Seeing and Believing
Lent 4
March 19, 2023
Fr. Tim Nunez
Seeing and Believing
May my spoken word be true to God’s written word and bring us all closer to the living word, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
There are a lot of evaluations in today’s readings, of Jesse’s sons, of the man born blind and of Jesus himself. We do a lot of evaluating, and we need to recognize our limitations.
The NFL draft is coming up in a few weeks and a key part of the preparation is the what they call the “NFL Combine.” They invited 319 players to spend four days getting measured for height, weight, wingspan, and so forth. They were tested physically for speed, strength and athletic ability and skills. They were tested for intelligence and psychologically and they were interviewed.
That is just a piece of the evaluation process. These are multi-million-dollar contracts in an ultra-competitive league. Scouts watch hours of video, attend live games, do background checks, interview their college coaches, many have further workouts. It’s exhaustive and done by professionals; people who eat, sleep and breathe football.
Clearly, despite all that evaluation, scouts are often blind to what they need to see. Sometimes it is hard to see what you’re looking at.
Samuel has a similar problem. The Lord sent Samuel to Jesse’s home. The Lord told him the next king of Israel was among Jesse’s sons. Eliab passed the eye test, he looked big and strong. But the Lord said no. Abinadab ran a very fast 40, but he wasn’t the one. Shammah had a great vertical leap, but it wasn’t him either. He went through seven rounds and finally had Jesse send for David, who was keeping the sheep. It appears that Samuel was blind to David’s qualities until the Lord pointed them out. Even David’s own father was surprised.
If we carry that same contrast of the Lord’s evaluations compared to our own into our Gospel today, what do we see? This man born blind was a beggar; the sort of person most people would ignore. Some might throw him a coin or two, others might tease or abuse him. Clearly Jesus sees him, really sees him, as a beloved child of God who is mired not in his own sin or the sin of his parents, but as a victim of the accidents and risks life holds. And Jesus sees this man as an opportunity to reveal God’s power to overcome all of these challenges.
Jesus is not measuring him as people do – but as God loves him. Jesus is the light of the world and about to shine brightly.
Once the blind man is healed, the gift of sight changes everything. We don’t know how old he is, but for the first time in his whole life, he has opportunity. This could and should proceed as other healings do – with the healed person rejoicing and going on with his or her life and Jesus’ disciples making note of what they saw and learned from it.
Here, John lays out a most vexing aspect of faith. The healing is completed by verse 7, then the story flips to how people see – and don’t see – Jesus, and how people will and won’t accept even the most convincing testimony about him. Their evaluations are mired in their routines and traditions, not in the astonishing power of God.
This man is doubted. His neighbors and others who see him regularly can’t even agree if he’s the guy who was blind or just looks like him. They interrogate him. “Are you really the blind beggar?” They don’t know what to make of it and take him to the Pharisees.
The Pharisees interrogate him. They see an issue in violating their interpretation of the Sabbath. His parents get interrogated and then he gets interrogated again. The Pharisees seem kind of split, some seeing the sign and wondering about it and others hung up on their rules and doubts. Through all of that, the fact that he was born blind is affirmed. The fact that Jesus healed him is therefore affirmed. As he said, no one had ever done that before. How then, can they not see?
Often, it’s hard to see and hard to be seen. We see what we see and we cannot see what we cannot see. I think about those scouts and coaches whose careers and livelihood are built upon their ability to evaluate players and how hard that is.
Despite all of their intensive evaluation, less than 1/3rd of the players drafted wind up being average, good or great pro players. Over the last 25 years, almost 25% of first round players, the can’t-miss guys each team wanted most of all, are “busts,” including half the running backs and 40% of the quarterbacks.
And, of course, sometimes it works the other way. Tom Brady was drafted in the 6th round. The very last player drafted last year, Brock Purdy, took over the San Francisco 49ers and led them to five regular season wins, then all the way to the NFC Championship game – one step away from the Super Bowl! The last guy, a rookie, did that!
But when it comes to the eyes of faith, such evaluations don’t apply. The man born blind is a sign. Everyone is born blind. I don’t mean like kittens, that’s not the sight that matters. Jesus said, “I am the light of the world.” Recall that John began his god news by saying about Jesus, “In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1:4-5)
The point of the blind man’s healing was not merely to bless him with that extraordinary gift of physical sight, but to help people see Jesus for who he is. We need Jesus to help us see him for who he truly is, to open our eyes, to help us see the world as he sees it, to see other people as he sees them, and awaken ourselves to the potential he sees in us.
This life we live together in church is meant to help every person see Jesus better over time, get to know Jesus better over time and become better Christians in every aspect of our lives, ever more confident and showing the same sort of transformation as this blind man.
And be prepared that as our sight improves, as your blindness recedes, many people won’t see Jesus as you see Jesus. Many people won’t see you as Jesus sees you. They will expect the same old same old from you. They will doubt that you are the person they thought they knew. It’s hard to imagine the disbelief swirling around this miracle, a man born blind who sees. Don’t doubt the transformation Jesus is working in you and your family. Don’t doubt he is working it in others.
AMEN