It may make you feel better to know that even the great Saint Augustine thought this gospel reading a bit long.

“The day will not be long enough,” he said, “if we should try to explicate the whole of the lengthy reading just heard.” And he continued to his congregation that they should not expect him to comment on every mystery and detail hidden in the text, “for it will be too tedious,” he admitted, “to tarry on every point.”[1] Now I agree with the good doctor of the Church here. These readings from John’s gospel—for the third, fourth, and fifth Sundays of Lent—have been read every year in the Catholic Church since at least the time of Leo the Great in the fifth century—likely even earlier—and it evokes a time before television and the shortened attention spans of modern people.[2] And I am also reminded (more annoyed than reminded actually) of the wise words of Polonius, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, that “brevity is the soul wit.”[3] Now I know that by Shakespearian standards I am rather witless, but today at least I will do my best to get to the point, and quickly.

We hear that Jesus healed a man, gave him sight. And what separates this particular healing from your garden variety miracle is that the man was born blind—that is, he had never been able to see. It was “unheard of” the man said, when interrogated by the Pharisees, that anyone like him had ever been healed in such a manner.[4] But of course John means by this story not to tell us much of anything about the healed man himself (we don’t even know his name), but rather more about Jesus. You see, John deliberately designates certain miracles “signs,” and this is one of them. What is meant by calling this miracle a “sign” is that it is an event which tells us something significant about who Jesus is. That is, this story is meant to be a revelation.

You see, just before spitting on the ground and anointing the man’s eyes, Jesus said, “I am the light of the world.”[5] He had said this earlier during the Feast of the Tabernacles: “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life,” he said.[6] Now the significance of these words may be lost on many of us today. The best we can do with sayings like these nowadays it seems is sentimentalize them like some trite Facebook post. But earlier readers would’ve caught the full force of what Jesus was saying. They would’ve heard the deep echoes of sacred Hebrew history. When Jesus called himself the light of the world, they may have thought of the light of the fire of God leading the Israelites through the desert on their way to the Promised Land.[7] They may have thought of Zechariah’s prophecy of the final battle of history when the Messiah was to stand upon the Mount of Olives, and when—as the prophet foretold—there would be “one continuous day,” no more darkness, no more night.[8] It is of deep biblical significance that Jesus would dare to call himself the light of the world—that the man received sight is but the effect of this deeper truth about Jesus which John wants us to understand. It is in substance a divine claim. Church fathers and even pagan philosophers, Egyptian and Persian idolaters of the Sun, they all would have understood what Jesus was claiming for himself—that he is the great “I AM,” or as we say in the Creed, “God from God, Light from Light.”[9]

But what are we supposed to do with this theological truth besides simply believe it and be saved? What else can we learn besides this divine claim? Well, this is where our formerly-blind brother teaches us, especially when we compare him to the Pharisees in this story. A simple beggar, likely uneducated, he quite plainly outsmarts and gets the better of all those Pharisees who think they’ve got it all figured out, who think they know better. The old beggar doesn’t know much, but he does know what Jesus did to him. “One thing I do know,” he said, “is that I was blind and now I see.”[10] The Pharisees, however, with all their credentialed knowledge, are less impressed—more bothered by the fact that Jesus “does not keep the sabbath.” For them the logic is clear: Jesus breaks the Sabbath, therefore, he is a sinner. Thus, according to the canons of their own thought, their question makes all the sense in the world: “How can a sinful man do such signs?”[11] “This is what is so amazing, that you do not know,” the suddenly clear-sighted beggar says, growing confident in the face of such elite ignorance.[12] As the blind man now can see, unburdened by the fog of confident prejudice, so the Pharisees are shown to be the ones who are really blind. Such is the tragedy and warning of this story. Since you say, “‘We see,’” Jesus said, “your sin remains.”[13] As Augustine said, “they who think they see…remain in their blindness.”[14] This is the moral of the story, the timely word for today—at least for those of us wise enough to admit our foolishness, clear-sighted enough to admit our blindness.

Hopefully you won’t argue with me when I suggest that we live in a conflicted world, a world seemingly full of brash and over-confident ideologues, of either the “left” or the “right,” of intellectual cartoon characters. That the world has always had her fair share of such people is true of course, but today it seems our great technology has but turned up the volume on all the fools of the world—on people who think they know, but who really don’t. That is, the blindness we see in the Pharisees, we should see in ourselves. Twain called this “Corn-Pone” thinking, saying, “as a rule we do not think, we only imitate.” He said,

Men think they think upon the great political questions, and they do; but they think with their party, not independently; they read its literature, but not that of the other side; they arrive at convictions, but they are drawn from a partial view of the matter in hand and are of no particular value. They swarm with their party, they feel with their party, they are happy in their party’s approval; and where the party leads they will follow, whether for right and honor, or through blood and dirt and a mush of mutilated morals.[15]

There is real blindness that can come to those who think they’ve got it all figured out. And this can happen to religious people as easily as it can happen to non-religious people. It is a human danger. I’ve told stories before of the not-uncommon conversation I sometimes have at family gatherings. As the professional Christian in the family, sometimes a person will start a conversation with me about the Church (usually when I’m trying to watch football), and the conversation invariably takes this sort of turn: “You know, if the Church would simply allow this or that.” Or, “if only the Church could wake up to this or that.” It’s here that I give my normal considered response which is, “Yep.” But one day, I’d like to say, “You know, you’re right, the Catholic Church—which has given the world the greatest minds of our civilization in science, philosophy, theology—she’s so misguided. If only she would listen to you; only if she had your wisdom, the Church would be so much better.” You see the blindness here? Now I know religious people, even Catholics, can be obnoxious too. We Catholics can sometimes be so arrogant about the truth of our faith, that we have a hard time hearing genuine prophets, those voices which come to us from outside our Church, sent by God himself. Sometimes we can be as blind as anybody. Of course, the allegedly sophisticated and academic can be blind too, accepting like a herd what the philosopher Charles Taylor called the “false aura of the obvious.”[16] Even those committed to the more rational disciplines—especially those who boast about their rationalism—even they suffer from a sort of blindness. Even science suffers, so the great literary critic, Terry Eagleton, says rather contentiously. Even these great rational scientific disciplines, he says, have their “high priests, sacred cows, revered scriptures, ideological exclusions and rituals for suppressing dissent.”[17] What I’m saying is this: whoever we are, whatever we do, we all might just be a little blind. “Corn-Pone” thinking, as Twain called it—it’s cheap and easy, but it’s mostly just hot air and quite frankly unworthy of people who value truth and truthfulness—especially those whose Lord once called himself “Truth.”[18]

But what does Christian truthfulness look like then? Now we shouldn’t take up the sort of false postmodern posture of disbelieving everything—a position which is at the end of the day as dishonest as it is pathetic. Rather, we should learn from our formerly-blind brother. Remember, he didn’t know much, but he knew what Jesus did to him. And it is that, our experience of Jesus himself, which is the beginning of knowledge and truthfulness. Paul put it perfectly when he said, “I resolved to know nothing…except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.”[19] Now I’m not talking about fundamentalism or relativism, nor am I saying we should renounce tradition or collected wisdom. What’s I’m saying is that we should have a little epistemic humility (to put it pretentiously). That is, we should double-check our confidence, return to the simple gift of knowing Jesus personally—not just culturally, and not just intellectually. Now what this looks like in our daily lives is this: when we find ourselves in conflict with others, we should mostly just listen. And when we do speak, we should do our best to speak with the humble integrity of actual knowledge—no party lines, no memes, no herd thinking. And believe it or not, the Catholic Church is not worried about you thinking for yourself, in fact she prefers it. Because you see, she has a supernatural (some would say overly idealistic) trust that you, on your own, will come to truth, because the truth will come to you—whenever we finally let go of our blindness. It’s amazing, really, the freedom there is in truth. It is beautiful, unguarded truth. Of course, I can barely see it myself, but I want to see it, and I want to see it with you. So, hold out your hand to me, my beautifully blind friends, let us stagger, stumble and fall together. Because we will see someday as we are seen. That’s the mystery.

Now I am witless and long-winded, so please forgive me. And let me make just one last plea. Let us offer our blindness together to him. And may we see together with him that love is not just a word but actual light—the light of the world. All of this is more beautiful than we can know. Amen.

[1] Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 44.1

[2] Paul F. Bradshaw and Maxwell E. Johnson, The Origins of Feasts, Fasts and Seasons in Early Christianity, 93

[3] William Shakespeare, Hamlet II.II

[4] John 9:32

[5] John 9:5

[6] John 8:12

[7] Exodus 13:21

[8] Zechariah 13:7

[9] The Nicene Creed

[10] John 9:25

[11] John 9:16

[12] John 9:30

[13] John 9:41

[14] Tractates on the Gospel of John 44.17.1

[15] Mark Twain, “Corn-Pone Opinions,” Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches, 284-286

[16] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 551

[17] Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution, 133

[18] John 14:6

[19] 1 Corinthians 2:2

© 2020 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield