So that ...

The readings for the Fourth Sunday in Lent can be found here.

Lent 4A

March 30, 2014

The Rev. Christopher L. Caddell

This morning’s gospel contains one of those passages that goes on my list of things that I hope Jesus didn’t say exactly like gospel writers recorded it.

“He was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”

It sounds like something we might say when we are faced with unexplainable tragedy.  To say that a man was born blind so that God could be seen in him is in the realm of “Everything happens for a reason,” or “God never gives us more than we can handle.”

Of course, the problem with these statements is that it places God in the active role of causing suffering. 

In the case of the man in this story, that suffering is life-long. 

Having been born blind, the question that the disciples asked Jesus, “Who sinned, this man or his parents,” would have been his constant companion for his entire life. 

Who is at fault?

Why did this happen?

What did I do to deserve this?

His parents would have asked these questions.  Friends and family probably went home from a visit wondering the same things.  Strangers on the street might even point and stare, and either audibly or in their minds taken a position one way or another.  Even the disciples with genuine desire to understand the nature of loss and suffering, ask Jesus to weigh in on the topic.

This man’s entire life would have revolved around that question.

Then there’s the realities of the life he lived.  It’s a life that in his context would have been little more than just an existence.  Unable to see he would not have been able to provide for himself. 

His parents would have cared for him when he was young, but even that has its limits. Whether it was by choice or not, this man would eventually find himself without that support and have to find a new way to survive, and in his world begging was the normal way to carry on.

The stares, the judgments, the hardships, the questions…

All of this, so that God’s glory might be revealed.

It might be helpful to know that those words – so that – are hotly debated in the world of biblical studies.   While some want to stick to the literal cause and effect translation of Jesus’ words, many scholars tell us there is something lost in the translation.

Rather than offering an explanation to the disciples’ question, Jesus offers them an example of how God works.

Eugene Peterson translates that part of the conversation in The Message this way,

Jesus said, “You’re asking the wrong question. You’re looking for someone to blame. There is no such cause-effect here. Look instead for what God can do.

In other words, simply because this man was born blind, God’s glory will be revealed.

Once we begin to understand it in that way this story opens up for us in ways like never before.

Here is a man that everyone assumes is beyond God’s grace, a man in whom God has abandoned.  He is a man who – either by the fault of others or by his own doing – has caused this.

And whatever conclusion you come to there, it is a man who is outside, on the fringes of society.  He is swept to the side, goes mostly unnoticed, with the preference that he would remain unseen or simply go away.

He is someone who has no voice, no power to change his circumstances, and probably has no expectation that anything will ever change.

This man and his life is the last place that you would look if your were wanting to see “God’s works revealed.”

And yet, this is where God chooses to act – in a blind man, isolated from the rest of the world, completely helpless, and without hope.

Simply because this man was born blind, God’s works are revealed in him. 

To give you a preview of this morning’s adult education class – this is the theme in which Rowan Williams will challenge us to consider.  God’s works, God’s transcendent reality is most evident in the outsider. 

God is present in and with those who do not have a voice, in and with those without power to affect their world, and in in and with those who believe they have lost any right the might have had in the world. 

Williams pushes us further.

It is in these persons, those whose place we cannot guarantee, whose welfare we cannot secure, who do not fit with the world around us – these are the persons who remind us of our own limits.

The reason that we sweep outsiders out of view is because in them we are reminded of our own poverty, our own blindness, our own inability to control our situation. 

Yet it is here that we meet God most powerfully, most evidently.

At the 10:30 service, we will sing “Just as I am.”  It is one of the Christian world’s favorite hymns.  It’s in almost every hymnal and if you find an album of Christian hymnody there is likely going to be a track that includes “Just as I am.”

It was also one of my professor’s least favorite hymns.  He always said people sing it as if the words were “Just as I am, because I’m not gonna’ change.”

That is, of course, not what the hymn says. 

Just as I am,

poor, wretched, blind;

sight, riches, healing of the mind,

yea, all I need, in thee to find,

O Lamb of God, I come, I come.

We come to God with the recognition that within us there is a bit of an outsider.  There are those places where we feel we have no voice, no power to change the circumstances of our lives, no hope for the future.  We bring all of that with us and carry it every single day.

And yet, in that is the good news.  Those are the places where God is most likely to be found.  Those are the places where transformation happens.  Those are the places where God seeks to heal.

May that be the prayer for us this day – that we come, just as we are, especially those parts of us that are blind, so that God’s works may be revealed in us.  Amen.