Reading the Gospel according to John against itself
Wonderings:
I wonder: what’s your favorite underdog story?
I wonder when somebody judged you too quickly? Was not interested in the whole picture, but just reduced you to one sliver of your self?
Reflection based on these wonderings + the readings assigned for the Fourth Sunday of Lent.
1 Samuel 16:1-13; Psalm 23; John 9:1-41
and looking ahead to Bobby McFerrin’s “The 23rd Psalm (dedicated to my mother)” which we sang later in the service.
Let us speak, and listen: held in the presence of our loving, liberating, and life-giving God. Amen.
We know that blindness is not a mark of judgment. Disability does not say anything about a person's soul.
Jesus is very clear about this: Jesus says to his critics right there at the end of this Gospel passage assigned for today: "If you were blind, you would not have sin." For Jesus and for us, physical blindness is morally neutral. Ability and disability, what we imagine is the norm and outside the norm—God does not reduce us to these categories.
It is an article of our faith that every human being is made in the image of God. In all our particularity, in all our uniqueness, in all our abilities and limitations we bear the image of God. And as theologians of disability remind us, that means that a part of God is blind, as this image-bearer of God in our story today was born blind. That means that God is neurodivergent; God is on the spectrum, as many of our siblings and children are. That means that God suffers from chronic pain, as many of us do.
The stories tell that in the beginning we were made in God's image, and the story of Jesus tells us again that God is not set apart from us, but shares our incarnate life: our joy and our pleasure, our grief and our pain. The radical claim at the heart of this tradition is that God is not far off, but intimate with the texture of every tile in the vast mosaic that is human life.
And as we spoke of last week, God is not ashamed. God does not reduce us to a sliver of ourselves, but sees the whole—and holds the whole of us with the strength and tenderness of a mother holding her child. And like a mother, God is rooting for us to grow into the people we are called to be. And “even though I walk through a dark and dreary land, there is nothing that can shake me, for She has said she won’t forsake me, I’m in her hand.”
This passage from the Gospel according to John, like last week's, is another long and thorny one. This passage agitates me; it makes me angry—and there is good news in it. And I've been struggling this week to find a way to honor all that. I hope this is helpful, and I hope you’ll talk back after the service about what this passage stirred up in you.
Here are the two things we have to hold together in our minds. The Gospel according to John insists that God is LOVE, and that to follow Jesus is to love one another, to share in the self-giving love of God that seeks the flourishing of the other. And this same Gospel can get on this track of very black and white thinking, very end-of-days thinking, very us—vs—them.
In the Gospel according to John we have both this insistence on genuine love and care—that in acts of love that heal and liberate and reconcile, we shall touch the heart of God. And we also have an apocalyptic imagination in which the forces of light and darkness are at war—for those with eyes to see. And why would we—how could we—have compassion for forces of darkness?
On the one hand, Jesus acts in a way that creates dramatic new possibilities for this man born blind, and moreover insists that his dignity is not dependent on his sightedness, that his blindness is not a source of shame.
And, the Gospel does this subtle thing that makes me agitated and angry. The story is told so that this healing functions as a wedge between the community around Jesus and their opponents—here identified as the Pharisees. John’s gospel shapes this story so that the healing marks a dividing line between us, who get it, who “see,” and those who are “blind”—which in this metaphor means ignorant, corrupt, deluded, in denial.
So we hear Jesus saying that this man’s blindness is morally neutral, that disability does not say anything about a person’s soul. And at the same time John’s Gospel uses blindness as a symbol for the stupidity, naïveté, or moral failure of those who criticize Jesus and refuse to acknowledge him as the Son of God. That’s the part that makes me angry. Because that’s wrong.
Wrestling with scripture—being faithful to its wisdom—means acknowledging the ways that scripture can do harm, does wrong. It’s wrong for this man to be reduced to a symbol.
And this Gospel passage does harm by using that hurtful symbol to reinforce this black and white dualism between “us” and “them.” From the little we know about the Johannine community—the community that wrote this Gospel—they feared persecution; they felt disempowered and at the mercy of vast forces. And like many, many people through time and in our own time—people like our imaginary soup kitchen volunteer, they found solace in a story that simplified what they were experiencing into a cosmic struggle between good and evil, light and darkness, between us and them. Out of their hurt, they hurt people.
I want to repent of this part of the story we hear today—to turn away from it. To strip it of any authority it may have for us by virtue of being in the Bible. And I want to be clear that we are doing that not because we’re “woke,” or because we pick and choose the part of the Bible that we like. We turn away from it because this “us” and “them” thinking is not worthy of the good news we have learned from our reading of the Bible. That the logic of the universe is love, that God is nothing less than Incarnate Love. And to reduce people to taglines and self-serving stories is not worthy of the love made known to us in the person of Jesus. And his life and his teachings, and his embodiment of a love that is stronger than death—that is the lens through which we see all things.
As I said, I’ve had a hard time this week, finding the right angle of approach. So I want to end by switching gears. I want to spend just another few minutes with the Good News that does peek through this problematic text. And I want to move out of the headspace, the critical space of argument, and into the body. This is one of the things we practice in this space. Traveling back and forth. Listening and working through up here; listening and feeling through, in here.
This man born blind: he didn’t choose that. He didn’t choose to be born to the parents he had, or to be born in first century Palestine, under the stress and violence of Roman occupation, in a culture that had punitive ideas about what it meant to be blind.
Every one of us finds ourselves thrown into the world…into these bodies with their unique gifts and limits. Thrown into families we didn’t choose, thrown into a political economy we didn’t choose, thrown each day into situations that are not of our own making.
And often, when we are thrown into something that isn't working for us, it’s naturally to ask, who’s to blame? Is this my fault? Is this my parents’ fault? My government’s? My roommate’s?
Jesus is called into this situation to answer that question: why was this man born blind? Who’s to blame for bringing things to this moment? But Jesus doesn’t answer that question. Because he’s more interested in a different question. What is possible, starting from this moment? That’s how I understand what Jesus says, that this man was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.
Throughout holy scripture God seems to have a special affection for the underdog, people who are down and out. Underappreciated, underestimated, marginalized. A thousand years before the time of Jesus, God sends Samuel to the house of Jesse to anoint a new king over the people of Israel. And it’s not the eldest, Eliab, or the tall and handsome Abinedab. It’s this kid, David: the runt of the litter.
God seems particularly interested in the underdogs of every time and place: the people crying out for healing and liberation. And God seems particularly interested in the underdog parts of each of us: the parts of us that are dismissed out of hand, or that we hide for fear that we’ll be judged. Again: God sees these parts and God is not ashamed. God doesn’t need these parts of us to be fixed so we can be acceptable. But maybe God is rooting for the goodness and glory that might be revealed in them, and through them.
I wonder what goodness might be revealed in the underdog parts of you? I wonder what glory might shine forth from the parts of you that you’ve been taught to hide?
Amen.
