Readings: 1 Samuel 16:1b, 6-7, 10-13a; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41
It is typical of the irony
that pervades John’s Gospel
that it is not the man born blind
who cannot see,
but rather the other people in the story.
They cannot see Jesus for who he really is:
the power of God made flesh.
The blind man, however, sees divine power
at work in his healing.
Just as God, in the beginning,
scooped up the clay of the earth
and formed Adam and breathed life into him,
so too Jesus takes clay
and rubs it into the blind man’s eyes
to heal and restore him to fulness of life.
The bystanders, however, cannot see this;
they are blind to the presence in their midst
of the life-giving God.
But they are not simply blind
to the divine reality before them;
they are equally blind
to the human reality of the man Jesus heals.
One of the odd details in John’s telling of the story
is the confusion, after Jesus has healed the man,
over whether this is in fact the same person
who had begged for alms in their streets,
or someone else entirely.
Perhaps they had never really seen the man.
Perhaps they had seen simply a blind beggar—
not a person
but a category of people:
“the unfortunate” or “the disabled”
or maybe “the annoying” or “the threatening.”
The language used by the people in the story
is revealing: “His neighbors
and those who had seen him earlier as a beggar
said, ‘Isn’t this the one who used to sit and beg?’”
Notice that they do not identify him
as a particular person who is known and named,
but as a faceless member of some collective group:
the beggars or the blind.
Having seen him before simply as a blind beggar,
they cannot now recognize him
when he is no longer blind and begging.
Jesus, however, can truly see the man,
for he sees with divine vision.
As we are told in the first book of Samuel,
“Not as man sees does God see,
because man sees the appearance
but the LORD looks into the heart.”
Jesus’s love and compassion for the man
is not a generic love for those that suffer;
it is the LORD’S highly particular love
for this man and his unique story of suffering
and it is this love that heals.
We who are Christians are called to have
what Saint Paul calls the “mind” of Christ;
to see with what we might call the eyes of Christ.
We are called to see the unique story of each person,
to have compassion on the unique suffering of each person,
to love with a love that is not vague and generic
but concrete and specific.
This is, of course, a challenge.
One of the ways in which our hearts
keep the world’s horrors at bay
is not to focus too clearly on the details,
to keep the pain of the physical suffering
and social marginality of others
confined in large categories:
the disabled, the poor,
the unemployed, the dispossessed.
But everyone in those categories
suffers the horrors of the world
in their own particular way,
a way that cries out
for our recognition
and our compassion.
The difficulty of hearing and answering those cries
has been driven home in the past week,
as we have seen the unfolding
of the corona virus pandemic
around the world.
Over three-thousand deaths in China,
nearly five-thousand deaths in Italy,
over fifteen-hundred deaths in Iran.
These numbers will grow larger,
and may grow much larger,
and in order to manage our anxiety
we can be tempted to turn those deaths
into abstractions,
faceless numbers to feed into
some calculation of risk and benefit.
Some of us even speak
of acceptable levels of death
that we should tolerate to ensure
that life can continue as usual
and our economy remain healthy.
This is a view, I think, that requires us
to blind ourselves to the truth
that each person lost has a story
and the loss of each
is an immense tragedy.
One of the ways we seek to manage our fear
is to let our vision of this horror lose focus,
to make ourselves blind to the fact
that behind these numbers
are real people who suffered:
someone’s mother or father,
brother or sister,
son or daughter,
friend,
co-worker,
teacher,
student.
The human mind simply cannot take it in,
and we can perhaps be forgiven
for retreating into abstractions.
But not as man sees does God see,
for the LORD looks into the heart.
God knows the story of each one who has died,
just as Jesus knew the story of the blind man.
And to believe your story known by God
is to hope for a share in God’s eternity.
And we who bear the name Christian
are called to see as Christ sees
is some small measure;
we are called to not let the world’s pain
go out of focus,
but to confront that pain
by concrete acts of compassion
by which those who suffer
can know themselves as seen.
We do not have God’s capacity
to look into the heart of each and every person,
but we must still resist the impulse
to let their deaths become abstractions.
Look at the numbers and remember:
each is a person.
We are called to mourn the loss
of each one who has died,
and to hope for each one that greatest of hopes—
that God will breathe once more
the breath of life eternal into lifeless clay
and open their eyes to see God’s face.
And may God have mercy on us all.
