A cure for blindness: Seeing as God sees

In this Sunday’s reading from the first book of Samuel, the God has summoned the prophet Samuel to anoint one of Jesse’s sons to lead Israel. While Samuel immediately is drawn to Eliab because of his appealing appearance and lofty stature, God dissuades the prophet from that candidate. Instead, God directs Samuel to choose David, the son not even offered as a candidate and who is still out shepherding the family’s sheep. This story makes clear that God sees differently than we humans tend to see. God’s gaze looks past what we often define as “appealing” outward appearances of dress, ethnicity, race, or physical features. Instead, God looks into our hearts.  

Similarly, the second reading from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians takes up the matter of vision, but with a different emphasis. Using the familiar metaphor of light and how it enables us to see, Paul urges both that community and us to be children of light, especially in ways that illuminate goodness, righteousness, and truth, by our works in places where darkness dominates. Such light has the capacity to counter the darkness of mere outward appearances, a darkness that leads to prejudice, exclusionism, isolationism, and other forms of human alienation. Such darkness causes a kind of blindness that results in the failure to see one another as God sees us.  

Indeed, a connection does exist between such sinful forms of human alienation and blindness, but not as the Pharisees in John’s Gospel define it. This Sunday, we hear the familiar story of the healing of a man who had been blind since birth. The Pharisees determine that his blindness resulted from being born in sin. By contrast, when the disciples ask Jesus why the man was born blind, he makes clear that no relationship exists between this man’s inability to see and a sinful past. Instead, Jesus answers that this man was born blind so that the works of God might be revealed in him. Yet the spiritual blindness of others continues to challenge the man.  His neighbors question whether he is really the one who has been blind since birth. His parents even retreat from affirming that his blindness was cured. The Pharisees question his identity, challenge his honest admission about how he was cured, and disqualify his claim that credits Jesus with the healing. Moreover, the Pharisees fix upon the breach of law by Jesus, namely his healing the man on the Sabbath, rather than upon the human suffering of blindness that Jesus resolves.  

Challenged by neighbors, family, and religious officials, this man had to make a decision. He continually had to decide to speak the truth about his experience of Jesus and, as he does, his faith and understanding of who Jesus is grows.  First, he claims Jesus to be a healer. Then his experience allows him to see Jesus as a prophet. Finally Jesus himself reveals that he is the Son of God.  

On both last Sunday and this, the Gospel reading offers accounts of Jesus choosing to disclose his divine identity to two unnamed persons — the Samaritan woman, an outcast and foreigner, and the blind man, judged by many to be a sinner. Despite their socially marginalized identities, both honestly encountered Jesus, spoke truthfully to him and about him, and ultimately are the recipients of the revelation of Jesus as the Christ.  

Lent also offers us an opportunity to grow in our insight, relationship, and grasp of who Jesus is.  We also must undergo a healing of our blind spots, however. For example, we might pray for Jesus to help us to cure those “dark” places where we tend to be judgmental, dishonest, or self-promoting, or those situations in which we turn away from those most in need. Such healed places in our lives will enable us to begin to see as God sees. In addition, such healing in our relationships will ensure that the works of God, which the healed life of the blind man reveals, can become manifest in our own lives as well.