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The Fourth Sunday in Lent, 2005
March 6, 2005
Christ Church, Covington
“The Lord does not see as mortals see” (1 Sam. 16:7).
The eyes pick up light reflected off the objects around us, sending the
data to our brains where it is interpreted and slotted into a framework
that helps us operate. It’s a complex process, apparently the result of
evolution and adaptation; but still, difficult to believe it’s one that
happens completely by chance. Our eyes work, more or less successfully,
equipping us with a powerful sense that helps us make sense of the world.
The sense of sight is also a powerful metaphor for some other things.
“Vision”, as in the first George Bush’s “the vision thing”, from the
campaign trail of far-off 1988: a concept he tended to dismiss but which
his son has very successfully embraced. “Vision”, in this sense, is a
powerful and compelling description of the world and our situation in it.
“Vision” requires an interpretation of the world, just as the sense of
sight does, and helps us orient ourselves. Where would we be without it?
Yet it’s also necessary to say that vision is not always an unmitigated
good, since some visions are terribly constricting or even downright
dangerous.
Then there is the metaphor of blindness. “He just can’t see it”: a
reference not to lack of physical sight, but to moral blindness. Imagine
if human beings had an organ, analogous to our eyes, that provided moral
sight, an “anti-nonsense” faculty, if you will. Imagine what that world
would be like! In David Lindsay’s off-beat novel of 1920, Voyage to
Arcturus, the writer describes a race of people having sense organs that
allow them to feel what others feel, and to hear each other’s thoughts.
Strange; but even stranger would be an organ of moral sense, that allowed
us to pick up on the reflection of character from those around us, as well
as to perceive our own interior motivation. For this moral sense, at the
very least, would have to be directed within.
You might say that this is the real point of our Gospel reading: not that
some of us are born blind, physically blind, but that the human race as a
whole is morally impaired. We don’t have an organ of moral sight, and the
resources we do have for distinguishing good from evil seem to be
operating at low ebb, or at least episodically. Notice how the Gospel
story has a moral frame from the start: “Who sinned, this man or his
parents?” (Jo. 9:2). But the question needs to be turned around. It’s not
that the man or his parents sinned, and as a result he was born blind (a
question Jesus dismisses); but rather that we are all born blind, our
moral sense impaired, and sin is the result of our groping around in the
darkness.
Even Samuel the judge, in our first reading, has a hard time seeing. Each
of Jesse’s sons are brought before him in succession, and each one looks
to him like the one chosen to be the king, but in fact God does not see as
we see, and it is David, the youngest and the least likely, who is chosen.
God looks on the heart, that is, with a discerning moral vision that we
often lack.
We need healing (like the man in the story), to recover our moral sense,
and Jesus is the source. Again, this is part of the Lenten project. So how
to get there? It’s a curious part of this story that Jesus only asks the
man to believe after he’s been healed. What is required of him before is
something even simpler: obedience. “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam (which
means Sent)” (Jo. 9:7). We need to move forward even though we cannot see.
“Obedience” has as its origin the notion of “listening to each other”. So
that’s what we need to do: to listen to the voice of Jesus in Scripture
and in our own prayer, as well as to the voice of Jesus that we hear in
the voices of each other in the Church. I know I’ve mixed my metaphors
here, in moving from “seeing” to “listening”, but that’s today’s
prescription. Our moral vision needs direction, and that requires us to
hear each other; it requires listening as well as looking.
The Rev’d John Bauerschmidt is Rector of Christ Church, Covington.
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