Man Born Blind (Peter H)

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Transcript

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Welcome to SGTM Talks. We hope you find this encouraging and inspiring.

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So now for our end of the teaching, we're going to read the passage for the fourth Sunday in Lent, which is the story from John's Gospel about the man born blind. It's John chapter nine, verses one to forty-one. This is quite a long reading, and I will say why it's quite a long reading when I begin to preach. As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. The disciples asked him, Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind? Neither this man nor his parents sinned, said Jesus, but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world. Having said this, he spat on the ground, made some mud with saliva, and put it on the man's eyes. Go, he told him, wash in the pool of siloem, a word meaning scent. So the man went and washed, and came home seeing. His neighbors and those who had formerly seen him begging asked, Isn't this the same man who used to sit and beg? Some claimed that he was. Others said, No, he only looks like him. But he himself insisted, I am the man. How then were your eyes opened? They asked. He replied, The man they called Jesus made some mud and put it on my eyes. He told me to go to Siloam and wash. So I went and washed. And then I could see. Where is this man? They said. I don't know, he said. They brought to the Pharisees the man who had been born blind. Now, on the day on which Jesus had made the mud and opened the man's eyes was a Sabbath day. Therefore, the Pharisees also asked him how he had received his sight. He put mud on my eyes, the man replied, and I washed, and now I see. Some of the Pharisees said, This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath. But others asked, How could a sinner perform such signs? So they were divided. Then they turned again to the blind man. What have you to say about him? It was your eyes he opened. The man replied, He is a prophet. They still did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight, until they sent for the man's parents. Is this your son? They asked. Is this the one you say was born blind? How is it that now he can see? We know he is our son, the parents answered, and we know he was born blind. But how he can see now, or who opened his eyes, we don't know. Ask him. He is of age, he will speak for himself. His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jewish leaders who had already decided that anyone who acknowledged Jesus was the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue. That is why the parents said, He is of age, ask him. A second time they summoned the man who had been blind. Give glory to God and tell the truth, they said. We know this man is a sinner. He replied, Whether he is a sinner or not, I don't know. One thing I do know, I was blind, but now I see. Then they asked him, What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes? He answered, I've told you already, and you didn't listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples too? Then they hurled insults at him and said, You're this fellow's disciple! We're disciples of Moses. We know that God spoke to Moses, but as for this fellow, we don't even know where he came from. And the man answered, Now that is remarkable. You don't know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, he listens to the godly person who does his will. Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing. To this they replied, You were steeped in sin at birth. How dare you lecture us? And they threw him out. Jesus heard that they had thrown him out, and when he found him, he said, Do you believe in the Son of Man? Who is he, sir? The man asked. Tell me, so that I may believe in him. Jesus said, You have now seen him. In fact, he is the one speaking with you. Then the man said, Lord, I believe, and he worshipped him. Jesus said, For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see, and those who see will become blind. Some Pharisees who were with him heard him say this and asked, What? Are we blind too? Jesus said, If you were blind, you wouldn't be guilty of sin. But now that you can claim you see now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains. Denial. Denial is a river in Egypt. And I hope you won't mind me saying that in that long, carefully composed story of healing, John, the gospel writer, is as interested in how people deny what has happened as he is in the actual healing and what it means. Only the first seven verses of that long story are about the healing. The next 34 verses are a series of mini-dramas where the neighbors and then the Pharisees find ways to resist the truth of what they're seeing. In the original language, the word for I see and I know are the same word. So every time you heard me say in English, reading the part of the man, I know that he healed me, or his parents say, We know that he was born blind, or the Pharisees say, We know God spoke to Moses, or the man say, You do not know where he comes from. It's all the same word as see. I see he has healed me. You don't see where he comes from. And that crossover between those who know and those who see is because John is concerned by the ways that people make themselves blind, as well as how they regain their sight. You all get a turnaround. By the end of the story, it's the blind man who sees, and the seeing men who are the blind ones. That means I think this story is a very penetrating analysis of what psychologists call defense mechanisms. The basic mental maneuvers we all use to deny or block out situations that make us afraid or too hurtful to contemplate or make us feel about that tool. You know how this works. Your boss makes a disparaging remark about you in front of everyone at a meeting about the recent report you put in. Instantly, you find yourself saying that you couldn't get the accurate data in time because the sales team didn't supply it, shifting the blame to somebody else. Then you fume humiliated through the rest of the afternoon. But you don't knock on the boss's door and have it out with him. Instead, you find yourself lashing out in fury at the Tesco shop assistant who seems to be ignoring you. That is, displacement. Displacement of your own rage onto someone else. In the pub, later on, you order yourself a second large glass of wine, compensation, a great defence mechanism. And then you tell your friend that the boss really has it in for you. When frankly, it's you who has it in for her. This is the mechanism known as projection. You give somebody else the bad motives that you yourself feel. And then you say, Well, I didn't really give much time to writing that report anyway. I was preoccupied by some very high-level negotiations. That one is rationalizing, discounting the emotional hurt, pretending that it didn't really matter. Finally, you end up watching the box set of Bridgerton till 2 a.m. because you don't want to have to go to bed and feel the shame any longer. That's just straightforward distraction. Defense mechanisms are our natural ways to recover self-esteem. We all have them and they protect us. And there are really good ones: humour. Or converting your bad feelings into something better. Say, converting any anger into energy to fight for justice. We don't have to be taught any of these mechanisms. Children use them automatically. It wasn't me. But when adults don't do this, their defences dominate them. It's especially visible, say, when you see a raging narcissist like President Trump playing telling lie after lie to deflect blame, or revenging himself on anybody who doesn't bow to his will. But me calling out President Trump like that is also a defense mechanism, pointing away from the unpleasant truth that I am myself a small man from a small country, not strong enough to go into politics myself and wanting to recover the moral high ground. What we see in John today is a very defensive group of people doing everything they can to deflect the fear and blame they feel when confronted by Jesus. They deny it, they accuse others, they reaffirm their own importance. I think John tells such a long story, really dissects it out, not so that we can stand here and laugh at them, safe in the knowledge that we would never do the same thing. Because that would be another defense mechanism. I think John wants us all to see part of ourselves in the Pharisees. Only in that way, by thinking about our own defences, can we let Jesus, the light of the world, shine into our darker places. So the healing itself is short but quite symbolic. In Jesus' day, many people were taught that disabilities were part of God's punishment on that person or possibly their parents. So when the disciples see the man begging, they want to know, they want to make a theological judgment on him. They want to say, Jesus, was it his fault or his parents? Jesus is having none of it. Because that act of judgment itself, making a theological case out of him, would be a defense. It would be the able-bodied using the disabled to reveal their own superiority. Instead, Jesus says, This happened that the work of God might be revealed in him, literally, might be visible in him. It's not a big theological justification for why God permits suffering and disability in particular. It's really about an answer that applies to all of us. The blindness is there for the work of God to be revealed. But frankly, the reason we all exist is for the work of God to be revealed. Jesus isn't singling this man out as a particular problem. It's making him the representative of all of us who live in order that the work of God might be revealed. Then Jesus' unusual method speaks to the man by touch, that language that as a person born blind, he is super sensitive to. Mixes mud, the dust of the earth, the Adam, with saliva, his own DNA, and spreads it gently on the man's eyes, as if symbolically uniting the earthly man and the heavenly and the heavenly Christ, symbolically making a new creation. Then he sends the man off to Siloam, the pool that John means says means sent, which is interesting because the man has to take part in his own healing, his own choice, his own will, has to be involved. He's not just going to be passive. And in so going, he becomes one of the people in the gospel who is willingly sent. In John's language, an apostle. That means somebody who is sent, like Peter, like James, like John, like Mary Magdalene. They're all those who are sent by Jesus. It then turns out that like the apostles, he's going to face persecution. When the neighbors take his case to the Pharisees, it turns out that they are less concerned about the man and more concerned about what it might mean for their own grip on power. If Jesus is healed, and if the people believe he's healed, they might start transferring their allegiances to this rebel upstart from the north. So straight away they want to find out if Jesus has healed on the Sabbath, because if he has, they have creative, they have proof that he cannot be God's chosen person. Because God rested on the Sabbath day in the making of the world. If Jesus had healed, he'd be blurring all the lines that the Sabbath establishes between work and rest, holy and unholy, Jewish and non-Jewish. And these are the lines, the ones that the Pharisees, a Jewish nationalist movement, are most concerned to maintain. What they fear most is the loss of distinctiveness in a time of occupation. We must patrol the borders around us. But the result is that Jesus' healing brings them no joy whatsoever. It's instantly politicized. It's a potential loss of power. So they have to try and shut it down. The first defense mechanism they use is to deny the man himself. You're faking it. You weren't really blind. John lets out in verse 16 that they were split on the question of whether this was from God or not. But splitting, internal division, would be threatening to any movement needing to maintain distinctiveness in the face of Roman opposition. So they deny the man's opinion that Jesus really is a prophet because they're afraid of being split. Group loyalty, the fear of being left out, trumps honest appraisal. One of the best ways to reunite a group that's divided is to find a common enemy, to expel the outsider. So the Pharisees threaten to expel any of Jesus' followers from their synagogues, or to turn the hatred outwards by bullying someone else. Will-blindness, John seems to observe, can come from fearing the costs of standing out, of becoming acceptable. That's how we don't see what we actually see. So the first set of reason for denial, will wanting to belong to the group. The second one is to start splitting. In a hostile situation, splitting means that psychological mechanism where you say that all the badness is on one side and all the goodness on the other, usually yours. Give glory to God, they say in verse 25. We know that this man, Jesus, is a sinner. Splitting the bad from the good protects us from the unbearable anxiety of knowing there might be something wrong with us. Ultimately, Jesus will be crucified because the crowd and the world does this splitting. They believe he is the criminal who has to be invest executed in order for them to be safe. By trying to set up a mile-wide barrier between themselves and this sinner who heals on the Sabbath, the Pharisees are revealing their own fear. The fear, I'm afraid, that every church professional knows. The fear that they maybe are not holy, despite patrolling the boundaries of holiness for everybody else. Riled by their questions, the man seems to sense their weakness and touches a nerve. God doesn't use sinners, he says in verse 31. But he hears the prayers of those who fear him and does his will. In other words, you didn't heal me. Maybe you're not as close to God as you pretend. That stab of jealousy provokes their next attack. If you defend him, you must be a sinner. Because and we know that you're a sinner because you were born blind. Doubling down in the face of the evidence. Another classic defense mechanism. Shifting blame. Now it's the man's own fault that he has been born blind, the very thing where Jesus that Jesus started from. So we can be blind because of group loyalty, and we couldn't be blind because we want to say that all the badness is on the other side. Splitting. The final defense they use is the one that reveals a motivation. We don't know where this fellow comes from, they say. He's not one of us. He's not qualified. He's not been to rabbi school. He's not an expert. Working for a university, I recognize this one. Questioning somebody not based on their actions, but on their qualifications. Because of the fear that you're going to lose your role as a gatekeeper of knowledge. I don't mean universities are trying to keep everybody out. I mean that questioning somebody's background can be a defensive move. Just as you can be suspicious of somebody's class or their ethnic origins. It's the same move. The Pharisees say, no, we're in a direct line from Moses. A move which actually conceals the reality that they were quite innovative, they were theological innovative, theological innovators. They'd taken the laws of temple purity and reapplied them to everyday life. And though they claim this was keeping in tradition, it was actually a really quite a radical reinvention of it to serve a new purpose. But they couldn't admit this. So the Pharisees are using their originality as a stick to beat their rivals with. And so they cast him out, expel him from the synagogue, and forbid him to have anyone to have contact with him. So questioning someone's background, splitting the good and the bad, all the bad is over there, group loyalty. Jesus hears that they've done this and he goes to reassure them. Do you believe in the Son of Man? He asks. It's his favorite word for himself. And one that probably links to the figure of the Messiah coming in judgment in the prophetic book of Daniel. So he's bringing himself in as a judge here. And that's kind. Because by asking the man to believe, what he's saying is, the real judge of the world is here. You've been judged by them, I'm the judge. Where are you? And the judge accepts him. For judgment, then I came into the world, Jesus announces. Not for condemnation, but for crisis. The decision that reveals the secrets of the heart. Because Jesus hasn't judged the Pharisees at all. They've judged themselves. In denying the obvious goodness of what has been done, in failing to rejoice at the healing, in blaming and shaming everyone else around them, the Pharisees have judged themselves. Okay, it's Lent. We all have a list of obvious sins we would really like to be rid of: bad temper, envy, caving in, addictions, resentments. This story suggests that we can bring judgment on ourselves just as much by getting in God's way. We get in God's way when we want to defend ourselves, our status, our worldview, our entitlement to a way of life. When we defend ourselves more than we want to see and welcome what God is doing, no matter who God is doing it through. It's also Mother's Day, the middle of Lent. One of the best examples of the process of growing up, of becoming less defensive, learning not to just respray all and take negativity over everybody else, is good mothering. If you're a parent, you know the truth that your children bring you up as much as you bring them up. One of those learning points, especially for me, was learning to be at some point, you will have to be the parent of shame. And you have to learn not to fly at your toddler when they do something really embarrassing. Not to pass on the stress you're feeling for being short of money or time. Not to try and transmit down the generations, the disapproval that you might fear from your own parents and grandparents. As you grow up into parenting, mothering, good mothering does not let the bad defenses win. Instead, it converts them into protection for the little ones. Scale this up, though, and let's think about where Jesus is in this. The real healing from defenses, from our defense own defensiveness, the ultimate healing is knowing that God is on our side too. Your inner atheist may be saying to you right now that Christianity is just a sophisticated religious form of splitting, believing that all the bad went on to Jesus in order to make yourself feel better. But this is only half the story. Jesus endures our sins in order to help us endure the bad news about ourselves rather than keep defending and pushing and blaming and shaming everybody else. And Jesus rises again because those sins are not the end of the story. God wills to adopt us in his family forever. We are part of the problem, but he has taken us on in order to make us part of the solution. I want to just finish with some wonderfully encouraging words from Ephesians, which Paul writes here. For by grace, he says, you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing. It is the gift of God, not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what God has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God has prepared beforehand for us to do. Or in another translation, which God has prepared beforehand to be our way of life. That I think is the invitation in Christ for good works to be our way of life.

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