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Sermon - The Parable about Blindness and Sight - 2nd March 2008
St Alban's Epping
Readings: 1 Samuel 16:1-13, Psalm 23, Ephesians 5:8-14, John 9: 1-41
At last Tuesday’s Ecumenical Service at the West Epping Uniting Church, Fr Colin Blayney was the preacher. He delivered a stunning homily based upon today’s Gospel reading. So stunning that I asked for his permission to represent it here today. And, so here is my reading of Fr Colin’s sermon.
I guess that we’ve all heard – or used – at one time or another a phrase like: “They were staring right through me: they didn’t even realise I was there.”
It’s about how we can have blinkers on, sometimes not even notice that someone is there: and it picks up a theme which is in today’s Gospel passage, a passage which has been associated with the fourth Sunday of Lent for a millennium and a half. The great story of Jesus’ healing of the man born blind is all about sight, about what we see and what we don’t see, but more to the point, about what we refuse to see. The story seems to be about the central character of the man born blind but in a way it’s the other characters, the minor players, who are the most significant.
John is good storyteller and every little phrase is laced with meaning. And one of the most significant things about this story I think is about how much time and energy they had to put into confirming the identity of the man born blind. No one is entirely sure who he is.
“Isn’t this the man who was born blind?”
“Well…we think it is.”
“We think it is.”
There are no throw away lines in John’s writing and he’s making such an important point here: they had to put so much energy into confirming the identity of the man born blind because, when he had simply been a blind beggar, they hadn’t noticed him. In other words, while they knew that there had been a blind beggar hanging around every day for years on end they didn’t have a clue what he looked like. They’d never really seen him. He was beneath their notice. He was a blind beggar, that’s all; he was something, rather than someone.
So there’s the first point John is putting before us in this living parable about blindness and sight: there are people that we simply don’t see, that we don’t take into account, who don’t even impress themselves onto our consciousness. And I’m not just talking about someone we know who we might pass in the street and fail to notice. John is getting at something deeper than that. It’s that there are whole categories of people who we can be blind to. Without noticing it we can become people who assess others in terms of their usefulness, or of their importance to society, or of their importance to us: rather than seeing some people as having problems we can instead tend to see them as a problem.
The poor, or those whose lives get into such a state of difficulty that they depend upon the welfare of others, or those who have trouble holding the focus of their life together, or simply those who don’t fit into the mainstream.
It struck me that in the story we never learn the man’s name: he’s simply ‘the man born blind’. John is pointing us to identify those people in our life, in our society, whose name we don’t know, whose name we don’t care about, only the title, the label, we give them: the man born blind, the dole bludger, the foreigner, the refugee, the drug addict, the queer.
When we’re content to deal with a person’s label without concern for their name, their individuality, the depth and mystery of the person they are, then we’ve taken on the role of the Pharisees in this Lenten Gospel: blindness, rather than sight, rather than recognising the presence of God in every human being. But John doesn’t even let us off there: he takes us even deeper into this issue and gives the challenge an even sharper edge.
Because while the religious leaders may not have taken an interest in the man born blind when he was merely a blind beggar John makes it abundantly clear, that once Jesus gets involved, they become very interested indeed. But they’re not in the least interested in the man himself: there’s not even a hint that they share in the man’s joy at having his sight given to him. He’s not a person to them – he’s an issue. He’s an issue, not a person. That’s the very heart of this incident in John’s Gospel. Jesus never put issues above people. In fact that’s the very reason he incurred the wrath of the Pharisees: that he would never allow the religious law to be greater than love and compassion for the individual.
Fr Colin was with a group from his parish last week on retreat at a monastery in Victoria. He remember(s) that when the beloved first abbot of that monastery died it was said of him that his priority wasn’t principles but persons. I think that’s what this story from John’s Gospel is telling us. (As do so many other stories of Jesus’ encounters with people) And yet how often have those who claim to follow Jesus done exactly the reverse? In fact at the moment we even see some of our Christian Churches at threat of being torn apart by this very thing: with people – seen as issues; reduced to an issue – becoming a basis for the threat of schism, of the rendering of the Christian community.
We’re seeing an issue becoming more important than the bond of charity meant to unite disciples of Jesus, becoming more important than the Spirit of God which unites them. Whenever issues become more important than people, whenever principles become more important than people, and more important than the Spirit of God who is love and unity, then we’re not stepping in the footsteps marked out by Jesus; then we’ve departed from religion and moved into ideology.
Ideology is religion gone mad, it’s religion without God: although it always presents itself as most faithful to God. And I’m sure that it’s what this great encounter in John’s Gospel is warning us about. Religion becomes ideology when ideas become more important than a human person, and more important than the Holy Spirit.
So, true religion or ideology: this story of sight and blindness is a challenge to consider that. And it’s not about simply pointing our finger at Church leaders when they make this mistake: in simple and day to day ways it’s a question that has to sit before each one of us: the Pharisees were veering into ideology because their passion in faith was for ideas, for issues and for rules.
Symbolically, in the story, they didn’t even notice the man, they didn’t even notice the human being. Even when their attention was piqued it wasn’t the man – the man whose name they never even got to know – that concerned them.
The challenge of this week of Lent for us is to look for those areas of blindness in our own faith, in our own spirituality: to be on an on-going path of conversion that ensures that our faith is about a growing sight, insight, that’s all about recognising the presence and the working of God in human lives, and not only those human lives we approve of, those lives which are tidy and neat and fit our expectations.
The challenge is to stop our own faith from veering anywhere in the direction of ideology, anywhere in the direction of allowing ideas and issues, principles and rules from becoming more important than love for human beings, from being more important than the Spirit’s great work of bringing about love and unity.
The acid test of whether we’re followers of Jesus is whether we want to know the person’s sin, or the person’s name? Whether we would divide for the Church for the sake of a principle, or whether building the bonds of charity and unity is our greatest principle? Whether our faith is more a collection of ideas about God in our head, or about living the love of God in our heart? Whether our faith is more about issues and principles, or about human beings and their need for compassion?
Are we blind to what faith in God is really about, or do we see?
Fr Colin Blayney is the Parish Priest of the Catholic Parish of Epping and Carlingford, Diocese of Broken Bay.