John 9

Thursday, February 21, 2013

John 9

The story of the man born blind feels like a parable of false belief.  A parable warning all religions what can go wrong.  The two worst things that a religion can do:

1) designate certain people as okay to hate - so that you can feel holy while unleashing your worst, most prejudiced, least charitable self

2) refuse to see grace because it does not come in the form you expected - believe that tradition is more important than people.

We start with the question - the man born blind, was it for his sin or his parents?  I imagine follow up questions would have been: if him, is it sins he will commit or can a baby commit grevious sins?  Would he have committed the sins if not for the born blind part?  Is that some kind of divine entrapment?  And if it was his parents, is that fair?  Also, is the punishment on them that he's a burden and a shame to them?  If so, wouldn't it be more of a shame if this point of doctrine were quite clear?

Just, you know, to remind us why that's ridiculous.  Why it is ridiculous to find it okay to judge and hate a man born blind - as if his sin caused his problem and therefore he does not deserve our pity.

As part of the omnipresent project to designate only certain people as real people.  This fear that there's not enough to go around, that you have to step on people to get what you want, and how do you live with that?  So some people are designated not "real people" and that solves the problem.  It's why it's so hard to stamp out racism, xenophobia, sexism - they are easy ways to cast out huge swaths of people in one fell swoop!

And Jesus says, "No!  That's not how it works!" and proves it by healing the blind man.

And what should have happened is that Jesus uses this to teach us how we got it wrong.

But we like our slaves and our subservient women and our evil Gentiles and our unpitied beggars.  So what's going on here can't be that we never should have been oppressing the blind man in the first place.  That cannot be it, because that would mean changing the way we live our lives.

And admitting that we haven't always been good people.  We sacrificing being good people in order to not have to admit that we don't always behave well.  Poor bargain.

So the scribes and Pharisees run around like crazy, bringing up arcane rules and scorning anyone who tries to inject the common sense and logic that they know lead to the conclusion that they have to change and stop oppressing blind people.  They first try to argue, then, when they are losing the argument because of supernatural testimony of God Himself, they dismiss the messenger and ignore the proof.

Why do we do this?  What are we so afraid of?

That we have been oppressors unjustly?  Because didn't we know, deep down, that it was always unjust?  That it was never the right thing to do?  Haven't we always suspected that if the standard of blindness for sin was the real measuring stick we might not have such good night vision ourselves?  Haven't we all wondered if this can really be right?

Or maybe we haven't, and what God is asking is just hard.  To suddenly stand back and be shown our society - the truths we've always accepted, the rules we've always lived by, as wrong and hurtful.  To think of them not as things that have always and must always be, but things that we actively choose and can therefore stop.

No, it is a hard thing that God asks of us.  That is why He gives us such signs to accompany his explanations.  But what will we say on Judgement Day if we ignore the oppression even when we have been shown it?  What will we say if we dismiss the signs for leading down a path too hard and narrow to follow?