Fourth Sunday in Lent + March 19, 2023 + John 9:1-41 + Pr. Craig Mueller
“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” An enigmatic phrase by Mark Twain.
Our eyes can deceive us, it seems to be saying. We often see what we already believe to be true.
So close your eyes for five seconds. And then open them.
You can’t depend on your eyes. A strange thing to say. As strange as the climactic section of today’s gospel. With Jesus’ enigmatic words “I have come that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.”
All through the gospel the sighted people do not see the truth. The truth that the blind man was really healed. And the truth that Jesus is indeed God’s anointed one, the Christ. The neighbors are hesitant and fearful. The religious authorities are downright judgmental. How dare a healing take place on the Sabbath!
It’s a drama in miniature. And it’s kind of like a Shakespeare updated to the present. The story is from Jesus’ day. But John uses a cast and conflicts in the community from the late first century. When believers in Jesus were being expelled from the synagogue.
There’s a healing. Jesus makes mud and anoints the blind beggar’s eyes and tells him to wash in a pool. And he receives his sight. Yet like we heard last week, in John there is always more to the story than the story. You can’t just depend on your eyes. The blind man sees something more profound. He sees with the eyes of faith and comes to believe in Jesus.
In our first reading Samuel is ready to anoint a successor to Saul. And the Lord tells Samuel that God does not see as mortals see. They look on outer appearances. You can’t depend on your eyes alone! The Lord looks on the heart. After all of Jesse’s brothers pass by Samuel, he chooses David and anoints him with oil. And David receives the spirit that will give him a calling and a destiny.
How often we do not even see what is right before our eyes. As I heard on the NPR show “The Hidden Brain,” our brains normalize what we experience each day. And we begin to take the gifts of everyday life for granted. I live on the eleventh floor of a high-rise and see Lake Michigan every day. When I’m on higher floors I notice how the view is more stunning than mine. Yet when folks visit me and see the lake they are awed, and I look with new eyes at what I see all the time.
Jacques Lusseryan became blind at the age of seven from an accident at school. Though nearly everyone saw this as a total disaster, with the help of his parents he came to view it as an opportunity for discovery. In his memoir, And There Was Light, he tells how he still had the ability to “see” the world. He writes: “The problem with seeing the regular way is that sight naturally prefers outer appearances. It attends to the surface of things, which makes it an essentially superficial sense. We let our eyes skid over trees, furniture, traffic, faces, too often mistaking sight for perception – which is easy to do when our eyes work so well to help us orient ourselves in space.” He adds: “Since becoming blind I have paid more attention to a thousand things.”
So close your eyes again for five seconds then open them.
How often we don’t “see” people as they truly are. We may talk down to people with disabilities, for example. A blind Lutheran pastor remembers going to church as a child and hearing the awkward whispers of neighbors who asked his parents or grandparents if there was any hope he would someday see He wasn’t ashamed of being blind, but he did feel the humiliation of others whispering about him as though he wasn’t there.
Ralph Ellison describes something similar in his 1952 novel Invisible Man. It reflects the experience of many African Americans in the early twentieth century. A quote from the novel: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”
Our racial justice work of repair begins with “the call to see.” Here is quote from a provocative book on reparations I am currently reading: “For many White Americans the issue is not simply that they cannot see across the color line. The issue is that they do not even see that it is there. The segregated structures of American life function as a sort of cataract to true sight.”1
Though we may not see. And may come across as smug and judgmental, let us see our blindness as an opportunity for healing!
In the early church baptism was called enlightenment. And baptism isn’t a once-and-for-all-and-done sacrament. It is a lifetime experience of daily receiving healing and forgiveness. Learning how to see with new eyes. And expanding our imagination.
As we embark on the holy work of racial repair, consider this. It is not just people of color who carry racialized trauma in their bodies, passed from generation to generation. Resma Menakem writes about this in a provocative book called “My Grandmother’s Hands.”2 White bodies traumatized each other in Europe for centuries before they encountered Black and red bodies. And this also lives on in us. The same is true of the trauma that police officers carry in their bodies. The point: we are all in need of healing. And the healing needs to take place not just in our thinking. But in our bodies. That is where we carry memories. As individuals and as peoples.
Today we have an opportunity to be anointed with oil. Some may think this a ritual for those dealing with a specific physical or mental illness. I invite you to expand your imagination. All of us are ill. All of us are blind. All of us carry wounds—grief, fear, hurt and yes, the effects of racial trauma in our bodies.
Christ comes among us this day us to open your eyes. To anoint you with grace. To bring you new life. To heal your ills. To set you free from all that holds you back from seeing—from imagining—a new future before your eyes. And to bring you to Easter, when we can truly say, “I was blind, but now I see.”
You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. As we will sing in a few moments, “Let the inner eye discern / how much more there is to learn.”
1Duke Kown and Gregory Thompson, Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair.
2Resma Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies