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Sermon: The Fourth Sunday in Lent (A) - 3rd April 2011
St Alban's Anglican Church Epping 7,8 & 10 am
Readings: 1 Samuel 16:1-13 Psalm 23 Ephesians 5:8-14 John 9:1-41
Last week we had the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman, at the well at Sychar, in Samaria. She became a very unlikely evangelist for God’s good news of acceptance. She was a very unlikely person to tell the Good News. Society had placed her outside the bounds of accepted behaviour and the most unlikely person to talk about faith in God. She Said, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! … (and) … many Samaritans from the city believed in Jesus because of the woman’s testimony”.
Once again today we have a story us of the unlikely vessels God chooses to spread God’s grace. God’s choice is David, a shepherd, an eighth son, from the village of Bethlehem, from a family that has no obvious pedigree. The theme of David as an unlikely instrument for Israel’s hope continues throughout the story of his early years. We are always in wonder that this man David is the one for whom God has prepared us, of whom Hannah sang in hope. Can this boy defeat the Philistine champion? Can this upstart warrior escape the wrath of Saul? Can this fugitive and outlaw become a king? Can a man who hires himself out to the Philistines win Israel’s heart?
One of the most basic themes of the Bible is that God finds possibilities for grace in the most unexpected places and through the most unlikely persons. To choose the youngest son, who labours as a shepherd, to be Israel’s future king is to ignore the usual arrangements for power and influence in the ancient world. Unlike Saul’s father, Kish, David’s father, Jesse, is not described as “a man of wealth”.
The family tree of David is not distinguished. Jesse’s grandmother was Ruth, an immigrant Moabite woman. His grandfather was Boaz, whose ancestors included a Canaanite woman, Tamor, who was almost executed for adultery and a Canaanite prostitute, Rahab, from Jericho. In the world’s usual power arrangements, this would not be the stuff of royal lineage, but in God’s plans sometimes “”the last shall be first”, even an eighth son tending the sheep. Of course, the unlikely journey of God’s grace through the line of David leads to Jesus born in a stable, a Galilean, a carpenter’s son and finally crucified a criminal. However, Jesus is the Messiah in whom God meets us for the most unlikely of all moments of grace.
This story of the choosing of David can serve as a reminder that we still live in communities for which the patterns of power seek to become permanently entrenched. Too often we fail to look for possibilities of grace and hope beyond the traditional channels of power, influence and success. We ignore the possibilities in those who are customarily absent from the gatherings of power; residents of Housing Commission homes in the western suburbs, the elderly, immigrants who speak languages other than English, those of a different races from ours. We do not believe that God can find hope for a new future among the marginalized and the dispossessed. In our own personal moments estrangement, loneliness and self-doubt, we too often do not believe that God can find possibilities for grace in us.
Related to this theme of God’s unexpected choices, is our tendency, like that of Samuel, to confuse appearance for reality. We live in a culture oriented to image and appearance. Products are sold by the appearance of youth and sexuality, which have nothing to do with the product itself. Self-gratification is all important and products are sold by appeal to chic and macho appearances. Children are ostracized at school for not wearing the proper brand names, and sometimes are even robbed of coveted items when they do wear them. Political campaigners seek to polish a successful media image rather than to convince voters by their positions on issues. Their emphasis is on spin rather than substance.
God’s word to Samuel is hopeful in such a time. When so many are fooled by appearances, it is comforting and encouraging to hear that God looks on the heart, that God can see past the preoccupation with image and appearance that characterizes our time. If we are both to discern and to mediate God’s grace in the world, then we, too, must seek to look on the heart, to see as God sees. We must look beyond appearances in order to grapple with the concerns and address the needs of the human heart. Nothing less will be acceptable for the life of God’s people, no matter how successful our institutional appearance might be. If we succumb to the temptation to choose for appearance alone, then God’s rebuke to Samuel will be our own.
The irony of this story is that when David appears, he, too, is handsome. This story does not argue against our efforts to make ourselves, our communities, our programmes attractive. It is a question of priorities. Appearance alone is no substitute for matters of the heart, but if we attend faithfully to matters of the heart, the grace of God within will often show an attractive face to the world.
This mornings Gospel reading has another unexpected minister of God’s grace; the man born blind. The Gospel lays out the heart of how the incarnation has decisively altered the expectation of salvation. The story shows that God’s judgment is no longer reserved for a future age, because the presence of Jesus in the world brings the world to the critical moment of decision. The offer of God’s love, available to the world in the presence of Jesus, God’s Son, is the moment of salvation. Good and evil are defined solely by people’s response to Jesus; the good are those who come to the light, the evil those who scorn the light.
The healing miracle is not simply a story that shows the revelation of the works of God in Jesus’ gift of sight. Rather, John uses this healing story to portray the saving truth of Jesus’ incarnation obviously and with expression. Light and darkness are no longer merely concepts, but are embodied in the characters of the story. In the blind man’s journey from physical blindness to spiritual sight, we are able to watch as someone comes to the light and is given new life. In the Jewish authorities’ journey from physical sight to spiritual blindness, we are able to watch as they close themselves to the light and place themselves under judgment. Through the drama we are able to share in the saving reality of Jesus’ presence.
The irony of the story is that the authorities, who positioned themselves as judges of others, who is in and who is out, finally bring themselves under judgment as sinners. The Jewish authorities insist on their right to judge both the healed man and Jesus as sinners. When the healed man confesses his faith in Jesus as the Son of Man, he acknowledges Jesus as his saving judge, whose judgment renders the authorities’ judgment impotent.
The Pharisees’ assertion of their own sight is the basis for Jesus’ judgment of them as sinners. The Pharisees do have physical sight; the sight they lack is the ability to see God revealed in Jesus, and their refusal to acknowledge this “blindness” on their part proves that they are sinners. Why? Because, sin is defined not by what one does, but almost exclusively by one’s relationship to Jesus, and more specifically, by whether one believes that God is present in Jesus.
By giving the world access to the light and love of God, Jesus takes away the world’s sin because he makes it possible for the world to redefine its relationship with God. The world’s sin is its refusal to believe in Jesus. Sin only occurs in response to Jesus. If the Pharisees had not been given the opportunity to see, then they would not be blind. However, because they had seen Jesus’ works, obvious in the man born blind, and still refused to receive God’s revelation in Jesus, they remain in sin. They have turned down Jesus’ offer of salvation and so bring themselves under judgment.
Salvation from sin is primarily a result of Jesus’ life, not his death, because it is the life of Jesus as God’s Son and incarnate Word that makes it possible for people to move from sin to eternal life.
Sin is fundamentally about one’s relationship with God, and for John, the decisive measure of one’s relationship with God is one’s faith in Jesus. This flies in the face of views that want to define sin in relation to right actions and thereby establish the norms for judgment. Judgment is: Believe in the revelation of God in Jesus or not. The only way to be excluded from Jesus’ offer of salvation is to turn one’s back on that offer. This is a radical and liberating notion of sin and salvation, one that not surprisingly makes many people uncomfortable, because it removes the establishment of norms of behaviour from the category of sin. From this perspective, it is not the Christian community’s responsibility, just as it was not the Pharisees’, to judge anyone’s sins, because the determination of sin rests with God, Jesus, and the individual, and is determined by faith, not actions. The John’s Gospel is thus the most radical example of salvation by grace anywhere in the New Testament.
The Gospel is unequivocally clear: Jesus’ incarnation, not the price he had to pay through his death, brings salvation from sin. This, too, can be discomfiting to people who think that an atonement understanding of salvation is the “only” Christian view. John invites us to recognize the transformative power of the love of God made manifest in the incarnation and to shape our lives accordingly. This is why John puts his primary emphasis on Jesus’ coming into the world. To reject Jesus is to reject the love of God in Jesus and so to pass from the possibility of salvation to judgment. Therefore, the Pharisees’ announcement of their sight, when in fact they have not seen God in Jesus, marks their sin and the “blind” man’s embrace of Jesus as the Son of Man marks his salvation. Judgment and salvation are not lodged with Jesus’ death; they belong to Jesus’ life.
The blind man’s words also offer eloquent testimony to the transforming power of God’s grace in the hymn “Amazing Grace”: “I once was blind, but now I see.”
God’s unexpected evangelist said, “One thing I do know, that though I was blind now I see”.
This sermon composed using The New Interpreter’ Bible, Volumes II and IX Abingdon Press, Nashville. 1998 and 1995