March 26, 2017 – The 4th Sunday in Lent
© 2017 Evan D. Garner
Audio of this sermon is available here.
Yesterday, as I drove
into Moulton on my way to Camp McDowell, I noticed a sign that not only
welcomed me to that fair city but also proclaimed Moulton as the birthplace of
Jesse Owens. Although I knew that he was from around here, I hadn’t realized
that Moulton was the place that he called home. Perhaps, that is in part
because Moulton isn’t actually the place he called home. Owens was from
Oakville, Alabama, a tiny unincorporated community in southeast Lawrence County
halfway between nowhere and nowhere else. You can’t get to Oakville unless you
try, so I suppose that it’s ok for Moulton to add Jesse Owens’ name to its sign
since hardly anyone would ever see if it was restricted to its Oakville
counterpart, though I wonder whether anyone in Moulton bothered to ask the
residents of Oakville before they made that proclamation.
When I saw the sign, I
started thinking about Jesse Owens and what he represents to the world. Of
course, history remembers him best for his performance in the 1936 Olympic
Games in Berlin, at which he won four gold medals, ascending to the top of the
medal podium that Adolf Hitler had built for his own Aryan athletes. Initially,
Owens was criticized for taking part in the 1936 games because it seemed to
lend credence to the Nazi attempt to show the world that everything was just
fine under Hitler’s regime, but the result spoke for itself. Two truths
collided in those Olympic Games—one a belief that only a racially pure society
could rule the world and the other a belief that the best athlete in the world might
even be a so-called “colored man” from rural Alabama—and Owens won the gold…four
times. You couldn’t make it up any better than that.
Two different truths
collide in today’s long gospel lesson, and the implication for us is just as
profound. The miracle itself—a man who was born blind receiving his sight—gets
hardly any mention. We read only a rather earthy depiction of some spittle and
some mud and the waters of the pool of Siloam. John is far more interested in
the interrogation that ensues. It turns out that Jesus had healed the man on the
sabbath, which was a clear violation of the fourth commandment. The sabbath had
been set aside by God himself as a day on which no work was to be performed. By
keeping the sabbath as a holy day of rest, God’s people honor their creator,
who likewise rested on the seventh day. Although exceptions are always made
when someone’s life is in danger, healing a man born blind is without a doubt a
violation of the rules. That’s the kind of thing that can wait until Sunday. That’s
the kind of thing that real Jew, a truly faithful child of God, would always
put off until the sabbath was over. But Jesus didn’t wait.
It was quite a conundrum.
“Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a
person born blind,” the man remarked near the end of the episode. “If this man
were not from God, he could do nothing.” But, if he were from God, as the
formerly blind man was suggesting, he surely would not have done this work on
the sabbath. That seems just as clear as the now-sighted man’s vision. So which
is it? Which framework wins out? Which truth is operative—the belief that a
truly godly man would keep the sabbath day holy or the belief that only a godly
man could heal someone who had been born blind? It can’t be both.
Well, as they say, the proof
is in the pudding, which is to say that the proof of the pudding is in the
eating. We know how the story ends. We know that Jesus did what no one else had
ever done. We know what John is trying to tell us—who is really on God’s side.
But I wonder whether we actually believe what we know. Although we may side
with Jesus and call ourselves his disciples, I wonder whether we really accept
the implication of this story. I wonder whether we’re willing to see and
believe in the truth that Jesus gives us.
I’d like to ask you to do
something for a moment that may not come easily. I’d like you to set aside
everything you know about God and Jesus and sin and blindness and try to think
your way through this story as a first-century Palestinian might have thought
through it. I want you to go back to the beginning of this passage and hear it
with all of the theological and scientific enlightenment that the ancient world
had to offer: “As Jesus walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His
disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was
born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was
born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.’” Nowadays, we know
that some babies are just born blind. There’s no moral judgment behind that. It
just happens. But what did they know back then? What did a man born blind
represent to Jesus’ contemporaries?
Again, at the end of the
exchange between the man born blind and the Pharisees, we see what our
twenty-first-century eyes cannot perceive. With no small amount of irony, the
man who had spent his whole life in darkness began to lecture the religious
experts about sin. “We know that God does not listen to sinners,” he said, “but
he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will.” The Pharisees rejected
not the man’s argument but the one making it: “You were born entirely in sins,
and are you trying to teach us?” To them, a man born blind was truly a lost
cause. They didn’t need to know who sinned, this man or his parents. What was certain
to them was that this man’s life was defined by sin and the darkness that came
with it.
Keep in mind what the
world thought about a man born blind, and ask yourself what it means that
salvation would come to him. What does it say about how God works that healing
and true sightedness—the kind of sightedness that in the bible represents
salvation—come not to the Pharisees but to a beggar who had been blind since
his birth? What did the blind man do to deserve his sight? He did not ask Jesus
to heal him. He did not profess his faith in Jesus before the mud-paste was
spread on his eyes. In fact, even after he had been healed, he didn’t know
anything about Jesus except his name. He was just a blind, good-for-nothing
beggar. The Pharisees, on the other hand, were the religious leaders that
everyone looked up to. They were the ones who not only kept the law but went
beyond what was required of them, dedicating their whole lives to God. “Surely
we are not blind, are we?” they asked Jesus, genuinely confused about the
nature of salvation itself. “If you were blind, you would not have sin,” Jesus
replied. “But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.”
This miracle story isn’t
about a man who was born blind receiving his sight. And it isn’t even about a controversial
rabbi performing a miracle on the sabbath. This is about two diametrically
opposed schools of thought hurtling towards each other, and it’s about us
deciding which one will govern our lives. On the one hand, there’s the belief
that salvation comes to those who deserve it, that God loves those who love
him, and that God saves those who have proven themselves worthy of that
salvation. And then there’s the belief that God’s salvation is revealed first
and foremost to those who haven’t earned it; that God loves us regardless of
whether we love him back and regardless of whether we love our neighbors as
ourselves; and that the light salvation comes to those who don’t deserve it one
bit. It can’t be both. We have to choose. We have to choose which truth will
govern our lives. Will we believe in the salvation that Jesus represents, or
will we choose the option that makes sense to us—the way that says that people
get what they deserve?
The hardest thing about
following Jesus is giving up our need to be rewarded for our hard work. The
hardest thing about being a Christian is abandoning our hope to be recognized
for what we have done. For our whole lives, we have been told that hard work
pays off, that trying our best is what counts, and Jesus comes to show us that
that just isn’t true. Salvation comes not to those who know that they are holy
but to sinners who know that they need God’s help. That’s the true power of
unconditional love, but has that love taken hold in our lives?
Jesus doesn’t see a blind
sinner, begging on the side of the road. He sees a vessel for God’s grace. What
do we see? In the man with the cardboard sign, sitting by the entrance to the
grocery store, what do we see? In the mother with five children, using food
stamps and a disability check to pay for her groceries, what do we see? In the
guy who staggers toward the checkout, clutching a six-pack of malt liquor under
his arm, what do we see? In the man or woman who passes them by, offering
nothing but a condemnatory thought, when we look at that person in the mirror,
what do we see? Do we see a lost cause or a vessel for God’s grace? I know what
Jesus sees. Will we see it, too?
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