March 19, 2023
Rev. Mary Erickson
Hope Lutheran Church
Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41
Blind Faith
Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.
A famous test was conducted in 1999 called The Invisible Gorilla. Perhaps you’ve seen the video.
Audiences were told to watch a video of people passing basketballs. There are two teams: Three players wear white shirts and three players wear black shirts. The audience is told to count how many times the players in the white shirts pass the ball. They pass the ball 15 times.
But then the audience is told, “And…how many gorillas did you see?” Gorilla? What gorilla? Then the same video is shown again. This time the audience watches for a gorilla instead of counting passes.
And sure enough, a person in a gorilla suit casually walks on screen, stops in the middle of all the basketball players, beats its chest, and proceeds to walk off camera.
The test demonstrates the phenomenon of inattentional blindness. It has to do with our ability to perceive unexpected stimuli.
Inattentional blindness has nothing to do with your ability to see. It has to do with your ability to pay attention to something unexpected. If you’re totally focused on one task, it’s possible that you’ll completely fail to see the unexpected item, even if it’s right in front of you.
Sometimes we can’t see things that are plainly right in front of us. Our story from John this morning deals with a man born blind. But he’s not the only person suffering from blindness. There’s a whole lot of unintentional blindness going on.
The story begins on the streets in Jerusalem. Jesus and his disciples encounter this man who was blind since birth. Right away, the disciples suffer from a perceptual blindness. They overlook the man in all his humanity. All they can focus on is sin. In their minds, this man suffers from blindness as a punishment for sin. Someone sinned.
The disciples’ mindset was trained to think that if someone suffers from a physical malady, or if something catastrophic befalls an individual, it’s because they sinned. It’s a divine judgement. This is the premise behind the story of Job.
Job is actually a very devout man of God. But after a conversation between God and Satan, one curse after another falls on poor Job. His children and his livestock are killed in horrible accidents. Then Job’s own health takes a nosedive.
Job’s friends pay him a well-intentioned visit. But each of them reaches the same conclusion: “Job, you must have done something terribly bad. Confess to God and your lot will improve.” Job vigorously denies that he’s done anything wrong.
Jesus’ disciples draw the same conclusion as Job’s friends. Somebody must have sinned – but did the man himself sin while he was still in his mother’s womb or was it his parents who sinned?
Do we ever do this? Do we ever focus more on judgment than we do on compassion? When we see someone working through a situation, do we behold them with the eye of judgement like they had it coming? Does it blind our eye of compassion? The young woman who is pregnant outside of marriage. The neighbor who gets their third DUI. The impulsive nephew who makes bad choices. What do we see? Do we overlook the person, are we blind to the person and search only for faults? Our Lord counsels us, “Judge not, lest you be judged.”
The disciples focus on the sin, and they completely overlook the man and his suffering. Jesus points out to them that sin has absolutely nothing to do with the situation. This man’s suffering is not the result of sin. But Jesus will use it to shed light on God’s glory. Jesus sees the whole man and he sees God at work.
Jesus applies mud to the man’s eyes and gives him instructions. The man does exactly what Jesus said, and when he washes away the mud, he can see for the very first time in his life. What a marvelous thing.
And then we see more situational blindness. The man’s own neighbors don’t recognize him! Hey, is this the blind beggar? Some say yes, others say no, some say it’s a case of mistaken identity. They’ve lived next to him, they’ve passed by him in the streets for goodness knows how long, and they’re not sure who he is.
That’s because they never really saw him. He filled a role in their mind. They saw him as a caricature: “the beggar,” “the blind guy.” They had him pigeon-holed in their limited view. They didn’t know what to make of him once he no longer fit into their mold.
In a similar way, we can overlook others, too. We think we we’ve got them figured out, but really, we’ve done nothing but reduce them into a two-dimensional figure. It’s like we look at them through a tiny pinhole and only appreciate one very small aspect of who they are. We see someone as a black man or an old lady. We see a woman wearing a hijab and we think, “Muslim” with all the notions we personally carry about that. But in this limited vision we’ve become blind to their humanity. We miss their aspirations and talents, we overlook their courage and their daily challenges. Open our eyes, Jesus. Help us to see our neighbors in the fullness that you do.
Next we meet the Pharisees. The Pharisees don’t know what to do with the man. They’ve already made up their minds about Jesus. He’s a troublemaker. And now this miraculous healing on a scale never before seen challenges their notion. It doesn’t compute, it doesn’t jive with their world view. So they end up excommunicating the formerly blind man as a sinner and a heretic.
Jesus challenges their faith. The Pharisees are blind to his true reality. They look at him and they see a troublemaker. They see somebody who doesn’t perfectly follow the Sabbath rules. Here a miraculous healing has just occurred in their midst, a healing like no other, and they’re blind to Jesus.
We use the phrase “blind faith.” It means that we believe in someone despite having no concrete, physical evidence to back it up. The writer of Hebrews wrote: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” This kind of blind faith is a good thing. But the phrase Blind Faith can also describe when our faith falls short like the Pharisees, when we fail to see.
In the story of Saul’s conversion, his spiritual blindness literally knocks him down and renders him physically blind. Saul zealously chased down new Christian converts to punish them. He was so ardently opposed to the followers of the Jesus way that he pursued them in the city of Damascus.
But on the way there, a great light shone on him and knocked him to the ground. Then he heard the voice of Jesus: “Saul, Saul, why do persecute me?” When he rose to his feet, he couldn’t see. His eyes were physically blind and his heart was spiritually blind.
When he arrived in Damascus, a Christian man, Ananias visited Saul. He laid his hands upon him and said, Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” And then something like scales fell from Saul’s eyes. He could see – not just physically, but also with the eyes of faith.
The Christian faith boils down to what we believe about Jesus. Jesus tells the man whose eyes he healed, “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.”
In his book Mere Christianity, the Christian writer C. S. Lewis wrote eloquently about what we come to see in Jesus:
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic–on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg–or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse…. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
The Pharisees are unable to see Jesus for who he really is. They’re blinded by their rigid doctrines and their hostilities.
But the man who once was blind now sees. He experienced Jesus’ healing power through the miracle and now he sees Jesus as his divine savior.
The same question stands before us. As you look to Jesus, what do you see? Look at his life, look at his death on the cross and his resurrection. What do you see? What do his actions tell you? Here is one who didn’t consider equality with God in heaven as something to be clung to. He eagerly poured out himself into our humanity, to walk with us. His earthly life was filled with tremendous compassion. He comforted the afflicted, he challenged the comfortable. Then in his death on a cross, he accomplished his greatest act of healing. He broached the gap between our broken and corrupted sinful selves and the Divine source of life and goodness. And, in his miraculous resurrection, he defeated all our enemies once and for all. In him, there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God.
We walk by faith, not by sight. You might call it blind faith. Jesus Christ is the light of the world. Once we walked in darkness, but now in the Lord we are light. May we walk as children of the light.
