Instead of doing what we often do in judging others from our own outside perspective, Jesus takes this man by the hand and gets right in his face with a way to make a difference. You know how easy it is to coach others from the sidelines like the disciples wanted to do. We all have our opinions on how someone else ought to parent their kids, or try for a better job, or how our friend could just get a better life if she dropped her deadbeat husband or if he quit worrying about his ungrateful kid. It’s easy for us to contemplate who is the sinful party. We naturally pick up our favorite side in the same sort of debates. We see an unruly child and ask, “Is it the parents’ fault or the kid’s fault?” However, it’s not so easy to forget about who’s to blame and take the blind man’s hand. It may not cost anything to judge his life; but it costs everything to save it.

That’s what makes this story miraculous. Jesus turned the disciples’ petty debate into a means of grace. Who knows how healing can take place with a paste made of dirt and saliva? Cade has already told me this is the grossest Bible story he’s ever heard. I could probably think of a few others as competition. But as far as debates go, if Jesus had told his disciples first what he was going to do, I suspect none of them would have believed him. Today, we’d be worried about germs and cleanliness to be sure. Jesus’ disciples probably felt the same. This was pretty disgusting, and pretty intimate. We don’t swap spit with just anyone. We don’t get involved in people’s lives to that degree. We turn away from the people who sleep over the grate in the city. We shove money into their hands and shake our heads. Jesus changed his life.

I think I know what you’re thinking - - - “But I’m not Jesus. I can’t heal a blind person. I don’t have the time to get to know the vagrants and street people. It’s scary. I don’t like it. It makes me nervous.” Our inner dialogue constricts our point of view very quickly. We contract. We want to feel safe. We need some rules to help us know that we don’t heal other people with saliva. We don’t get involved with people like that. It’s only one person anyway. Can’t we do more by helping organizations and the bureaucracies set up to offer real help?

I may be wrong. Your inner voice may be totally different. But mine tends to run about the same course as the disciples. I’m curious about Jesus. I tend to ask the same kinds of wrong questions. I want to engage the rational mind and debate the “right” answers to theological arguments. But I stand amazed when Jesus bypasses all the expected answers and reaches out to the person instead. I want to follow where he goes, but sometimes I am afraid of getting so tangled up in the life of another human being. It’s easier to change people’s minds than it is to change their hearts – and sometimes even changing minds can be the work of a lifetime.

Jesus opened the blind man’s eyes. It was a radical choice. He could have answered the disciples’ question just as any good religious teacher would and still been thought of as a respected sage bestowing the wisdom of the holy. But as he said, if you want a reason as to why this man was born blind, it was so God’s works might be revealed in him. Jesus’ ministry was all about expansion. He was opening up spiritual doors that had been shut over time. He was breathing fresh air into stale spaces. He was making room for those who had been outcast. And he taught his followers to continue in the same way when he was gone. He told them that their commission was to go out into all the world, make disciples of all nations, baptize and teach.

Eckhert Tolle, author of The New Earth which is currently on Oprah’s book club list, writes about this sense of spiritual expansion and its opposite contraction from what I would consider to be a psychological point of view. He talks about them as the “outgoing and the return” and our movement between that which is form and that which is formless. He says, “Out of nowhere, so to speak, you suddenly appear in this world. Birth is followed by expansion. There is not only physical growth, but also growth of knowledge, activities, possessions, experiences. Your sphere of influence expands and life becomes increasingly complex.” He warns, however, that our ego can over-identify with these things. We can fall in love with our own self expansion, and that sort of self-important inflation is not what Jesus came here to teach. In fact that works against us in the long run to minimize our life in this world. Jesus, instead, gives the opportunity to see to someone who had been born blind. He expanded that person’s world by becoming intimately involved. He did what only God could do. That’s what made him dangerous. That’s what made his kind of expansion suspect.

The blind man became a lightning rod for attention in that particular community. Even his parents were afraid to give recognition to Jesus or to their own son’s testimony for that matter because they were concerned that the religious community would shun them for believing that Jesus was the Messiah. The religious community was much more in tune with their own self-importance. We might say now that the Pharisees were quite good at feeding their own ego. They had to be right. They had to have answers about Jesus. What if they were wrong? If they were wrong, then maybe everything they taught their students was wrong, and maybe what they learned from their parents and teachers had been wrong. That’s one of the reasons that it’s so hard for religious communities to change. We harden our positions over time without even realizing it. New information is deeply threatening when it’s about our core beliefs. The Pharisees thought they were the possessors of genuine truth. God doesn’t come to earth to heal just one person from blindness. God’s emissaries certainly don’t use unclean practices on unclean people like a blind beggar. To believe in Jesus would have shook their whole world.

The religiosity of the Pharisees had constricted their world view – choked out their very possibilities for seeing God. We can look at this story and think it could never happen to us – and yet it does. We find ways of diminishing the expansion of God’s household in the very things we think are “good for” the church. It’s true that we love our own forms and experiences and possessions to the point of identifying them with who God is. God is always using those things to be sure, but God is also far beyond and outside the reach of those things. One day, it will happen to us, our human form will die. As Tolle puts it, “And then one day, you too disappear. Your armchair is still there. But instead of you sitting in it, there is just an empty space. You went back to where you came from just a few years ago.”

The constriction of our human world that comes with death can be a frightening proposition. We fear that our arm chair will be there without us. But the truth is that we can participate in something far greater than occupying our favorite armchair. We can move beyond the worship of form and function that was the downfall of the Pharisees. We can allow Jesus to open our eyes to the Spirit of God all around us. We can be like the blind man whose possibilities were now seemingly endless. But it takes a brave person or a brave church to trade the security of religion for the unpredictability of Spirit. For in a small way, it means that we will have to embrace death. We do so by acknowledging the limitations of the human condition. Death comes to each and every one of us. We cannot stop it from happening. But what is so amazing about the dying process is that it often allows people to shed all the extra layers of what they thought was important and to shine with the light of what is most important.

Jesus knew this cycle of birth and living and death so very well. He showed compassion and concern not just for the popular or the rich or the well-behaved. He risked everything for the person who sat unnoticed on the corner. He gave his disciples eyes for seeing the light in that person through the debate about his sinfulness. He showed them that the important message was to reach through and save even one. Our efforts at evangelism should be so bold. But he also exposed the true blindness of the Pharisees. He challenged them with their own smallness – and they chose to remain constricted.

Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” Jesus’ words attacked the Pharisees right at their most vulnerable point – their ego. They simply couldn’t let go enough to see Jesus for who he was – truly God. The blind man saw far more clearly who Jesus really was for his life had been changed by this man directly. We stand as onlookers – as the disciples did, not exactly the blind man, not exactly the Pharisees. What will we envision for the church as it seeks to be the Body of Christ in a bleary eyed world today?

May God bless you with open eyes, an open mind, and an open heart for all God’s people.

Amen.