In this week’s gospel, the story is about blindness, both physical and spiritual. It’s almost like a play: we have the two main characters, Jesus and the man born blind, whom Jesus heals. There are a few minor characters, the disciples, the man’s parents and some Pharisees. And then there’s a sort of chorus of neighbors and others, who comment on the healing.
After Jesus restores his eyesight, the man born blind seems not to be blind in either sense. He describes what happened clearly and without hesitation, several times, and then confesses his belief in Jesus and worships him.
Everyone else appears to be spiritually blind. They see with their eyes, but they don’t understand or want to understand, what has happened.
We are not of their time or culture and therefore may find it easy to dismiss their attitudes. That, I think, is another kind of spiritual blindness.
The disciples think that someone must have sinned to cause this man’s blindness. The people who see the man suddenly able to see are confused, and don’t quite believe it’s the same man who used to beg for money. The Pharisees don’t like it, and some of them are saying that Jesus couldn’t have come from God, since he was healing on the sabbath. The man’s parents refuse to say anything. The man himself seems to be the only one who speaks openly and honestly about what happened.
Of course blindness isn’t a punishment for sins. But let’s be honest here. Haven’t we all, at some time or another, looked for a reason that something terrible happened to someone else? It may not start as a negative judgment – we’re just looking for a reason that it won’t happen to us. But it can easily slide into blaming the victim.
As for the neighbors, well, wouldn’t I be confused if I saw something that I didn’t believe was possible?
It’s always easy to pick on the Pharisees. In the gospels, the Pharisees represent religious intolerance and hypocrisy. They are also trying to protect their culture in a hostile empire. Maybe we should have a little sympathy for that.
And the parents of the man. They don’t want to be thrown out of their community. Who does? And maybe, like many parents who are confronted with unexpected news, their first reaction won’t be their final reaction.
As much as I want to see myself as the man born blind, who now sees, who isn’t afraid to tell anyone exactly what happened to him, who acknowledges Jesus and worships him, even though it means exclusion from the temple, I have to admit that I have been, or might be some of the other people in the story as well.
We want to get everything right, and we don’t always. Even when we get a lot of things right, or maybe especially when we think we see things clearly, it’s easy to miss the light in other people and the darkness in ourselves. This is the blindness that can be really hard to cure. The blindness that Jesus sees in the Pharisees.
The last words from Jesus, directed at the Pharisees, are “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, We see, your sin remains.”
I found the way this is worded a little confusing, so just to be sure, I checked the translation in The Message Bible, which is sometimes clearer. This is what it says:
“If you were really blind, you would be blameless, but since you claim to see everything so well, you’re accountable for every fault and failure.”
