Everyone Is Blind; Everyone Can See

4 Lent A  March 19, 2023
1 Sam. 16:1-13 Ps. 23
Eph. 5:1-14 John 9:1-38

Lectionary Link
Everyone is blind; everyone can see.  How so?  We are blind to what we cannot yet see, and we see the things which seem so obvious to us based upon our observations and our spiritual experience and emotional intelligence.

An age old question is why don't all people see things the way that I do?  And why do other people see things so differently than I do, that such different interpretations of reality makes us incompatible if not unfriendly or even enemies?

Seeing and blindness issues have always been part of human experience and differences in seeing and reading life experience is the constant challenge for people to live together well.  Seeing and blindness can be merely human experience in the process of time.  Time and change, especially changing human context creates differences.

We may think that something as objective as science is exempt from time and change, but science often has tentative conclusions that must be given up if more adequate answers are discovered. T.S. Kuhn, a historian of science noted that there are changes in thought networks within science and he called them paradigms.  Isaac Newton devised a definitional system for physics and he used terms like energy, mass, and matter.  Albert Einstein articulated the physics of relativity and he used the same words as Newton, energy, mass, and matter, but within his physics these tried and true words had different meanings.

The New Testament is essentially about a new paradigm in faith practice that arose out of Judaism.

The Gospels provide narratives about how Jesus was the one who initiated a new faith paradigm.

The New Testament is also a record of how not everyone comes to accept the new faith paradigm initiated by Jesus.

The Gospel of John lays out in story form the conflict between paradigms.  In our Gospel story, the blind man who encountered Jesus was able to see.  Conversely, the Pharisees, who did not have an experience of enlightenment about Jesus, were blind to this new faith paradigm.

The writer of the Gospel of John is elucidating this blindness/seeing divide that occurs when people live in different faith paradigms.

The Pharisees believed in God, they believe in resurrection, they believed in a fuller list of book of the Hebrew Scriptures than the Sadducees, and they believed in a Messiah.  But they could not see and understand God in the way in which the followers of Jesus understood God, the resurrection, the interpretation of the Scriptures and the identity of the Messiah.

The blindness/seeing metaphor helps us to be honest about division which exists between people who live in different religious, cultural, and political paradigms.  And the result is the we/they break down.  We see clearly.  They are blind.  However, they say that they see clearly and that we are blind.

What must happen for a person who was blind to message of the Risen Christ within the early Jesus Movement?  A person had to be converted; he or she had to have a new birth in order to see life, and the life of Jesus differently.

We today still divide ourselves up into groups of people who think that they see and that their opponents are blind.  

One way to understand the blindness/ seeing divide is to understand process and time.  As an older person, I understand God, Jesus, the Bible, the Holy Spirit, in a completely way now than I have at many different times in my earlier life.  In the past, I have been blind to what I have come to see.

Will the blind/seeing divide ever go away?  Probably not, as long as people are in the process of growing up with varied capacities for what they can learn and understand.

The best way to advocate for the adequacy of how we see and understand our lives of faith is to ask, "Is my way of seeing Christ-like?  Is is accessible to all people?  Does it end in actions of love, kindness, and justice?"

Now we can become pessimistic about the persistence of the great divide between people who think that they see while regarding others to be blind.  Or we can live optimistically toward the kind of enlightened seeing which manifests itself in a winsome kindness, love, and justice.

Today, let us not be too proud of our seeing.  Let us not be so sure that others are blind.  But let us endeavor to prove the worth of our enlightened seeing with truly Christ-like living, so that we are always preaching the Gospel of Christ, and if necessary, sometimes use words.  Amen.