There is a cliché in preaching – when you are giving a sermon you should have the Bible in one hand and the New York Times in the other. The point: the word of God helps us to understand current events and current events provide the place where the word of God comes alive. Our task this Sunday, therefore, should be to see how the story of the man born blind in St. John’s gospel helps us to understand how God is at work in the time of pandemic. The account begins with the disciples asking Jesus: “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” The disciples betray the very human tendency to try to make sense out of things that are senseless. There is no reason why this person should suffer and the other one not. The random nature of illness makes us feel vulnerable so we seek to fit things into a pattern. You see this tendency at work during the current crisis when someone asserts, “God is punishing the United States for our sins.” Or perhaps, “This is a sign of the end times.” Actually, this is a predictable and predicted event. Last year Smithsonian Magazine had a cover story “The coming pandemic.” The scientists knew this was coming as part of the nature of bugs and animals and humans all mixing together. It might be natural but it still feels like things are out of control. So the Bible teaches us how to deal with our anxiety. Jesus rejects the disciples attempt to find some easy explanation for the problem. “Neither the man nor his parents sinned,” Jesus said. He goes on to let the disciples know, to let us know, that no matter what is happening, even things that throw us for a loop, Jesus is the light of the world and that we can trust that no matter how things seem to be going, God can make a way out of no way.
The Gospel story suggests that what lies beneath this anxiety is fear. The fear in this instance expresses itself not in flight but in fight. The Pharisees become aggressive in dealing with a situation they don’t understand. “We know that this man, this Jesus, is not from God, is a sinner.” When you are feeling insecure, attack. This is, of course, something we see in the contemporary scene not only during the pandemic but in political life in general. The response of the man who was cured of blindness to the fear, to this attack is instructive. “I don’t know about that. What I do know is that I was blind and now I see.” The cured man blunts the attack, responds to the fear behind it, by noticing the kindness that was extended to him. This suggests that when fear is all around us the best response is kindness, to reach out to those who are hurting.
The gospel story shows anxiety – and then fear underneath the anxiety. As a result of anxiety and fear you have distance and division. Even the blind man and his parents are divided, are alienated from one another as they try to deal with the situation. “We know he is our son but that’s all we know. Don’t ask us, ask him.” Eventually, the gospel reports the cured blind man is thrown out of society. Anxiety and fear drive people apart. In our situation, in the pandemic it is not that we are being driven apart, we are being kept apart. The anxiety and fear in our situation require “social distancing.” But in the gospel Jesus responds to the separation, division, distancing by making a connection. Pope Francis has suggested that one way we might respond to this experience of alienation with “small concrete gestures expressing closeness to those near to us. We must rediscover the concreteness of little things, small gestures of attention. We must understand that in small things lies our treasure: a caress for our grandparents, a kiss for our children, for the people we love. If we live these days like this, they won’t be wasted.” Connecting in a more profound way with those we love might be a side blessing of these strange days.
So what is the bottom line? How does the story of the cure of the man born blind illuminate our current plight? The Gospel of John reports the scene as movement from sight to insight. The man can’t see, then he gains his sight, but he doesn’t know much about Jesus, until challenged when he calls him “a prophet,” and says that he is “a man from God.” When he eventually meets Jesus as a sighted individual he has the insight to recognize him as “the Son of Man,” as the light of the world. We are invited to undergo a similar transformation from sight to insight. We can see what is going on. We have the sight to see the anxiety, the fear, the alienation. The gospel invites us to have the insight to find God in the midst of it all. We need the insight to recognize the big picture that God who figured out how to twirl the Milky Way and generated a mother’s love can help us through a bothersome virus. We need the insight to trust that the care and kindness we extend to one another will overcome the fear and anxiety which plague us. We need the insight to understand that the small, concrete gestures of love in a family are in fact the building blocks of a new way of being in the world. As the song in Les Miz put it: to love another person is to see the face of God.
One final thought. For all of you old Latins out there, this is Laetare Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Lent when we are called to rejoice. Yes, these are stressful times. Yes, we miss each other. Yes, disease threatens us. But we still can rejoice. Rejoice that God is with us in our trials. Rejoice that the relationships that make up our community are real and vital. Rejoice that in the providence of God this too will pass and that all will be well, all manner of things will be well.
