On Opening Our Eyes

 

On Opening Our Eyes

In the Christian Gospels there are several stories about Jesus curing blindness. It is I think his most common healing miracle. When John the Baptist sent disciples to Jesus to ask if Jesus were the one to come or if they should wait for another Jesus answers by describing what he has been doing. The first thing he mentions is “the blind receive their sight.” Matthew 11:5 NRSV. Many of my progressive Christian friends and colleagues have a hard time believing that Jesus actually made blind people see. I have no reason to deny that he did, but whether he did or not these stories of Jesus opening the eyes of the blind have another meaning that is far more important to us than is the claim that something good happened to other people a long time ago in a place far away. Essentially every story in the Bible loses most of its meaning when we think of it simply as a statement of facts. Jesus giving sight to the blind is a perfect example of that truth. Jesus giving a blind person their sight, whether he actually ever did as a matter of fact or not, is a perfect metaphor for what Jesus can do for every one of us and indeed for the whole world.

When we take Jesus seriously, when we really listen to what he says, our eyes are opened metaphorically speaking to a whole new universe of reality, of truth and meaning. There are exceptions of course, but on the whole the world is for the most part occupied with and committed to so many wrong things. It values the material over the spiritual, wealth over personal integrity, violence over nonviolence, and war over peace (at least to judge by how often and how easily we go to war). It esteems what it calls success over moral and ethical responsibility, the individual over the common good, flamboyancy over honesty, and the showy over the decent. In so many ways the world just gets things wrong. It did in Jesus day. It does in ours. In so many ways the world is blind to what is good and true.

If we will let him Jesus can cure that blindness. He can open our eyes to God’s values and ways that are so different from and so much better than the values and ways of the world. Jesus lifts up spiritual values over material ones. He is the world’s greatest prophet of nonviolence. He call us to creative, assertive, but always nonviolent opposition to evil. He lifts up the poor and disabled and calls them the beloved children of God that they surely are. He condemned the rich, sometimes outright but always for the way they so often oppress and despise the poor. Jesus calls us to put our trust in God rather than in ourselves or anyone or anything else worldly. He praises those the world condemns and calls to do the same. He showed us and taught us that God always prefers substantive justice and compassion to pietistic delusions of moral perfection. He calls us to care for our neighbor as we care for ourselves, and he makes sure we know that everyone everywhere is our neighbor. Jesus’ teachings and actions stood his world on its head. They’d turn our world on its head too if we’d let them.

That’s what Jesus giving sight to the blind means for us. When we can literally give or restore sight to a blind person of course we should, provided that is that the blind person wants to see. For those of us who are not physically blind (and for those who are too) Jesus calls us to open our mental and spiritual eyes to the realities of the world and to the revolutionary vision of the way God calls the world to be that Jesus called the kingdom of God. We all need our metaphorical eyes opened in that way. So when we read the Gospels’ stories of Jesus giving sight to a blind person let’s understand that those stories aren’t just about something that happened to other people a long time ago in a place far away. Let’s understand that they are about us too. Then let’s do the work of opening our own eyes to the ways our world is disordered and the ways God calls it to be. Then let’s get on with making it that way.