April 24, 2022 + Second Sunday of Easter + John 20:19-31 + Pr. Craig Mueller
Blessed are those who do not see. And yet believe. Blessed are those with blurry vision?
In 2017, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni woke up to blurry vision. And from that moment on, his life changed forever.
“There was a dappled fog over the right side of my field of vision," Bruni says. “And I thought for hours that there must be some gunk in my eye, or maybe I'd had too much to drink the night before. Then I thought, Oh, no, it's my eyeglasses. I just have to clean them. And on and on, until deep into the day, I realized there was something wrong beyond all of that.”1
Bruni was 52 then. He would never regain the vision in that eye. He had experienced a rare kind of stroke that permanently damaged his optic nerve. And there was a strong probability that another stroke would impact his good eye.
The news brought shock and terror. It led Bruni to do some emotional, psychological, and spiritual inner work. He had a choice. He could fixate on what he had lost. Or focus on all the blessings that remained. “I ended up determined,” Frank declares, “determined to show myself that I could adapt to whatever was going to happen.”
You could say that Frank Bruni learned how to see in new ways. How to believe. How to have faith.
Blessed are those with blurry vision? Who would have thought?
I am now reading Bruni’s inspiring new book called The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found. He writes that sometimes he is taking in visual information that I didn’t before. He writes: “I'm focusing on certain details with my one good eye in a way that I never had with my two good eyes. . . an example ... of just how nimble our brains and our bodies can be when circumstances demand it. Because as we age,” he says, “we're all going to lose certain physical potencies and be asked to make certain adjustments and compensations.”
You could say there is a lot of blur in today’s gospel. The disciples are filled with fear as they gather behind locked doors on Easter evening. They are trying to make sense of Jesus’ death. It was not what they expected, not what they hoped for. Then they can’t believe their eyes. Are they really seeing Jesus among them? Showing them his wounds? Speaking words of peace? Commissioning them to be his hands and feet in the world? The blur of grief turns to resurrection joy.
Except that Thomas was not with them. Thomas who always appears on the Second Sunday of Easter. Asking the hard questions. Demanding proof. Revealing doubt and uncertainty. Thomas, the patron saint of all who need assurance that blurry vision, so to speak, is part of spiritual maturity. And can lead to deeper faith and a different kind of clarity.
“Unless I can see and touch the wounds, I will not believe,” Thomas blurts out. A week after Easter (that is today!) Thomas is with the others and Jesus appears again. Jesus invites Thomas to see and touch the wounds. And there is no more blur. Thomas sees with the eyes of faith. And this one known as “the doubter” for the past two thousand years makes one of the strongest declarations of faith in the Bible. Five words. “My Lord and my God.”
What do you think are the primary symbols of Easter? A lily? An egg? A bunny? Better yet, a chocolate bunny? Or should we go more religious? A cross? A sunrise? How about the paschal candle, the large Easter candle?
I doubt anyone would mention wounds and scars! And yet Jesus’ wounds are the sign of his suffering and death. Reminding us that cross and resurrection, terror and beauty, sorrow and joy are forever intertwined.
What about the scars that you and I carry? Our response to life’s hardest moments may be a kind of blur for us, but there is a blessing there as well?
It reminds me of another wonderful book called The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability by Nancy Eisland. By the time Eisland was 13 years old, she had had 11 operations for a congenital bone defect in her hips. Pain would be her lot for life. You would think that she would yearn for a heaven where she would not be disabled. But instead she accepted that her physical limitations were part of her identity, and without her disability she would “be absolutely unknown to myself and God,” she wrote.
In fact, Eisland uses the resurrection accounts where Jesus shows his disciples his scars to make a surprising assertion. “In presenting his impaired body to his startled friends, the resurrected Jesus is revealed as the disabled God,” she writes. The Risen Christ bears wounds. His injury is part of him. As our wounds and scars are a part of us. And there is a hidden blessing there. Blurry as it might be at first.
In fact, Frank Bruni’s blurry vision led him to learn, to see, to perceive all the different kinds of pain people are carrying. He admits that this was a “blessed development” the doctors didn’t name. Other people around him gradually came into sharper focus. He learned how we all project a public persona with all our accomplishments and the illusion that everything is okay. But we all have our private messes. Our fears and struggles. But also triumphs and resiliency. Bruni tells such stories of people that he learned to see with new eyes. And the blessing that emerged from his blurry vision.2
Amid our fears, amid our doubts, amid our blurry vision, the Risen Christ comes among us this today. And our eyes are opened. We see the cross. We see the scars. We see the suffering. In Ukraine. In the world. In this city. In one another. In ourselves. And even when we can’t quite see it, week by week we gather at this Easter feast. For there, we are indeed blessed.
1 https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/03/22/1087846087/frank-bruni-stroke
2 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/15/opinion/blindness-friendship.html