Spiritual Blindness

Lent 4, Year A, 2011
Refreshment Sunday, Harvest Thanksgiving, Mothering Sunday

Text: 1 Samuel 16: 1-13; Ephesians 5: 8-14; John 9: 1-12, 35-41.

Let us bow our heads in prayer –
God of all creation, heal our blindness that we may see our world and others in new ways. Amen.
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When I was a child there was a man named Bill who lived across the street from us. As children my bothers and sisters loved playing hid and seek with Bill at his house. The interesting thing about Bill was that he was blind. He always found us because he new the layout of his house intimately. However, I have to admit he wasn’t very good with mirrors, because he didn’t realise we could see him in them! Bill was also a very kind man, and as I grew older I realised Bill saw with his blindness what most of us never see. He saw with his ears and his gut, and his heart. Sometimes ‘blind’ is not really blind and ‘seeing’ is not really sight.

Today’s Gospel reading begins with Jesus correcting his disciples when they suggest that the blind man is born this way because of his or his parent sin. Jesus then tells them that he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.

I remember being at dinner party one night and being totally shocked when I heard a couple suggest that a person they knew must have done something really wrong to get cancer, attributing the cancer to a build up of bad karma in the person’s life. These people had very new age ideas. I couldn’t believe that people could actually think like this! Perhaps you’ve heard people suggest this about someone you know suffering from an ailment.

I personally think it’s helpful to make a distinction been the words ‘illness’ and ‘sickness’.

Illness is something a person is born with through no fault of their own. There body has simply been made with a chink in their DNA missing or chemically incorrect, resulting in a physical or mental problem, which can be realised at birth or sometimes later on in their life. Some forms of cancer can be like this. They can be realised at birth or they can be realised latter on in life when something triggers them. The person personally can’t do anything about it, and God has created them that way out of love. Nothing God creates is deficient or wrong. So that person is in fact complete physically in the eyes of God. It is only their own or others illusions about how the physical world is meant to be, and the incorrect belief in the physical world itself, that suggested that the person is not complete. God can use that person to reveal God’s works just like any other person or aspect of creation, as Jesus suggests to the disciples.

Sickness on the other hand is something that we make ourselves and can be realised physically or mentally. For example we all know that extreme worry can lead to anything from skin irritations to back problems to depression and even stomach ulcers and cancers. However, these same problems can also be illnesses that we are born with. So the important thing in considering the issues surrounding illness and sickness and healing is not to judge any situation because we may not know the real cause of a person’s problems.

All of us are blind in one way or another. Some of us have blindness of the body: like a crippling disease or cancer or loss of sight. And this can be caused as I’ve suggested through illness or sickness. The majority of us however are spiritually blind, which is true sickness. Spiritual blindness can lead to us not being able to love another person beyond a superficial level or not even being able to love ourselves. It can lead us to being rooted in addictions to material things like possessions or work to cover up the empty hole in our lives. Or it can lead to a total sense of darkness in our lives born out of a sense of anxiety about the past and fear about the future.

Maybe you’re living with a blindness in your life right now.

It’s a hard concept to get you mind around, but it’s interesting that everything we see physically is actually in the past. It has already happened. It takes a moment for light to travel so that we can see anything at all. In truth we never actually perceive anything physically as it is right now, this instant. So in one sense we are totally by ourselves in the physical ‘now’. The past has already happened and the future is yet to be, and we sit in the middle.

When we suffer from sickness we see the past as real and we project fears into the future based on our past beliefs, and it is out of these fears we make separation between ourselves and others and God. If we believe that the physical world holds answers to our happiness and if we believe that we are separate to God we are gravely mistaken, and our beliefs will only lead us to death. Nothing is what we think it is in our physical world and it is only when we open ourselves to these spiritual truths that we will find freedom.

Jesus says to the man who he had given sight “I came into this world for judgement so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” God’s judgement is not like human judgement. God’s judgement involves only love and truth and the removal of that which is not true. God’s truth enables those who do not see to see spiritual truth and those who see spiritual truth to become blind to the ways of the world.

It is not the physical healing of the blind man in our Gospel story that is important, although this may be important in pointing out who Jesus is, but his spiritual healing which saved him and led him to worship Jesus.

We have a choice. We can either be open to healing like the man who Jesus gave site and come to worship Jesus or be like the Pharisees who rejected and to who Jesus said “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.

What’s your spiritual blindness? Amen.