John 9:1-41
Bethel Presbyterian/Kingston United Methodist
March 2, 2008
The Dramatist Personae could rival the cast of Shakespeare’s finest production. It’s a little one act play without parallel in scripture; six little scenes and six characters or groups of characters. There are disciples who, as usual, don’t get it; curious neighbors; the protagonist, Jesus, who claims to be both light and judge; the antagonist, as any reader of John’s Gospel has come to expect, the Jewish authorities, this time represented by the Pharisees; and finally, the hero of the story, a blind beggar who had no idea what was about to happen, then has to try to explain it all under extreme scrutiny.
A word of background and explanation. We must, I believe, disabuse ourselves of the notion that the Pharisees in First Century Palestine were the evil villains. Now, John, of course, does make them out to be hostile toward Jesus; just in chapter 8 he has Jesus call Jews “children of the devil,” and I suspect that if the film-maker Mel Gibson had his way, all four gospels would be equally anti-Semitic.
But we should give due honor to the Pharisees, who like Nicodemus, whom we heard from two Sundays ago, embodied the best and brightest of Jewish culture: well-educated, copyists of the Hebrew scriptures, and quite godly in their understanding and practice of religion. Quite frankly, if we were to trade places, many of us would be Pharisees: good citizens and nice, law-abiding church goers; few of us would have the courage to be disturbers of the social and religious status quo as Jesus fundamentally was, and so we’d find it far easier to be defenders of traditional religion like the Pharisees.
But John writes after the destruction of the temple in 70 CE, and he writes 60 years or so following the death of Jesus. John’s audience seeks more knowledge about the identity of Jesus as the promised Messiah; John’s polemic sorely needs an antagonist. Just as we can’t really know that light is light unless we can see it in contrast to the darkness, so John argues his case that Jesus is legitimately from God by making it a black/white, either/or choice between the message of Jesus and the message of the Pharisees. Therefore, no one should be able to miss his point.
By the end of the first century, as John writes his Gospel, the “Jesus movement” has become problematic and contested; the synagogues realize they’re losing members, losing cultural status, losing hold on the people’s loyalty and commitment. “Sheep stealing” or “church shopping” we might call it today, but a reality hardly easy on that community left behind. Many of those who followed this Galilean Jewish rabbi who worked wonders and healed the blind turned their backs on home and heritage in ways much more costly than any of us can imagine.
For those, then, who did the unthinkable and left the synagogue, John offers a defense of Jesus as Messiah as well as crucial theological traction in the world of post-temple Palestine dominated by Pharisaic Judaism. John is not anti-Semitic; he condemns not race or people, but he does condemn opposition to Jesus. The Pharisees become symbols of those Jews who reject Jesus as the Messiah, whose religious practices remain tied to interpreting the Law of Moses and conventional synagogue practices.
So, that’s the cultural context for this little gem of a dramatic performance, a brief drama, to be sure, but a revelation about the identity of Jesus and a kind of magnifying lens held over contentious issues in the world of the early church.
On one level, it’s a drama about sin, with two characters, Jesus and the healed blind beggar, accused of being sinners – Jesus, having just left the temple on the 7th day, has been accused of performing the work of healing, thus violating the Sabbath and the fourth commandment; and the blind beggar has been accused of being a sinner for no reason other than because he was born blind, a sure sign of God’s judgment and punishment according to that day’s conventional explanations for why people suffer.
On yet another level, this drama raises a lot of questions about credibility, both about what really happened to this blind beggar – Was it truly God who healed him or the work of a charlatan? – and, moreover, what, exactly, should these other characters in the play believe about Jesus, the one who has come making the audacious claim that he is “the light of the world”?
I ask you: suppose Roane State had an open call for auditions for this John 9 drama, and you agreed to come. Aside from all the ministers among us, suffering from some variation of a Messiah complex, and thus likely auditioning for the part of Jesus, I bet the balance of this congregation would desire the part of the blind man. It’s really the lead role, is it not? as he not only gains sight but gains a whole lot more. The climactic moment in the end is that he, no longer blind, comes to see the true identity of Jesus, while those who have had sight all their lives are the blind ones.
It all starts when Jesus passes along the spot where day after day this man has held his tin cup. With no welfare safety net, he likely depended on alms-giving to survive; although his parents are in the wings, it’s hard to be sure what kind of relationship they had with their son, so we can imagine his was a day-to-day existence.
Jesus notices him, spits into the dirt, makes some mud, dabs it on his eyes, and sends him to the pool of Siloam, known in the ancient world for its healing properties. And, just like that, abrakadbra, this one whom no one seemed to know before, suddenly commands a long line of important people cued up to ask him how it all happened.
This scene has for me the feel of an interrogation room on the ubiquitous TV police drama; let’s put it to him and he’ll break under the pressure. They say they just want to get to the truth, but what they really want to hear him confess is that Jesus is a fraud, that Jesus couldn’t be from God because God would never contradict himself and break the Sabbath commandment. Jesus, we note isn’t on stage much, is, in effect, being put on trial in abstentia.
This newly sighted man, no doubt still giddy from seeing the sky for the first time, is thus under the spotlight without Jesus by his side, forced into the glare of unwanted attention; only, no one seems at all curious to hear about his amazing healing or to add their own alleluias for what God has done. Rather, they want to use his testimony to test whether Jesus is truly from God; they want to nail Jesus, even though it is not yet time for the cross.
It’s a good story for us; for we, too, have been left onstage without Jesus, as we live between his coming and his coming again. This man, healed of life-long blindness, has to make sense out of what just happened to him and decide what he will say about it, in the face of enormous opposition.
Most Christians in our part of the world don’t encounter the kind of opposition and interrogation this beggar experienced; nonetheless, it’s not a bad idea for us ponder we what we’d have to say. Shall we agree that the majority’s usually right? Agree that traditional religion should not be disturbed? Take sides with the victim? Or, just hope the controversy will pass on over as we look the other way?
At first, the healed blind beggar’s answers are timid one-liners. “I am the man.” “I do not know.” “He put mud on my eyes.” “He told me to go and wash.”
But as he is forced to field questions that probe deeper and deeper into what actually happened, he seems to grow both in eloquence and in courage, finally answering the Pharisees so sharply that they feel compelled to toss him out of the congregation. “Why this is a marvel,” his face finally growing flush with frustration. “You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes . . . If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.”
Yes, wouldn’t it be nice if we could play the part of the blind man? That’s the kind of faith we need, a faith that grows with the times and tells it like it is: he sees Jesus with far more than just his new-found sight, for, in the end, he has faith enough to say, “Lord, I believe.” But coming to see Jesus, as the blind man shows us, is a process, and only comes after the one met by Jesus is able to endure the spotlight, field questions galore, and most significantly, decide that confessing Jesus as his Lord will take priority over the protection and preservation of his old standing in that community.
This blind man, now healed, represents, not faith that has all the answers, but faith that begins in a relationship with Jesus, seeking truth, not in an ideology or system of belief, but in experience and in a person.
The Pharisees, apparently, never experienced that relationship; they only had an ideology. They were so sure of everything – that God did not work on Sundays, that Moses was God’s only spokesperson, that anyone born blind had to be a sinner and ditto for anyone who broke the Sabbath, that God did not work through sinners, that God did not work on sinners and that, furthermore, no one could teach them anything (Barbara Brown Taylor)
The founder of the L’Arche community in Canada, which is where the popular writer and Catholic Priest Henri Nouwen went at the close of his days, is an intentional Christian community that ministers with people who carry various physical handicaps, disabilities, and social stigmas in their bodies, residents not unlike this blind beggar. It’s a place full of people who have been excluded, left outside of community, forgotten even by parents, yet who radiate the vulnerability and compassion of Christ.
Jean Vanier, Director of this unique community, writes: “This beggar is the first person in the gospel to be rejected and persecuted because of Jesus. He bears witness to Jesus and in this way is the first martyr . . . Having found his sight, he could have become well-integrated into Jewish society. He would no longer have to be marginalized and seen as a punishment of God, unworthy to worship in the Temple. Instead, he chose the truth, and gave witness to the healing he had just experienced” (Drawn into the Mystery of Jesus, 177).
The scandal here, I believe, is not so much as the Apostle Paul and others in the early church claimed, that is, the scandal of the cross, but here the scandal is that people with all the holy books, all the ritual practices, and all the religious ideology got so caught up in protecting what they had, that they ended-up practicing exclusion: not grace, not mercy, not love. Their threat and demeanor of exclusion even cast a pall of darkness over the parents, who so feared being cast out of the synagogue, banished from their little group, that they were robbed of joy at their son’s healing from a lifetime of blindness.
“I am the light of the world.” What a claim in a world filled with doubt, suffering, and shame.
After the blind beggar comes to faith in Jesus, it is then that those final, haunting words of the Lord get spoken as the lights on stage dim to darkness and we are left to ponder whether we are blind or have sight:
I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see,
and those who do see may become blind.
For anyone with eyes to see, let them receive this word of the Gospel. In the name of the God the Creator, Redeemer, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
