Open Your Eyes...

Reflections on John 9:1-41
Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad, Richmond, 4/3/11

This is a long and astonishing parable on blindness and belief. As always in the Gospel of John, the true believers are the ones who, unfailingly believe in Jesus as the Messiah. The unbelievers are the people of Jesus’ religion and heritage: the Jews.

We hear of the strictness of the Pharisaic code- a man must not work on the Sabbath - even to mix saliva with mud to enact a miracle. A man born blind is simply proof of the sins of his parents or himself- the only question is- which one sinned? But nothing is more chilling than the terror displayed by the parents of the man born blind. When pressed by “the Jews” they would sooner turn in their own son “Let him speak for himself” than suffer the worst thing imaginable for any Jew- to be expelled from the synagogue.

A text now called the Birkat Ha-minim, or Benediction Against Heretics was discovered in the Cairo Genizah in 1896. Apparently, any first century Jew was forced to recite this before they could enter the temple, making it impossible for the Christian Jews to enter their former house of worship.

…And let the arrogant Government (the Romans)
be speedily uprooted in our days.
Let the Nazarenes (the Christians)
And the Minim (the heretics) be destroyed in a moment
And let them be blotted out of the Bood of Life and
Not be inscribed together with the righteous.
Blessed art thou, O Lord, who humblest the proud.


Blindness in the presence of miracles is an oft-repeated theme in the Old and New Testaments. I spoke of Hagar last week, who was certain that she was lost in the wilderness, and so desperate that she left her young son under a bush so that she would not see him die, then she wandered away.

But God opened her eyes- he took away her desperate blindness, and she saw that she was right in front of a well of water. No longer desperate, but filled.
Mary Magdalene, upon seeing the risen Lord, was blind enough to take him for the gardener! And on the road to Emmaus, two of Jesus’ disciples, those closest to him, came upon Jesus on the road, and took him for just some guy who, apparently had a remarkably good handle on the scriptures!

How do we remain blind to the miraculous? After a long cold winter, I took down heavy curtains in my bedroom to launder them. When I woke up, for the first time in a very long time, I was looking directly outside at the dawn. There were exquisite bands of gold and pink stretching across the sky, and I thought-
“Wow! Does this happen every day?” How do we insulate ourselves, how do we protect our selves, how do we all remain blind to the miraculous?

For more than a year, I have been mourning my best friend Alison, who died after a long illness. She used to travel to California from Georgia every summer for 13 years with her young son, Alexander. My eyes were gloriously opened, this Spring, when her beautiful son, now 21 years old and the spitting image of her (except that he is 6’6”) gave us a call. He said he wanted to continue the tradition- he wanted to spend his Spring break with us, and then come back to camp with us in Big Sur in the summer- just as he and Alison always used to do. The miraculous occurred- Alison was resurrected for me in her beautiful boy, and now I too, have a son, and Alexander has the closet thing possible to a mother. He spent a wonderful week with us in March, and his smile, his humor, his sandy blond hair- so much of him was my dear friend come to visit. My daughters were reunited with their new older brother, and it was, for the first time in my life, like having three kids!

Before his visit, I had known, I had seen what was true, which was that there was no resurrection, and I had lost my best friend of 43 years, and there could be no comfort for me. But fortunately, my eyes were opened to the miraculous, in the person of my tall, blond, sweet new son.

Jesus, tells us that he came into the world so that those who are blind may see, and those who see may become blind.

I think all of us err on the side of out-thinking God. We KNOW what will or will not happen. We can just SEE it. We don’t take into account that miracles can and do happen. We are too apt to see what we see, believe what we believe. The disciples of course, were champions at this. There they were, actually in Jesus’ presence, and still, so often, they were blind.

Thich Nhat Hanh, the Christian/Buddhist poet and theologian has a lovely passage about this in a meditation about the Eucharist:

The disciples had been following Jesus, and had seen Him, had the chance to look at Him, to look into his eyes, to see him smile, to see Him in reality. But it seems they were not capable of being in contact with that marvelous reality. Then he broke bread and poured wine and said, “This is my flesh and blood, take it, eat it, drink it, and you will have eternal life.” We eat a lot, we drink a lot [we SEE a lot] but what do we eat? We eat phantoms, we drink ghosts. We don’t eat real bread, real wine, real life. But Jesus said, “This is my flesh, this is my blood. It’s a very drastic way of awakening us from our forgetfulness, from our ignorance.

A drastic way of awakening us from our blindness.
Amen.