Blind Driveways
Sermon
The Lord Is Risen! He Is Risen Indeed! He Really Is!
Gospel Sermons For Lent/Easter
King George VI, addressing his subjects at the beginning of a new year, said in his annual message: "I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, 'Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.' And he replied: 'Go out into the darkness, and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light, and safer than a known way.' "
The Gospel story is about a man who all his life had tread in physical darkness -- but put his hand into the hand of God and could see. And it is about Pharisees -- rejoicing people -- who had their sight -- who, we soon find out, were treading in spiritual darkness -- and pulled away from the hand of God.
We start out in sympathy for the physically blind man -- and the question that the disciples raised. Why is he so handicapped? What has been done to deserve such a fate? But we end up with sympathy for the spiritually blind Pharisees -- and maybe, still the question: Why? Why would those so learned, who could quote the Scripture word for word -- why would those be so blind?
The story about the blind man is not primarily a miracle story about healing ... or at least the restoration of sight to the blind man is the least of the miracles. It's really a story about spiritual sight -- about vision -- and how it grows and nurtures us -- or how it eludes us. The storyteller intends to remind us that it isn't what we see physically that makes life good or bad. With minor adjustments for bifocals we all see the same things. Even Helen Keller, blind from birth like the man in the story, "saw" the same things we see -- with different senses, but just as clearly. Perhaps more clearly. Because it's a matter of what we see in what we see that dictates how we experience life. The blind man saw Jesus. The Pharisees saw Jesus. One saw a healer, a savior, a friend. The other saw a Sabbath breaker, a sinner, a threat to be dealt with. How they responded to Jesus depended on what they saw in Jesus.
Herman Hollerith saw something in a thing that everyone else had seen that has determined the life direction of our whole society. Hollerith was an engineer who helped compile the 1880 United States census. (Market Street Church was already fifty years young!) It took seven years of tedious clerical work to gather the data and tabulate the information. Hollerith was looking for a better way. One day, while riding on a train, he noticed the conductor punching holes in a railway ticket to record the bearer's destination and the fare. On many trains they still do it the same way.
But do we see what Hollerith saw? Using what he saw, Hollerith designed a punch to be used by census collectors to record a person's vital statistics by means of holes in a card. The cards were then read with an electromagnet. Because of this punch card invention, the census in 1890 took half as long and cost $5 million less. Because of what Herman Hollerith saw in what everybody else saw -- you and I can now see the possibilities of life in ways he never imagined, as we turn our electron microscopes to see the world within and our shuttle-borne telescopes to see the worlds beyond. What Herman Hollerith saw on the train became your desktop computer.
Sometimes there is a block to our seeing. Certainly we would say the Pharisees had one. A while back, I was driving along a road, trying to stay slow enough to avoid the speedtrap I knew was there. Then I rounded a curve and saw a sign I'd seen hundreds of times before. It said: "Blind driveways." You see them often on curvy roads. On the Ohio driver's test they expect you to know the signs. "Blind Driveways" doesn't mean that the driveway is blind, but that the circumstances of the road make you or me blind to the driveway. It says pay attention. There's something there you don't see; there is a block to your seeing. The Pharisees said to Jesus: "Surely we are not blind!" We know the way. Jesus said to them: "If only you were blind, then you would not be guilty of sin. But now that you claim to see, your sin remains." Pay attention! The warnings are up. It's a blind curve. There's something unexpected going on here. You think you see. You don't see!
Sometimes in life we need to take a new look at things -- at signs we've seen before -- and God may use our circumstance to make that happen. That's what it means when it says, "The man was blind so God's work might be revealed." His circumstance, blindness, was to be turned in God's will into his circumstance of spiritual as well as physical sight. His perspective as well as his physical circumstance was to change.
I like the story of Charles Eliot, the President Emeritus of Harvard University, who used to summer in Northeast Harbor, Maine. Kendrick Strong says that one day, in his ninetieth year, Charles Eliot "made his way down the road from his cottage to the cottage of his neighbors, the Peabodys. Mrs. Peabody greeted him and took him into the living room. After a brief chat, Eliot asked if he might hold her new baby. Mystified, she lifted her infant son from his crib and laid him in Eliot's arms. Eliot held the baby quietly for a few minutes. Then, with a little gesture of thanks, he returned him to his mother, explaining, 'I have been looking at the end of life for so long that I wanted to look for a few moments at its beginning.' " I've been looking at too many signs saying "blind driveways," I want to see around the curve beyond the signs.
Charles Eliot could do nothing to change the circumstance of old age, but he could do a lot about his perspective on life -- about how he chose to see his place in life, and the signs along the road. Jesus came that you and I might see beyond the blind driveways and the curves of life.
There is a danger in seeing. It's that we think our insight (the thing we see) is the insight (the thing everyone should see). We're all guilty of this. We settle on our laurels, on some key insight, about God and our neighbor, as though we had unlocked all of God's truth for us, and everybody else. But Elbert Hubbard said: "The recipe for perpetual ignorance is be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge." To assume that you have seen all that God desires to show you. That you can ignore the "blind driveway signs." But the story suggests that no matter how much you have truly seen, the moment you make the assumption you've seen it all, you become profoundly blind.
John sets up his story in two scenarios to make the point: The blind man and the Pharisees are depicted as "passing in the night" -- one to the light -- the other to greater darkness. The blind man by degrees moves from one level of sight and insight to another: he receives physical sight. He acknowledges that his benefactor was the man they call Jesus. He confesses Jesus as a prophet. He defends Jesus before the Pharisees,saying, "He is of God." And then he acknowledges Jesus as "The Son of Man" and worships him.
The Pharisees on the other hand move from one level of blindness to another: at first they accept the miracle of healing but debate the propriety of healing on the Sabbath. Then they doubt the miracle and interrogate the man's parents, seeking to prove he was never blind. Then they seek to trap him in cross examination by having him repeat the details of the story. Finally, those judging the miracle find themselves judged by Jesus himself. As Raymond Brown puts it: "Three times the former blind man, who is truly gaining knowledge, confesses his ignorance. Three times, the Pharisees, who are really plunging deeper into abysmal ignorance of Jesus, make confident statements about what they know."1 About what they see!
The story is a parable of life into which Jesus came, saying, "I came for judgment, that those who do not see may be able to see, and those who do see may become blind." "I came to give sight to the blind, and to make their blindness apparent to those who think they see!" The man did not claim to have seen God. Only one sent from God. The Pharisees threw him out. When Jesus heard about his expulsion, he found him and said, "Do you believe in the Son of Man?" He answered, "Who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?" Jesus said: "You have seen him."
____________
1. Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John I-XII (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1966), p. 337.
The Gospel story is about a man who all his life had tread in physical darkness -- but put his hand into the hand of God and could see. And it is about Pharisees -- rejoicing people -- who had their sight -- who, we soon find out, were treading in spiritual darkness -- and pulled away from the hand of God.
We start out in sympathy for the physically blind man -- and the question that the disciples raised. Why is he so handicapped? What has been done to deserve such a fate? But we end up with sympathy for the spiritually blind Pharisees -- and maybe, still the question: Why? Why would those so learned, who could quote the Scripture word for word -- why would those be so blind?
The story about the blind man is not primarily a miracle story about healing ... or at least the restoration of sight to the blind man is the least of the miracles. It's really a story about spiritual sight -- about vision -- and how it grows and nurtures us -- or how it eludes us. The storyteller intends to remind us that it isn't what we see physically that makes life good or bad. With minor adjustments for bifocals we all see the same things. Even Helen Keller, blind from birth like the man in the story, "saw" the same things we see -- with different senses, but just as clearly. Perhaps more clearly. Because it's a matter of what we see in what we see that dictates how we experience life. The blind man saw Jesus. The Pharisees saw Jesus. One saw a healer, a savior, a friend. The other saw a Sabbath breaker, a sinner, a threat to be dealt with. How they responded to Jesus depended on what they saw in Jesus.
Herman Hollerith saw something in a thing that everyone else had seen that has determined the life direction of our whole society. Hollerith was an engineer who helped compile the 1880 United States census. (Market Street Church was already fifty years young!) It took seven years of tedious clerical work to gather the data and tabulate the information. Hollerith was looking for a better way. One day, while riding on a train, he noticed the conductor punching holes in a railway ticket to record the bearer's destination and the fare. On many trains they still do it the same way.
But do we see what Hollerith saw? Using what he saw, Hollerith designed a punch to be used by census collectors to record a person's vital statistics by means of holes in a card. The cards were then read with an electromagnet. Because of this punch card invention, the census in 1890 took half as long and cost $5 million less. Because of what Herman Hollerith saw in what everybody else saw -- you and I can now see the possibilities of life in ways he never imagined, as we turn our electron microscopes to see the world within and our shuttle-borne telescopes to see the worlds beyond. What Herman Hollerith saw on the train became your desktop computer.
Sometimes there is a block to our seeing. Certainly we would say the Pharisees had one. A while back, I was driving along a road, trying to stay slow enough to avoid the speedtrap I knew was there. Then I rounded a curve and saw a sign I'd seen hundreds of times before. It said: "Blind driveways." You see them often on curvy roads. On the Ohio driver's test they expect you to know the signs. "Blind Driveways" doesn't mean that the driveway is blind, but that the circumstances of the road make you or me blind to the driveway. It says pay attention. There's something there you don't see; there is a block to your seeing. The Pharisees said to Jesus: "Surely we are not blind!" We know the way. Jesus said to them: "If only you were blind, then you would not be guilty of sin. But now that you claim to see, your sin remains." Pay attention! The warnings are up. It's a blind curve. There's something unexpected going on here. You think you see. You don't see!
Sometimes in life we need to take a new look at things -- at signs we've seen before -- and God may use our circumstance to make that happen. That's what it means when it says, "The man was blind so God's work might be revealed." His circumstance, blindness, was to be turned in God's will into his circumstance of spiritual as well as physical sight. His perspective as well as his physical circumstance was to change.
I like the story of Charles Eliot, the President Emeritus of Harvard University, who used to summer in Northeast Harbor, Maine. Kendrick Strong says that one day, in his ninetieth year, Charles Eliot "made his way down the road from his cottage to the cottage of his neighbors, the Peabodys. Mrs. Peabody greeted him and took him into the living room. After a brief chat, Eliot asked if he might hold her new baby. Mystified, she lifted her infant son from his crib and laid him in Eliot's arms. Eliot held the baby quietly for a few minutes. Then, with a little gesture of thanks, he returned him to his mother, explaining, 'I have been looking at the end of life for so long that I wanted to look for a few moments at its beginning.' " I've been looking at too many signs saying "blind driveways," I want to see around the curve beyond the signs.
Charles Eliot could do nothing to change the circumstance of old age, but he could do a lot about his perspective on life -- about how he chose to see his place in life, and the signs along the road. Jesus came that you and I might see beyond the blind driveways and the curves of life.
There is a danger in seeing. It's that we think our insight (the thing we see) is the insight (the thing everyone should see). We're all guilty of this. We settle on our laurels, on some key insight, about God and our neighbor, as though we had unlocked all of God's truth for us, and everybody else. But Elbert Hubbard said: "The recipe for perpetual ignorance is be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge." To assume that you have seen all that God desires to show you. That you can ignore the "blind driveway signs." But the story suggests that no matter how much you have truly seen, the moment you make the assumption you've seen it all, you become profoundly blind.
John sets up his story in two scenarios to make the point: The blind man and the Pharisees are depicted as "passing in the night" -- one to the light -- the other to greater darkness. The blind man by degrees moves from one level of sight and insight to another: he receives physical sight. He acknowledges that his benefactor was the man they call Jesus. He confesses Jesus as a prophet. He defends Jesus before the Pharisees,saying, "He is of God." And then he acknowledges Jesus as "The Son of Man" and worships him.
The Pharisees on the other hand move from one level of blindness to another: at first they accept the miracle of healing but debate the propriety of healing on the Sabbath. Then they doubt the miracle and interrogate the man's parents, seeking to prove he was never blind. Then they seek to trap him in cross examination by having him repeat the details of the story. Finally, those judging the miracle find themselves judged by Jesus himself. As Raymond Brown puts it: "Three times the former blind man, who is truly gaining knowledge, confesses his ignorance. Three times, the Pharisees, who are really plunging deeper into abysmal ignorance of Jesus, make confident statements about what they know."1 About what they see!
The story is a parable of life into which Jesus came, saying, "I came for judgment, that those who do not see may be able to see, and those who do see may become blind." "I came to give sight to the blind, and to make their blindness apparent to those who think they see!" The man did not claim to have seen God. Only one sent from God. The Pharisees threw him out. When Jesus heard about his expulsion, he found him and said, "Do you believe in the Son of Man?" He answered, "Who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?" Jesus said: "You have seen him."
____________
1. Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John I-XII (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1966), p. 337.
