On
Recovering our Sight
October
27, 2021
One of the
striking things about the Gospel stories of Jesus is how often they tell of him
giving sight to the blind. There are six of them. They are:
·
Mark 8:22-26. Jesus heals a blind man at Bethsaida.
·
Mark 10:46b-52. Jesus heals blind Bartimaeus at
Jericho.
·
Matthew 9:27-31. Jesus heals two blind men.
·
Matthew 20:29-34. Jesus heals two blind men at
Jericho—Matthew’s version of the healing of Bartimaeus in Mark.
·
Luke 18:35-43. Jesus heals a blind beggar at
Jericho—Luke’s version of the healing of Bartimaeus in Mark.
·
John 9:1-7. Jesus heals a man born blind.
Even when we consider that three
of those stories are versions of the story of the one story of the healing of blind
Bartimaeus, that’s quite a few stories of Jesus giving or restoring sight to
blind people. Of course gaining or regaining one’s sight must be a great
blessing for people who are blind. The Gospel writers certainly thought it
important for them to include those stories in their proclamations of Jesus
Christ that we call the Gospels. These stories, along with others of Jesus
healing other maladies, present Jesus as a miracle healer.[1]
Yet as I’ve said about so many Bible stories, these stories of Jesus giving
sight to the blind don’t have that much to say to us if they are only about
things that happened to other people a long time ago in place far away. The
great Bible stories are still with us because they so often tell us things
about our own lives and our relationship with God, not just about the people
who appear in the stories. Sometimes what those ancient stories are about is
pretty obvious. The most obvious lesson (there are several others) in the Parable
of the Good Samaritan that we are to care for people in need and not pass by on
the other side of the road is hard to miss. But what about those stories of
Jesus giving sight to the blind? Do they have a meaning for us too? If there is
one I don’t think that if there is one it is at all obvious. I mean, I have a
granddaughter with a significant vision disability that will probably
eventually make her blind. I don’t expect Jesus to come along and cure of that
visual disability. I just don’t think God works that way. So if these stories
have meaning for us it must be something other than “ask Jesus to cure physical
blindness, and Jesus will cure physical blindness.” What might that other
meaning be?
In answering that
question we begin by understanding that the power and meaning of most Bible
stories for us appear when we stop thinking of them merely as factual
statements about something the supposedly once happened to other people. Thinking
about Bible stories only as facts about other people deprives them of most of
their power and meaning. Before the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth
through the nineteenth centuries CE and the Scientific Revolution that was a
significant part of it reduced truth to fact—and if you think only facts are
true it’s because of those two revolutionary developments in the western world—while
they understood Bible stories to be factually true, they also knew the value of
reading those stories as more than mere facts. Sometimes they called that other
way of reading allegory. Today some scholars call it historical metaphor. The
theologically correct term for many Bible stories is myth, with myth understood
to mean a story that points beyond itself to God and functions to connect us
with God and God with us. Others are best understood simply as metaphors for
something other than what is actually in them. Whatever you call it, the important
thing is that Bible stories come alive for us when we get over thinking of them
as mere fact and plumb them for deeper meaning than mere factual meaning.
For me at least
the stories of Jesus giving sight to the blind come alive when we think of them
as metaphors. But a metaphor for what? For, I think, the way in which all of us
are metaphorically blind and the way Jesus can metaphorically grant us sight
too. By blindness understood as metaphor I mean the way in which we all are to
a greater or lesser extent morally and spiritually blind. We live according to
the ways of the world not the ways of God. We don’t see God’s truth. We have
scales over our eyes, scales of philosophical materialism, nationalism, the
idolatry of wealth and power, selfishness, tribalism prejudice, and so many
other false things that the world presents to us as true.[2]
Most of us have physical sight. Nearly all of us lack spiritual sight. Most of
us know the ways of the world, far too few of us know and are committed to
following the ways of God. Most of us are indeed morally and spiritually blind.
The Gospel
stories of Jesus giving sight to the blind don’t say they’re metaphors. There
are however a couple of things about them that suggest, if only weakly, that
their authors may have thought of them as metaphors. In Mark’s story of the
healing of Bartimaeus the blind beggar Bartimaeus calls Jesus “my teacher.”
Mark 10:51. The words rabbi in Hebrew and rabbouni in Aramaic, Jesus’ native
language, both mean teacher. Bartimaeus calls Jesus his rabbi, his rabbouni. It
is a rather odd thing for Bartimaeus to call him. As far as we’re told Jesus
and Bartimaeus had never met before their encounter on the road out of Jericho.
Until then, while Bartimaeus apparently had heard of Jesus he had never spent
any time with him. Yet Bartimaeus calls Jesus “my teacher.” Consider also that
all of the people to whom Jesus gives sight are men. Men studied with rabbis.
Women didn’t (except in Luke’s story of Mary and Martha, but never mind). Is
there a suggestion here that we are to consider Jesus to be a rabbi, a teacher,
who can cure our spiritual blindness the way he restores physical sight to
people in these stories? Perhaps.
In any event, if
in these stories physical blindness is a metaphor for our spiritual blindness,
for the worldly scales over our eyes, then Jesus curing people of their
physical blindness must be a metaphor for how he can take the scales from our
eyes and give us true moral and spiritual sight. How could Jesus restore our
spiritual sight? He can’t if all we focus on about him are his suffering, death,
and resurrection the way so much of Christianity does. He can if we will pay
attention to his teachings, that part of what he offers us to which we so often
pay lip service and never live into. It’s not that Jesus’ Passion isn’t
important. It is, but it’s his teachings that can really remove the scales from
our eyes if we’ll just listen to them and heed them.
What is that
teaching? It is essentially turning nearly everything in the world upside down.
It is what Jesus called the kingdom of God (which some of us today prefer to
call the realm of God because we don’t like the connotations of the word
kingdom). It is replacing violence with nonviolence, with creative, assertive,
nonviolent resistance to evil. It is putting “the least of these” first and
making those the world puts first last. It is focusing on the life of the
spirit more than on physical life in the world. It is making God our God, our
ultimate concern, and not any of the idols the world is always offering us,
idols of nation, wealth, power, and the other lies we get from the world as
though they were actually worth having and striving for. It is spending time in
prayer and sabbath, not working ourselves to death in the pursuit of money and
power. It is caring for those in need
and nonviolently deconstructing the world’s systems of oppression and
injustice. It is nonviolently replacing those systems with systems of freedom
for all and true distributive justice so that all God’s people have enough to
live on.
Folks, if we
would just take all of that teaching of Jesus to heart and live into it the
world’s scales would fall from our eyes. We would see life anew and aright. We
would walk in the true light of God rather than in the false light of the
world. We would see the world the way God wants us to see the world. We would
replace hatred with love, and doing that alone would transform the world. So
let us come to realize how morally and spiritually blind we are, how morally
and spiritually blind our world is. Let’s turn to Jesus and ask him to remove
the scales from our eyes. Then let’s join him in the sacred work of gaining
true sight and transforming the world into that reign of God of which Jesus
said so much. May it be so.
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