“Mud Gets in Your Eyes”, A Sermon preached by The Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, April 3, 2011 at Church of the Ascension, Rochester, New York
6When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, 7saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see. (John 9:6-7)
Well, it was bound to happen. We’ve been in Lent now for three full weeks and we know that this is a season of penitence, a season to reflect on our sinfulness, to work on our relationship with God. But up till now we have been able to avoid the general topic of sin, which is one of those churchy words that can make us uncomfortable. For most of us the word sin evokes images of bad things we’ve done or said, unkind thoughts, careless deeds, hurtful or shameful things we’ve done. If we spend time thinking about sin in this way, it can make us feel overwhelmed, helpless, maybe even hopeless because no matter how hard we may try to be a “good person” we continually fall into the same old patterns of human behavior that cause pain to ourselves and others. Lent is traditionally a time to consider participating in the sacrament of reconciliation, what used to be called “confession,” but very few people are willing to do the tough self-examination that such a ritual requires. We humans simply do not relish confronting the issue of sin, especially our own.
But, today, the 4th Sunday in Lent, we hear a story that confronts the subject of human sin head on. The story of Jesus healing the man born blind is a rich tale in which is embedded a truth about human sin that we too often forget; that “sin” is refusing to recognize or to see God when God is staring us in the face. John’s gospel proclaims that Jesus is the one who was sent into the world in human flesh to save humankind from that particular form of sin by walking among us in human form so that we could easily see and recognize him in our midst.
One important thing to take note of here is that the author of John’s gospel repeatedly uses the word sin, in the singular, not sins, in the plural. John puts a spin on sin that we all too often miss when we get embroiled in human arguments about who is good and who is bad, who is in and who is out, who is saved and who is damned. When we don’t understand the truth that this story of the healing of the man born blind contains within it, we tend to become judgmental and self-righteous, much like the Pharisees are portrayed in this story. We all know how discomforting it is to listen to some fervent Christians who zealously proclaim that some group of people of whom they disapprove are “sinners”, doomed to eternal damnation, while they, the “saved ones” are just fine in the eyes of God. Such an understanding of sin is a convenient way to avoid facing the real challenge of the spiritual life by focusing on relatively petty, daily deeds, rather than the ongoing spiritual transformation of our soul which is the real call of discipleship.
In the story of Jesus and the blind man, the disciples ask Jesus who sinned, the man born blind or his parents? They simply assume that his physical blindness is a punishment from God for some misdeed or other that either the man or his parents committed. Of course, I can’t figure out what the disciples could have thought the man did before he was born to deserve to be blind from birth, but that is the way they asked the question. Jesus immediately dismisses the entire concept of God punishing someone for their “sins” (plural) by inflicting them with an infirmity or disease. He then replies with the enigmatic response, “he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” Now there is an answer that is as clear as the mud Jesus used to heal the man!
God’s works were revealed in this blind man as Jesus healed him. Jesus spat on the ground and made mud out of his spittle and the dirt, and smeared that mud on the man’s eyes. When I reflected on this story, I was tempted at first to think of the mud as a soothing and healing balm, like the mud used at mud-baths or spas which is considered luxurious and soothing. But then I remembered that whenever you take a mud-bath or a have a mud-mask on your face, your eyes are covered and protected so that the mud doesn’t get in them. The eyes are a part of our bodies that are particularly sensitive and delicate. To smear mud in someone’s eyes would cause tremendous pain and discomfort, and indeed, would cause blindness at least until the mud was washed away. I imagine that the blind man’s eyes must have hurt like crazy until he washed the mud out of them, but then the miracle occurred. He could see for the first time ever, and he saw Jesus and understood how God was working in and through Jesus. It was his ability to see Jesus that healed him. Salvation came to him through his relationship with Jesus.
We’re all a lot like that blind man. What we need to be healed from is not our particular physical or emotional illnesses or infirmities, or our particular bodily afflictions, or emotional baggage, but rather our inability or unwillingness to see God staring us in the face. We are born hard-wired, if you will, for relationship with God. But we so readily turn away from God and refuse to see God standing before us. We either refuse or simply neglect to nurture an intimate relationship with God. It is this turning away from God that is sin, not some laundry list of naughty deeds or thoughts. Sin is not a question of whether or not you are doing good deeds or thinking good or pure thoughts or being a nice person. Sin is not a matter of failing to keep the Ten Commandments, or not sticking to some accepted code of moral behavior, or not acting in some righteous way so that you can win God’s approval. Sin, this story suggests, is a question of whether or not we have opened ourselves to God, whether we, as Christians, have really accepted the revelation of who God is as revealed in the person of Jesus. Jesus came to show us the face of God. Our refusal or perhaps, inability, to really see and love God is the sin Jesus came to take away, by revealing God to us in human flesh.
In this story of Jesus and the blind man Jesus says, “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” The images of darkness and light are used repeatedly by the author of John’s gospel as a metaphor for Jesus and his role in God’s plan for the created universe. Obviously, when one is blind, one cannot see light at all, everything is darkness. In darkness we stumble about, we grope, we can easily be lost, we cannot readily be in relationship because we can’t see other people, we are much more likely to be afraid and to become paralyzed by that fear. When light shines into the darkness everything becomes clearer, less frightening and we are able to carry on. But the light can only get through when we wash the mud out of our eyes.
And that is where the rubber hits the road for every one of us. We are all baptized Christians sitting here today. We have had the opportunity to experience Christ, to know Christ, to receive Christ into our lives. We belong to a faith community which is the body of the Risen Christ in this world. We gather weekly to worship, to pray and to receive the real presence of the Risen Christ in the gift of the sacrament of his body and blood. The Pharisees in the story put themselves under judgment by not seeing who Jesus was, despite his witness and the miracle that he performed to reveal God to them. We put ourselves under judgment when we go through the motions of our religious tradition but do not let Christ into our hearts and souls, when we come to church but make no attempt to live out in our lives, the words and rituals we engage in at the altar.
We are like the blind man in another way, too. It often takes God mixing Godself into the dirt and dust of our lives and smearing that mud in our eyes to make us see and recognize the Christ who is standing right before us all the time. When things do not go well in our lives, when something terrible happens to us or to someone we love, or we make a big mistake, or get ourselves into trouble, or a relationship goes sour or we have trouble in our job, or fail at some project that we are working on, or simply feel overwhelmed by the demands of our lives, God is right there in that dirt, making mud out of it and smearing it in our eyes. The very things that are blinding us to God are the means through which God can break through our defenses, smear our eyes with mud and get our attention.
We can be spiritually or emotionally blinded in those hard times by that mud in our eyes. But, when we run to wash away the mud, God is standing right there. When we finally surrender and open ourselves in prayer to God, and thereby acknowledge that God exists, and allow ourselves to be vulnerable, when we admit that we are not in control and that we need God, the mud is washed from our eyes. When we succumb to tears, (a natural reaction when the eyes are smeared with mud,) our resistance to God melts, our defenses are washed away by those tears, and God’s face is revealed to us.
Sin is not simply bad deeds or immoral behavior. Those things are actually outward signs of the deeper condition of sin in which we live perpetually when we shut God out of our lives. Sin is alienation from God, a life in which we have refused to see the face of God looking into our eyes with the love that only God can give. When we wash the mud out of our eyes and really look upon the face of God, we can only respond as did the blind man: “Lord, I believe.” - “I believe that you exist, that you love me, and that your love for me is all I ever need, for eternity.”
The good news is that as we wash that mud out of our eyes the light of Christ shines through and we find ourselves gazing upon the loving face of God. We are truly sorry for the sinful things we’ve done and said in the depths of our blindness. We are filled with love and compassion for other people as the natural response to God’s love for us. As we continue our Lenten journey to Jerusalem and the cross, let us remember to wash the mud out of our eyes so that we may live, as the Letter to the Ephesians exhorts, “as children of the light - for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.”
No comments:
Post a Comment