I have to admit that I have more than once been the victim
of misconceptions. Perhaps you have been also. Most of them aren’t especially dangerous,
but I’m grateful anyway to have them corrected. Here are a few that have been put
right for me over the years:
• There is no evidence that Vikings wore horns
on their helmets. That goes back to the costumes in an 1876 production of
Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle.
• Medieval Europeans did not believe the earth
was flat. In fact, from the time of the ancient Greek philosophers onwards,
belief in a spherical earth remained almost universal among European
intellectuals.
• George Washington did not have wooden teeth.
• Benjamin Franklin did not propose that the
wild turkey be used as the symbol for the United States instead of the bald
eagle.
• Napoleon Bonaparte was not short. Quite the
opposite: he was slightly taller than the average Frenchman of his time.
• The Twinkie does not have an infinite shelf
life; its listed shelf life is approximately forty-five days.
For the most part, misconceptions such as these are quite
harmless (unless you happened to be George Washington’s dentist). There are
more serious misconceptions out there, however, and we come across one of them
in our Gospel reading for this morning.
Jesus and his disciples were walking through the crowded,
dusty streets of Jerusalem, when they came across a blind man crouched down by
a wall, holding out his begging bowl. I suspect that the disciples were
inclined to ignore the man. Perhaps they were not even conscious of him, as
such people were commonplace, especially in Jerusalem. It was Jesus who noticed
him, and that prompted the disciples to ask a question. “Rabbi,” they asked,
“who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
Who sinned?
Jesus’ followers were living under the impression that
disease and physical impairment were somehow tied to an individual’s sin. That
notion was not something that they had come up with on their own. It was not
uncommon in their day and was even promulgated by some of the rabbis of the
time. Today such a perspective seems intolerably cruel to us—as though a
disability were not enough to suffer from, much less the guilt that it might be
the result of some sin that I might have committed even before my birth.
Yet I dare say that there are probably just as many misunderstandings
and hang-ups about sin today. Sad to say, the word “sin” has often been used by
religious people as a stick to beat others down, to exclude them, even to
dehumanize them. Yet, deep within all of us (if we are prepared to admit it) there
is a nagging sense that things are not as they should be. As someone said to me
years ago, “I don’t know about you, John, but if there is a video of my life, I
don’t ever want to see it.” How important it is that we shed ourselves of
dangerous misconceptions in something that is so pervasive, so central to our
lives—that we come to a true biblical understanding of what sin really is.
I have been tremendously helped in that respect by a book by
contemporary American theologian Neal Plantinga, and I am going to ask your
forgiveness for reading to you a rather long quotation from it. He begins by
quoting biographer Harry Wills, who wrote,
We are hostages to each other in a deadly interrelatedness.
There is no “clean slate” of nature unscribbled on by all one’s forebears… At
one time a woman of unsavory enough experience was delicately but cruelly
referred to as ‘having a past’. The doctrine of original sin states that humankind,
in exactly that sense, ‘has a past’.
Then Plantinga continues,
But, of course, our past also includes saints,
civilizations, generous laws for gleaners, hospices, relief agencies, virtuoso
peacemakers, and rural traditions of pitching in at a neighbor’s barn raising…
It includes exultant worship, fifty-year wedding anniversaries, and, on some
May mornings, a sense of life’s sweetness and of God’s goodness so sharp that
we want to cry out from the sheer promise of it. Evil rolls across the ages,
but so does good. Good has its own momentum. Corruption never wholly succeeds.
(Even blasphemers acknowledge God.) Creation is stronger than sin and grace
stronger still. Creation and grace are anvils that have worn out a lot of our
hammers.
To speak of sin … apart from the
realities of creation and grace, is to forget the resolve of God. God wants
shalom and will pay any price to get it back. Human sin is stubborn, but not as
stubborn as the grace of God and not half so persistent, not half so ready to
suffer to win its way. Moreover, to speak of sin by itself is to misunderstand
its nature: sin is only a parasite, a vandal, a spoiler. Sinful life is a
partly depressing, partly ludicrous caricature of genuine human life. To
concentrate on our rebellion, defection, and folly … is to forget that the
center of the Christian religion is not our sin but our Savior. To speak of sin
without grace is to minimize the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the fruit of the
Spirit, and the hope of shalom.
But to speak of grace without sin is surely no better. To do
this is to trivialize the cross of Jesus Christ, to skate past all the
struggling by good people down the ages to forgive, accept, and rehabilitate
sinners, including themselves, and therefore to cheapen the grace of God that
always comes to us with blood on it. What had we thought the ripping and
writhing on Golgotha were all about? To speak of grace without looking squarely
at these realities, without painfully honest acknowledgment of our own sin and
its effects, is to shrink grace to a mere embellishment of the music of
creation… In short, for the Christian church … to ignore, euphemize, or
otherwise mute the lethal reality of sin is to cut the nerve of the gospel. For
the sober truth is that without full disclosure on sin, the gospel of grace
becomes impertinent, unnecessary, and finally uninteresting.[1]
… that God’s works might be revealed in him
How important it is that we not ignore sin or trivialize it,
and at the same time not be obsessed by it. The disciples’ were mistaken in
connecting the man’s blindness with any sin. Jesus, on the other hand, was able
to look upon both the man and his disability in an entirely different manner.
Read literally from the Greek, his words in verse 3 were, “Neither this man
sinned nor his parents, but that the works of God might be revealed in him.”
What did Jesus mean by this? I don’t believe that Jesus said
what he did merely in anticipation of the miracle that he was about to perform.
I believe that he was seeking to share a much deeper truth with his disciples. That
was that this man, even in his blindness, crouched by the wall and covered in
the dust from people’s sandals, either ignored or pitied by passers-by, was
made in the image and likeness of God. Jesus was able to see in him a nobility
that was invisible to the disciples—and that was a characteristic of his
ministry. As we saw last week, he spoke with respect to a Samaritan woman. He
welcomed children into his presence when his disciples regarded them as nothing
but a nuisance. He honored the selfless act of a prostitute. He reached out and
touched a leper who may not have felt the warmth of human contact for years. He
invited himself into the home of a corrupt and hated tax collector.
The man who sat by the side of the road and begged was
blind. Yet Jesus’ disciples suffered from another form of blindness in their
inability to perceive the image of God in him. One of the challenges to me in
this passage is to develop our senses
so that we can see people as Jesus did, as men and women and children who bear
the image of God and in whom God’s beauty dwells. Again and again I have found
myself being rebuked in this area—by blind people who were able to see in ways
that I could never imagine, developmentally disabled people who were able to respond
to the love of God in ways that were beautifully uncomplicated yet more
profound than anything I can express, physically handicapped people who showed
a strength of character and determination that staggers me.
All through his
ministry the apostle Paul suffered from a disability. He called it his “thorn
in the flesh” and I can only imagine that it was the cause of much pain and
sorrow for him. “Three times I appealed to the Lord about this …,”
he wrote to his friends in Corinth, “but he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient
for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.’ So, I will boast all the more
gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me… For whenever
I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:8-10).
Blindness and sight
We would have missed the point of this passage if we left it
without observing one more lesson, however. It has to do with blindness and
sight. We have seen already the physical blindness of the man who sat by the
road. And I have alluded to the blindness of the disciples who were unable to
see God’s image in him. Yet as the passage continues we are exposed to a deeper
and more pernicious blindness: the blindness of those who cannot see and yet
willfully insist that they do.
It is such a monstrous irony that the very people who should
have been praising God for the miracle that had been done in the blind man’s
life were the ones who spoke with scorn and condemnation. What was it that
motivated them to treat the newly healed man with such contempt? Were they
jealous that they could not perform such acts of healing—or perhaps that they
were not the beneficiaries of them? I believe that ultimately it was an
insistence on their own rightness. This is the root of the condemnation that
the risen, glorified Christ levels against the church in Laodicea in the book
of Revelation:
You say, ‘I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing.’
You do not realize that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.
Therefore I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire so that you may be
rich; and white robes to clothe you and to keep the shame of your nakedness
from being seen; and salve to anoint your eyes so that you may see. I reprove
and discipline those whom I love. Be earnest, therefore, and repent.
The man born blind had spent all his life depending on
others. He depended on his parents to house and feed him. He depended on friends
to lead him to and from his begging place on the street. He depended on passers-by
to toss their spare change into his bowl. He was painfully aware of his
incompleteness, of his need for healing; and when Jesus offered him the
opportunity to be made whole, he leapt at the chance.
All of which brings us back to where we began. If we are to
receive the healing that Jesus offers, it will not come by ignoring our sins or
hiding them, or pretending that they don’t exist or don’t matter. It will come
as we acknowledge them, as we willingly receive the forgiveness, cleansing and
restoration that Jesus holds out to you and to me from the cross.
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