This sermon was written and preached by the Rev. Elizabeth Raine at the Tuggeranong Uniting Church on Sunday 19 March (the Fourth Sunday in Lent).
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The story in John this week reminded me of the play, The One Day of the Year. I don’t know if you know it, but it is about different perceptions of Anzac Day. For Hughie Cook, the son, Anzac Day appeared to be just an excuse for “one long grog-up”. For his father Alf, an ex-servicemen, it was a day to be with your mates. For Wacka, his mate, it was a day when we as a nation reflected on those who had paid with the sacrifice of their lives.
At one point during a heated debate between father and son, Alf points out that Wacka was there at Gallipoli and knew what Anzac was all about. Hughie puts the counter argument that soldiers who took part in the campaign at Gallipoli couldn’t know the full story of the disaster that was Anzac Cove because they only saw part of the whole picture, the part they were involved in. He sees himself as having a full overview, having studied history.
But Hughie’s view that Anzac Day was just “one long grog-up” is also flawed, as this is the only part of the picture Hughie can currently see. He doesn’t see the mateship, or the skill and resourcefulness, or the sense of pride that Alf and Wacka see in the ex-servicemen who ‘hung in there’ on Anzac Cove. And Hughie fails to recognise that the freedom that gives him the right to speak his opinion was a freedom in part won by soldiers like his father, fighting in the jungles of Asia.
These different viewpoints in the play all contributed to the whole picture of what Anzac day is, but none of the parts on their own are the full story. The story today of the healing of the blind man is very similar in its construction.
How often do we fail to grasp the whole picture? Let us do a simple exercise. Look around you. What do you see? Now, look around again, more carefully. What do you now see that you didn’t notice the first time? If I asked to describe the church, the answer would vary depending on whether you were looking at the front or the back, or even relying on your memory. The whole picture can be hard to take in.
We view the world through the lens of our own experience and perceptions. Like Alf and Hughie in the play, we concentrate on some things and take them in, but filter out others that we deem as unimportant or that perhaps we don’t understand or don’t like. We regularly interpret the information we receive, and we each choose different ways to respond to it. The writer Anais Nin was right when she said, “We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.” In effect, often we see only what we choose to see.
We see this happening in the gospel story. As the disciples walk down a village street with Jesus, they saw what they had been taught to see – a man who was being punished by God. They knew something of his story. He had always been blind. Which raised a tough question for them. Did the birth defect mean that he had somehow sinned in the womb, or was he the victim of his parents’ transgression? For the disciples, this was simply an interesting theological question to raise with their teacher, Jesus, but for the man concerned it was a painful reality that he lived every day, and that, it seems, had left him destitute.
We know that his parents were still alive because later in the story they get called in by the religious authorities to testify at the investigation into his healing. But, probably out of fear, they refuse to be drawn in, and simply point out their son is now a grown adult and can answer for himself.
Their presence at this point in the story raises some questions though. If they were alive, and close enough to be called in for questioning, why was this man a beggar? why was he left pleading for the pity of strangers in order to survive? why was he not cared for by his parents?
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How then did this man see himself? After a life of being outcast, perhaps from his parents, from his neighbours, from the Temple, how could he have felt anything but shame and despair? how could he possibly even think that he might see something different in himself from what everyone else saw? how could he not accept the wisdom of the crowds and judge himself accordingly?
And he remains this way until someone came along who could see the whole situation, and see it differently. Jesus did not accept the dominant paradigm of his times, that illness and disability was a punishment from God. Perhaps for the first time, the blind man felt the gaze of someone who did not pity him or wonder what sin he had committed. For the first time the blind man knew what it was to be valued, to be accepted and to be made whole.
And then, as if this wasn’t enough, he discovered what it was like to really see, to accept light into his eyes and have it transformed into colours and textures, depth and movement. But if he thought this healing would make everything right he was mistaken. He may have had his eyes opened, but there were other, more powerful people who were not interested in having theirs opened. They were convinced that they knew how the world worked, and they weren’t about to change their perceptions.
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It can’t have been easy for the Pharisees in this story, for Jesus had a tendency to complicate things. When religious custom dictates that blindness is God’s judgement for sin, it’s easy to know what to do and what to think. But, when blind people get miraculously healed in God’s name, it all gets messy. If sin didn’t cause the problem, then where did it come from? And what about all those other beggars? Would they now be expected to be treated as equals? And if a healing really had happened, then they had another problem. None of them had done it, Jesus had done it. For them, it was best not to see the whole picture and just stick with what they knew.
What to do? The Pharisees try and extract a confession from the blind man. Perhaps he wasn’t really blind – it had been a lifelong hoax and the community had fallen for it. Or maybe he’d found a body-double who was now pretending to be healed to get him a few minutes of fame. Then they resorted to questioning his parents. Again, the result was unsatisfactory.
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Finally, there was no other option but to throw him out of the synagogue. Though the blind man could see, the Pharisees refused to see. The religious leaders had decided that Jesus was a fraud, so that’s all they could see. They decided the blind man was a sinner, so that’s all they could see. And they had decided that God could no more use Jesus to heal than that God would heal a person God had afflicted with blindness in the first place. Because that’s what they believed, that’s what they saw.
Perception is everything. It’s not just what we see or don’t see, but how we interpret what we see that determines our actions, our responses and our beliefs. We can look at the poor and see unfortunate victims of circumstance, or lazy people who refuse to work, or dignified human beings making the most of a tough situation. We can look at climate science and see a natural cycle which has just happened to hit us now, or human actions putting our planet under pressure.
Ultimately, how we determine what we see and what it means must flow from Jesus’ example. How did Jesus address poverty? How did Jesus view the natural world, power, violence, sickness, and human dignity? If we are to follow Jesus into a world of justice, we will have to wrestle with these questions and not see them as outside of the realm of faith. And once we have seen the problems, we also have the task of helping others – our leaders, our neighbours, our children – to see as well.
In our daily lives we all make choices (consciously or subconsciously) about what we will see and what we won’t. It’s tempting to choose not to see the suffering and injustice in our world – to switch off the news, and to ignore reports of grief, warand trauma. It’s tempting to avoid seeing certain people and to allow them to just blend in with the landscape, removing their need and struggle from our vision.
It’s tempting to avoid seeing God’s truth and grace in those with whom we disagree, and whom we would rather see as “all bad”. It’s tempting to avoid seeing the brokenness in those we support and with whom we agree and to see them as “all good”. It’s tempting to avoid seeing the resources, the opportunities and the capacity we have for making a difference, and to believe we can do nothing.
But, if we have really seen Jesus, and if we have truly seen God’s reign proclaimed and manifest in him, then we have to confront how we see things, and allow God’s grace and mercy, God’s truth and justice to change our seeing and shed light on our world, our relationships and our neighbourhoods.
And, once again, our seeing must be informed by God’s different perspective where the greatest are the least, and where everyone – even a young shepherd boy, or a carpenter from the countryside – can make significant differences in the world.
An Informed Faith 