You can listen to my sermon on the Christ Church website, or read it below
After four months of being in transition, this week I decided to get back into the routine of life. No more sleeping in until just before the kids wake up and rushing through the morning, the alarm now goes off at 5am, and thanks to our recent return to Daylight Saving Time, it is still very dark. In those first moments of the morning, I struggle to stay awake. It is so dark, the bed is so comfortable, and I really would prefer to just roll over, but at least for this week, I was able to stave off the snooze button. The hardest part, however, isn’t the waking up, it is those first few seconds while my eyes adjust to whatever light source I introduce. Usually, it is my iPhone. After the alarm goes off, I check for overnight messages and then open up the Forward Movement website to read Morning Prayer. Slowly my eyes adjust to the brightness of the screen. At first, it is almost painful as my dilated pupils rapidly shrink. Usually, by the time I have finished reading the Psalm, my eyes are fully adjusted, but it really does take a while.
I can only imagine what it must have been like for the man born blind when he first opened his eyes. After decades of darkness, never knowing the light of day, suddenly it all came flooding in. How intense must that first moment of sight been for him? How excruciating was it as his eyes adjusted to the light for the first time? How long did it take before he could actually comprehend what he was seeing? As much as this story is about the miracle of a man born blind being given the ability to see, it also serves as a metaphor for John. This story is meant to teach us what it means to really see Jesus even as it assures us that it might take some time for the eyes of our heart to adjust. For John, this story serves as an illustration of what it means to call Jesus the light of the world. It took the man’s eyes some time to adjust to the newness of the light, and it would take his soul a while to come to see clearly in the light of Christ. While he is learning to see, everyone around this man were found to be perfectly happy staying blind.
After the man is healed, the questions start, beginning with his neighbors, those who had passed him by for years, but never really saw him. They had seen his cloak, spread out to receive loose change. They had seen his rags, barely stitched together. Some had seen his face and the vastness behind his eyes, but their reactions betray the fact that though they were perfectly capable of sight, they had never really seen him. The man, on the other hand, continues his journey toward sight. “Who did this to you?” They asked him. The man responds, “The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes… and I received my sight.” In the initial stages of his spiritual seeing, the man only knows the name of the one who healed him, but as the story unfolds, his soul’s vision will increase.
His neighbors don’t buy his answer, and so they drag him off to the Synagogue where the Pharisees essentially put him on trial for heresy. Again, he gives the details of his healing. When pressed about the man called Jesus, the once blind man’s understanding deepens. No longer able call Jesus simply a man, the eyes of his heart continued to open and he tells them, “He is a prophet.” Not content to leave it alone, the Pharisees push things further. They call his parents to testify that he was, in fact, the man born blind. Afraid of what the Pharisees might do to them, and unwilling to comment on who this Jesus character might actually be, his parents make themselves blind to their own son’s healing. “Ask him,” they say, “he is of age.”
Again, the man is brought back before the council, and again they ask him for the details of his healing. How can the details of this story be true, they wonder, for Jesus healed the man on the Sabbath, clearly he is a sinner and God doesn’t work through sinners. So, who healed you, God or this sinner? The man can clearly see that they are missing the point. He wonders if maybe they secretly want to be disciples of Jesus. He assures them that he has no idea how it all happened, but that this Jesus who healed him has to be of God. As he considers the truth that never before had anyone ever heard of someone blind from birth being healed, his spiritual vision continues to come into focus.
Finally, the Pharisees have had enough. Their eyes are scrunched closed so tightly that they may never see anything the right way again, and they throw this man out of the Synagogue. Jesus, having heard about it, tracked him down, and the man born blind was able to see Jesus for the first time. Here, with physical eyes wide open and spiritual eyes ready to see, he comes to see and to understand fully that Jesus is the Son of Man, one of John’s favorite names for the Messiah, and he becomes the only person in John’s Gospel to worship Jesus.[1] It was difficult work, coming to see Jesus fully, but the man born blind was blessed in the experience. His eyes were made open by Jesus, but more than that, his heart became open to God.
I am more and more convinced that learning to see with the eyes of our hearts is the basic work of discipleship. In Baptism, we are given the gift of the Holy Spirit and with it, the spiritual eyes needed to see God’s hand at work in the world. Over time, by the grace of God, the pupils of our hearts slowly adjust to the light of Christ. As our spiritual vision comes into focus, we see the hurting and the lost and we care for them. We see the joyful and the blessed and we rejoice with them. We see blessings poured out and we give thanks for them. We see the work of the Kingdom and we join in it. The process of learning to see the world through the eyes of our hearts is never ending, but with God’s help, every day, our spiritual eyesight can get a little bit better. As our eyes adjust to the light of Christ, the progress might be slow, even painful at times, but in the end, our eyes will be open and we will be ready to worship Jesus, the light of the world, the Son of God. Amen.
[1] http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=906
Draughting Theology 