The Blind Leading the Blind

4^th Sunday of Lent

Cycle A 

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost but now am found,

Was blind but now I see

We all know the story of John Newton, the composer of Amazing Grace. How he was the captain of a British slave ship in the 18h century who had a conversion experience that led him to become an Anglican priest and abolitionist. He had only been living according to the beliefs of his day, and for years saw nothing wrong with treating slaves the way he did. Because they were not like him. Something in their makeup made them inferior, and therefore, subhuman.  Much like the Pharisees saw people who had been born blind. John Newton came to see his former life of sinfulness as blindness. And as one blind he was lost, in the darkness. Through God’s grace he was given his sight again. He was able to change his life and be saved.

We equate darkness with evil. We call Satan the Prince of Darkness, and we fear the dark. Because we can see we feel uncomfortable in the dark. We fear the unknown, we fear what we cannot control. We’re afraid we’ll stumble and fall in the dark. Darkness is frightening for us only because we know the difference between light and darkness. If we were born blind we would never have experienced light, so darkness would hold no fear for us. For one born blind, who has never experienced the light, stumbling and falling is a natural thing. Relying on the help of others is a requirement for survival.

This gospel begins with Jesus’ own disciples asking a question based upon a belief all Jews had at the time – that physical weakness and disease meant you or your family were steeped in sin. If you were a sinner God punished you with infirmity. If you were righteous you were healthy, wealthy and wise. Everybody believed this: the Pharisees did, the disciples did, and the blind man himself did.

The blind man could not enter the temple. Everybody said he shouldn’t be there, and he himself thought he shouldn’t be there. He also thought he was unworthy to be in the presence of God, just because he was blind. He was reduced to begging at the door. The people who passed him every day saw him as unworthy, beneath them, worthless to God and man. And so he saw himself as unworthy and worthless. How could he ever become worthy? How could he ever come in out of the darkness and be included among the seeing?

The saddest thing about the blind man is that he bought into his culture’s prejudices and allowed them to make him feel less about himself, to alienate himself from God and his community. Even today, we can allow outside influences to keep us from God. We can beat ourselves up so much that we actually stay away from God. How wretched you must feel to keep yourself from God. Have you ever not come to Mass because you felt unworthy? Or stayed away because you were not in the “right frame of mind” to receive the Eucharist; that you just didn’t think you could come to Mass with all those people there and try to pretend that everything was ok? Why just go through the motions?

Do you think that you shouldn’t come to Mass if you haven’t exactly been living a perfect Christian life lately? I mean, why add one more hypocrite to the mix? Do you think that you have to have it all together in order to worship the Lord? I’m not perfect, so I’ll stay away. Does Jesus really only call the righteous? If that were the case there’d be no one here. It’s sort of like saying that I’m starving, so I really shouldn’t come to the banquet. The very thing you think you should avoid is the thing you really need. Sometimes we blind ourselves to what we’re really doing here.

It’s ironic that the best way to become worthy of the Eucharist is to experience the Eucharist. None of us can ever make ourselves worthy of being here. If blindness is equated with sinfulness, then we’re all born blind, aren’t we? As John Newton said, it is through God’s grace that we can see again. Only God can make us worthy, just by willing it so. So we have a choice, to beat ourselves up for not being worthy or to accept the grace of God that allows us to see. To exclude ourselves from the banquet or to humbly accept the invitation.

It’s funny, isn’t it, that the ones who thought they were worthy – the Pharisees – were the ones that Jesus said were blind. Their sin was their prejudice against people like the blind man, people they thought were sinners. They could not see their own shortcomings, and that we’re all blind in one way or another. The story ends for us just as it did for them. Many times we’re the Pharisees; we’re the good church going folks who think we have all the answers. We’re the John Newtons of the world, who go along with the conventional wisdom of our day, blinded to how we are actually making things worse in our ignorance.

But we don’t have to persist in our blindness, do we. Like the blind man, we’re sometimes on the outside looking in. Not really sure what we’re seeing, Jesus calls us forth. He makes us uncomfortable at times and calls us to the waters. We do not know the way, so others need to help us get there .When our eyes are opened, we still are not sure exactly who Jesus is, even when he is right in front of us. We come up against opposition. The entrenched prejudices of others try to derail our journey. Sometimes we are thrown out. Sometimes others try to keep us in our places. Finally, Jesus comes to us in the light and we recognize him for who he is. We have become his disciples.

In many ways we’re all blind and the ignorant together. Someone once described Christianity as one beggar helping another beggar to find bread. The blind leading the blind. We have all needed help to see from time to time, and we have all helped others to see the light, too. And we all stumble together towards our Lord.

Scrutinize This

3^rd Sunday of Lent

Scrutiny (A)

Many of us have been forced to scrutinize our lives the past few years. We are being forced by job cuts and dwindling resources to take stock in our lives, perhaps reevaluating what we want to do with our lives. I met a man last week who had just been laid off from a high paying sales job. Instead of trying to find another job like the one he had just left he has decided to go back to school to become a nurse practitioner. He wants to help people and feels that’s the best way for him to do it. It’s not that he hasn’t been doing anything worthwhile up until now; he just wants to take his life in a different direction, one that he feels he is being called to pursue.

How many of you have, shall we say, “embellished” your resume’ to get a job? I figure I’ve bluffed my way into practically every job I’ve ever had. Those few press releases I wrote freelance made me a “public relations specialist”. That one article I wrote for a trade magazine as a college intern proved that I was a “published writer”.  I have a “working knowledge of Japanese” because I can competently order in a Tokyo sushi bar and then ask where the bathroom is.

Lies? Not really. Stretching… Maybe. When we write our resumes, we scrutinize every job we’ve ever had. We go over past job descriptions and list all the things we have done and accomplished. We do a bit of soul searching to determine exactly what it was we did accomplish. Some things we leave in, some things we take out. Every time we switch jobs it seems we have to take inventory of our past lives. We are forced to judge ourselves by what we see as our successes and our failures. Maybe that’s why we fudge a bit. Maybe we see the failures too glaringly.

We don’t outright lie on our resumes, we just highlight our strengths and minimize our weaknesses, so we can get our foot in the door. In the end, whatever our resumes say, we still have to perform at our jobs or we get fired.

I think we do the opposite when we scrutinize our moral lives. Whereas when we put together our professional resumes we tend to exaggerate the positives, our moral resumes may tend to emphasize our failures. All too often when we take stock in how well we’ve actually been living our lives, we come up short. All we see is the negative.

Each year we are given the opportunity to take some time to reflect on our lives, to pray about it and make corrections. Lent is the time when we update our moral resumes.

Come and meet a man who told me everything I ever did.

But Jesus actually hadn’t told the Samaritan woman everything she had ever done.  He only told her one thing about her life; that she had problems with her relationships with men. He didn’t run down a long laundry list of sins, and he didn’t judge her life choices. He simply stated the fact, and then praised her for her honesty, even though she hadn’t told him the whole truth. She had fudged her resume’ yet Jesus saw the positive in it.

Why did she make the leap from that one fact to “he told me everything I ever did”? Seems a bit drastic. Who scrutinized whom? It wasn’t Jesus. But something about him caused the woman at the well to take an inventory of her life, and it came up short. No amount of fudging could make it look good. He didn’t tell her everything she ever did. She told herself.

Jesus did not come to judge. But when we come face to face with our perfect God, we can’t hide.  When we encounter Jesus our lives are laid bare before us, and he forces us to scrutinize ourselves.  Jesus doesn’t throw our shortcomings in our faces. He just allows us to see ourselves for who we really are, and then steps back to see what we’ll do next. The woman at the well took one simple piece of information and used it to make a complete turnaround in her life. She knew everything she had ever done wrong; she just needed a gentle push to get back on track.

The woman at the well begins with a surface level observation, taking Jesus literally at his word that he has physical water to drink that will never dry up. A pretty neat trick, if he can do it. I think we also sometimes come here to see if Jesus is really all he’s cracked up to be. We have also been called to the well, and some of us saw immediately how deep it was and others were a bit more skeptical.

As the woman was forced to confront her own weaknesses and sinfulness, she recognized Jesus as someone special, not just another nice guy, but a prophet. A prophet speaks truth to power, and speaks truth to each of us. He tells her the truth of her life without judging her for it. We have also found out that the more we learn about Jesus Christ the more we learn about ourselves. We become aware of the positives and negatives of our lives more acutely, and we have become better for it.

Finally, when the woman focused on the person of Jesus, she came to recognize him for who he really was. She began to understand who God really is and how we are in relationship with God; that we must worship him just the way he is, in spirit and in truth, that we actually have to mimic God’s identity. Much like Mary Magdalene in the garden on Easter morning, she came to recognize Jesus as God only when she could strip away all the preconceived notions she had of who was before her. She had to see the spirit and accept the truth. Only then could she accept what he offered her. Only then could she truly worship him.

Usually in the gospels, people come to believe in Jesus because of the miracles he performs. But there is no miracle here. No water turned into wine, no blind person seeing again, no cripple walking, no one being raised from the dead. Or is there? Water is not turned into wine; it is transformed into everlasting life. The woman does not regain physical sight; she sees who she really is. Her legs are not strengthened; she is healed from the paralysis of fear and doubt that has kept her away from her neighbors. She is not raised from earthly death; she dies to her sins and rises to a new life as Jesus’ disciple.

Like the woman at the well, we also have met Jesus in unexpected places. While going about our everyday lives, Jesus has come to us and spoken to us, even when we’ve felt we didn’t deserve it.

Have we ever put as much effort into scrutinizing our moral lives as we have putting together our resumes? Do we understand that we too are called to constant conversion, or are we like the apostles in today’s gospel who can’t see beyond our own prejudices to see people as God sees them? Do we get so hung up on our own daily concerns that we don’t recognize the God who’s in our midst? Have we totally missed the point?

Come and meet someone who told me everything I ever did. Could we stand up to such scrutiny?