Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 2, 2008

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Pity the poor Pharisees in John’s story of Jesus and the man born blind. They had a real problem. They really believed that it was a sin to work on the Sabbath. Anyone who did was a sinner and was not right with God. Yet here was this man saying that he had been blind from birth and that this fellow Jesus had healed him—on the Sabbath. Jesus had done work on the Sabbath, and the man had been given his sight. Clearly only God could give sight to a man born blind, and God would never work through a sinner. Yet Jesus, a sinner, had given the man sight. It just didn’t make sense, but it sure looked like it was true. The truth was, Jesus had healed the man through what for the Pharisees was a sinful act. That was the truth, and it was a very inconvenient truth. It was a truth that challenged everything the Pharisees knew to be true. It was a truth that, if they let it, would shatter their whole worldview, and worse, their view of God and of God’s will for God’s people. The Pharisees of John’s story faced a very inconvenient truth indeed.

And they reacted the way most people react when they’re faced with inconvenient truths, truths that challenge their firmly held beliefs or their entrenched way of life. They turned on the messenger who had brought them the inconvenient truth. Near the end of John’s long story the man whom Jesus had given sight states the obvious conclusion from what had happened. He says: “If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” John 9:33 NRSV The Pharisees can’t really deny that statement, but they can’t accept it either. So they attack the messenger. They say to the man “You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?” And they “drove him out,” as John puts it. John 9:34 NRSV John then ends his story with a passage in which Jesus sums up the story’s point by saying “I came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” John 9:39 NRSV

That’s a troubling point, isn’t it? We are all pretty comfortable, I suspect, with the idea that, metaphorically speaking, Jesus gives sight to the blind. Jesus lets us see the truth, God’s truth, the truth of God’s love and grace for all people that we would not see except for him. We get that, I think. But why does John’s Jesus say that part of the lesson of this story is that those who do see should become blind? We don’t like the idea of anyone becoming blind, so why does John’s Jesus say that he came not only that those who are blind may see but that those who do see may become blind?

To understand that part of the story, remember first of all that Jesus is speaking in metaphor here. He doesn’t want anyone to become literally blind. Rather, he wants us to understand that there are things that are making us blind to that which he shows us, to that truth of God that he came to reveal. In John’s story the Pharisees’ unshakable conviction that they know God’s law and will, that they know what sin is, and that they know how God relates to the world kept them from seeing the truth of God that was demonstrated when Jesus gave sight to the man born blind. They had to become blind to what they saw as the truth before they could see God’s truth in Jesus.

It’s the same with us. John’s story of the man born blind calls us to ask: What do we see, what do we think we know, that is keeping us from seeing God’s truth? You may have your own answers to that question, but I believe that it is our often unquestioned acceptance of the ways of the world as simply the way things are, as natural human ways that we can’t change, that is keeping us from seeing God’s truth. We see the world’s ways as normal and normative. We often even see them as right, and because we do we can’t really see the very different ways to which God is calling us.

What worldly ways am I talking about? I’m talking about the way of violence, for starters. We accept war as a normal and acceptable human activity. Our blithe acceptance of the world’s way of violence blinds us to God’s way of peace and nonviolence. And I’m talking about the world’s way of inequality and exploitation. We accept without question national and international social and economic structures that result in us Americans, who are about 2% of the world’s population, consuming something like 25% of the world’s resources. Our self-interested acceptance and defense of those structures blind us to God’s way of justice and equality.

I could go on and on with more examples, but I trust the point is made. We will never see God’s truth until we become blind to these ways of the world. The worldly ways that we so easily accept block out God’s ways. They veil God’s ways from our sight, and we are blind to them. Jesus came to make us blind to the ways of the world so that we might see the ways of God.

So we have to ask: How do we do that? We start, I think, simply by realizing that the world’s ways that we accept are not God’s ways to which Jesus calls us. The world order of exploitation defended with violence that we know is not divinely ordained. It is the product of human sin. We know that because we know Jesus, who teaches us a different way. Then, once we accept that the world’s ways are not God’s ways, we need to put our trust in God as we give up our worldly ways and seek to live into God’s ways. We need to trust that through us God can and will work a transformation of the world if we humans, or even just some of us, truly give up violence and injustice and embrace nonviolence and justice.

Trusting God in this way is to embrace inconvenient truths. It is to embrace inconvenient truths that call us to reject things we have always known to be true, just as the Pharisees of John’s story had always known their truths to be true. It is to embrace truths that call us to change the way we think and the way we live. God’s truth is inconvenient for us; but it’s still God truth, and God is still calling us to it. So, are we ready to become blind to the world’s convenient truth so that we can live into God’s inconvenient truth? Are you? Am I? Amen.