The
blind man in today’s Gospel lesson
is
one of my favorite characters in the Bible.
If
the American Academy of Religion gave out Oscars,
I’d nominate him for best supporting
actor.
He
gave us the immortal line in Amazing Grace,
“I once was . . . blind but now I
see.”
But
that doesn’t quite catch the feel of what he actually said.
We
translate his words as “I once was blind but now I can see.”
But
in the Greek, that last clause is just one word – Vlepo.
I once was blind. Now: vlepo.
It’s
a word with sharpness of insight,
like the French Voila’ or
the Spanish Claro.
Vlepo
doesn’t mean quite the same thing
as Voila or Claro – but it has that feeling.
I once was helpless. Now voila.
I once didn’t have a clue. Now claro.
I once was blind. Now vlepo.
It’s
a pithy rejoinder shot out in the middle of an argument.
The
religious authorities didn’t like it one little bit
that Jesus had restored the man’s sight.
They
were smart theologians and scholars.
They
knew charismatic healing was just hocus pocus
by
charlatans to fool the hicks in Galilee.
Now
Jesus had healed someone in the city.
Something
had to be wrong with this picture.
So
they interrogated the man’s parents
to find out if he had really been blind at all.
Then
they interrogated the blind man himself,
and when they didn’t like his answers,
they confronted him with undeniable religious truths.
“We know this Jesus is a sinner,
so how can you claim he has restored your sight?
Just answer us that.”
He
replied. “You say he is a sinner.
I don’t know whether he is a sinner or not.
All I know is I was blind. Now vlepo.”
Do
you see what I like about this guy?
He is so Zen. So simple. No interpretation. No fuss.
Having spent his entire life in darkness,
he is used
to not knowing things.
He knows what he knows, and beyond that
he doesn’t
speculate.
He
doesn’t argue that Jesus must be the Son of God,
or the Incarnation of the 2nd person of the
Trinity.
He’s
no theologian.
He’s
just someone who was blind and now he sees.
The
first thing we see here is that grace is just that.
It’s
grace. It isn’t something we have to earn
by believing anything in particular,
not even believing in Jesus.
The
blind man didn’t believe any doctrines.
Grace
just happens.
We
didn’t conjure the sun to rise with our positive thinking.
We
didn’t make the flowers bloom with our sound doctrines.
We
didn’t make the river flow with our moral living.
Creation
is gift. Life is gift. Healing, beauty,
and goodness are all gift.
When
we acknowledge that so much is just gift,
we can relax
and open our hands to receive more of it.
The
second thing we see in this story
is that faith doesn’t begin with doctrines.
They
come later and sometimes they can help,
but they can
get in the way too.
The
religious authorities in our Gospel lesson had doctrines
that made what they were seeing impossible.
So
they could not believe what they saw.
There
is a Sufi story about a joker sage named Mullah Nazradin.
One
day a neighbor came to borrow Mullah Nazradin’s donkey
to haul some goods across the village.
Nazradin
said, “I am sorry friend,
But I have already loaned my donkey
to my cousin in the next village.”
“Ok,”
the neighbor said, but as he walked away
he heard braying in the back yard.
Curious,
he went around to the back and voila, claro, vlepo!
There was the donkey.
So
he went back to the door and said,
“Mullah, what is this?
You said you
had loaned your donkey
to your
cousin in the next village.
But I hear your donkey braying in the back yard.”
Nazradin
snapped back indignantly,
“Well who are you going to believe --
me or a
stupid donkey?”
The
first cardinal virtue, the mother of all virtues
is
the just seeing things as they are
unfiltered through fixed
concepts.
Faith
and wisdom both begin
with looking life in the face
and telling the truth about what we
see.
The
final thing we see in our story
is that seeing the truth, especially
telling the truth,
can stir things up.
In
our families, in our jobs, in our churches,
wherever we organize ourselves into
groups,
the groups adopt certain agreed upon
ways of looking at things.
This
person is a hot head; that person is a saint.
People
of this race are a certain way.
People
of one religion are greedy
while people of another religion
are violent.
We
have unquestioned beliefs about ourselves
and about each other.
We
dare not question them because loyalty to the group
means living in the group think box.
But it's pretty dark inside those boxes.
is a form of blindness.
We
cannot see the simple truth of things as they are
because we are wearing blinders of
prejudice
and unquestioned beliefs.
In
this story, Jesus takes the man’s blinders off.
He
gives him sight, simple sight.
And
he accepts it. “Vlepo,” he says. No interpretation.
In
the 15th Century, church leaders refused to look
through Galileo’s telescope for fear
they would see something contrary to
the accepted beliefs
of the time.
They
had not gotten the point of today’s story.
Nothing
that is true is foreign to Christ.
Ironically,
some scientists like Richard Dawkins
are blinded by their group think box.
They
are unwilling to look a the truths we see
through our telescopes of ancient
stories, poetry,
rituals, songs, and prayers.
They
are even unwilling to look at the interpretations
of other scientists, like physicist
Robert Russell who explains
that time is a construct restricting our possibilities,
that
eternity plays by completely different rules
and
that sometimes the threshold between time and eternity opens.
Jesus
invites us to look at things as they are.
He
invites us outside our group think box.
He
does that for the same reason now that he did then
He’s
lonely out there.
Jesus
doesn’t fit in our group think box
so we can’t see him.
It’s
a kind of blindness.
But
if we dare to look through our spiritual telescopes,
if we dare to read the old stories,
perform the sacred rituals and sing
the songs,
if we dare to pray,
we might just see Jesus.
I
have seen him in those forbidden ways
and he has blessed my life beyond
measure.
The
joy and splendor of reality
are always outside the
box,
like the stars the men
of old refused to see
through
Galileo’s telescope.
They
are in the hand of the same man who opened
the blind man’s eyes.
And
the price is still the same. It’s a gift.
