from the temple. He tries to be on duty when people leave morning prayer and feel particularly pious. His garments are dusty and faded but well tended. A woman in his community repairs them in exchange for a few coins whenever they wear out. He may be a beggar, but he doesn’t need to be a shabby beggar.
He tries to be a kind man. He offers bits of his bread to the cats that wander close. When someone new joins their ranks along the sidewalk, he doesn’t shoo them away like so many of the other beggars do, protective of their turf. He calls them closer, gives them tips, shows them how to protect themselves. Watch out for the kid who smells like burnt wood and old fish—one minute he’s chattering away about the dice he found in the gutter and the next he’s sprinting away with your coins.
This is why the man keeps his walking stick across his lap when he’s working, and he’s not ashamed to say that he’s bruised more than a few ankles.
But it’s not the thieving kids who get him down. He can’t blame them—they’re as desperate as he is for something to eat, for a leg up from this life. It’s everyone else. Despite his eyes, he knows who walks past him and how. He can feel the pity of some who bend down to drop a coin in his basket—or maybe it’s a kind of guilt. Pity and guilt feel similar to him. A few stop to chat sometimes, ask his name, which is nice, but they never stick around long. And some particularly terrible people silently mock him, thinking he doesn’t know. And it’s easiest to pretend that he doesn’t.
But mostly he feels indifference radiating from those who walk by. The vast majority of people don’t stop, don’t even slow down. When the sidewalk is crowded, some even step over him, as unconscious of him as they would be if he was a large rock in the way. Most people just don’t even see him.
Blindness, Part 2
On this particular day, he hears a group of feet coming his way. He overhears their conversation. “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” The man swallows hard. They’re talking about him. He’s so sick of how everyone needs an explanation for everything, but particularly his lack of sight—as if he, his parents, or someone screwed up in order for him to deserve it. Your mom must have drunk too much wine when you were in the womb. Or maybe your father committed adultery and this was God’s punishment. Maybe your body was just too weak to develop fully.
But maybe—just maybe, he thought, people are simply born different. He moves around the city just as easily as anyone else by feel, by sound, by memory. He knows what’s good to eat by touch or smell. He loves the sound of a flute. His life could be full if someone would take the time to recognize what gifts he has to offer and simply adapt the environment even just slightly for him to be able to step into those gifts.
But all anyone wants to see are what they view as his limitation, his disability, and try to figure out who or what is to blame for it. No one really sees the fullness of who he is
—.
The footsteps have stopped, but someone is still talking. “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” The man’s ears perk up. The frustration that had been building in him dissolves. Who is this man who sees God’s works revealed in me?
Blindness, Part 3
He hadn’t expected that seeing things with his eyes would be such an overwhelming and disorienting experience. He’d never understood the words bright or shadow or red or cloud before. He’d made his way quite easily to the pool of Siloam as the man had instructed, but after he’d washed the mud off his eyes he found walking difficult. Watching his feet move underneath him was strange and distracting. Sometimes he still closes his eyes to get from one place to another more smoothly. He needs to take in this new experience of sight in small doses, otherwise he gets tired quickly. But he’s excited to finally witness a sunset, to see the smile of the woman who mends his clothes, to know the color of his mother’s eyes.
Even more unexpected than the overwhelm of his new sight, though, has been everyone’s reactions to it. People he’s known for years now claiming that he isn’t who he says he is. He’s still working out what the different movements on faces, the different shine in eyes, mean, but when he closes his eyes, he feels their suspicion, their mistrust. It can’t be you, they say. Though you look like you.
What is wrong with you, he thinks, it’s me. The man you’ve been begging beside for years. As if his sightless eyes had been his only defining feature.
Then there are the Pharisees. Twice now, they’ve asked what the man called Jesus did to give him his sight. The first time, he simply told them what happened: “He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see.” He thought they’d be happy about this miracle, but all they did was argue about it. Finally, they’d asked him what he thought about this Jesus who’d given him his vision. And he had answered as straightforwardly and honestly as he could. “He is a prophet.” Which seemed to make them even more angry.
Even his parents don’t seem excited. “We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind; but we do not know how it is that now he sees, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is of age. He will speak for himself.”
What is so complicated about this? the man wonders. What is it that makes them refuse to see this amazing thing that happened? Is it because it didn’t happen on their timeline? Or because they didn’t oversee it? Or because they don’t get to claim responsibility for it, that someone they don’t like gets the credit instead?
Isn’t it enough that it happened? Why can’t a good thing just be a good thing? Why can’t they see?
—
The Pharisees had been so angry that they’d cast the man away, driven him out of their presence. So now he sat at his same place on the sidewalk by the temple, soaking in this huge, new overwhelming experience of the world through his new sight, but wondering what has really changed.
That’s when Jesus finds him. In fact, Jesus had been looking for him after he’d heard the Pharisees had sent him away.
“Do you believe in the Son of Man?” Jesus asks him.
The man responds, “And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him.”
And Jesus says, “You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.”
In those words what the man suddenly sees is that though others have cast him out all his life, though his own religious leaders have cast him out, he is loved and he belongs. That though people fear his new way of seeing, it will bring him life and life abundant, and if others are willing to have their eyes opened, so could they.
A pang of empathy rings through him. Just now, he is still learning how to move in this world with his new way of seeing. He’s still learning the meaning of depth perception and the ways people talk with their bodies as much as their words, and it’s slow and disorienting and frustrating. He understands what it feels like to want to shut his eyes and move through the world like he used to.
But he knows that to shut his eyes, to fall back on his old, comfortable, but ultimately limiting way of being, is to miss this great opportunity for love, for belonging. So with a bit of trembling but also great trust, he responds, “Lord, I believe.”
Amen.
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