Sermon: Lent 4

Blinding Blame
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Lent 4, Year A (RCL)
John 9:1-41

His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s work might be revealed in him.”

When things go amiss in our lives, more often than not our first temptation is always to place blame. Coming upon a blind man, we quickly wonder who caused his blindness. If he caused it himself, so be it. We may feel sorry for him but somehow find ourselves okay with the fact that the wound was self inflicted. If someone else caused it, we may become filled with righteous indignation, seeking that the responsible party is brought to justice. If God caused it, we may find our faith shaken to its core, our understanding of how God works in our world challenged; we may find ourselves wondering if we can still believe in such a God. When something in life seems wrong, we seek to understand it, to find out who’s responsible, to place blame, to right the wrong.

While our intentions may be pure in holding the world accountable, what often times gets left out of this equation is the person for whom we advocate; is the person we seek to understand and help. In our concern for the blindness of the man, we may unknowingly see the man as nothing more than mere blindness itself. Wanting to understand, placing blame, desiring justice, it becomes easy to take personal suffering and transform it into a crusade for the greater good. Coming upon a blind man, it becomes easy to ask the question of fault rather than to ask the question of identity; the question of who this man is apart from his blindness and regardless of its cause.

Two examples come to mind. Coming upon a homeless man, I once asked myself how it was that he had become homeless; who caused his homelessness, who was to blame. Was he a drunk or a drug addict? Was he psychotic? Was he lazy? Or was it his upbringing? Did his parents abuse him? Did he grow up in poverty? Or was it God, did God cause it, or if not cause it, did God somehow allow this to happen? Asking myself so many questions about who was to blame, the homeless man became more of a social experiment in my mind and less of the human being that he was despite these things.

In a similar way, this happened on a national level following September 11th. Following the terrorist attacks, we asked ourselves how it was that the World Trade Center was destroyed; who had caused this horrendous act, who was to blame. Were the hijackers to blame? What about the terrorist leaders themselves? Were we to blame? Was God to blame? Asking ourselves these questions of cause, hijackers, terrorists, and victims alike all became what they had done or how they had died, while their humanity was forgotten. Through finding fault and placing blame, we sacrifice our ability to see the God in others and instead, create them in the image of what they have done or had done to them.

When we do this, when we sacrifice the person in order to place the blame, that blame becomes for us an idol. When we do this, a shift in power occurs; power is transferred from the individual to the cause or fault in and of itself. All of a sudden, how the man became blind is much more important than the blind man himself. How the man became homeless is much more important than the homeless man himself. How these horrendous terrorist attacks were carried out is much more important than the humanity of those involved in the attacks. And even for Jesus, as a man who is perceived by the Pharisees to be a sinner, how he can perform such signs and heal on the Sabbath becomes much more important than who he is as a person. When fault becomes our idol, the sacrament of creation is devoid of power and our humanity becomes meaningless.

Just as the scale of justice rises on one side while falling on the other, as a person is dehumanized through blame, that blame is emphasized and idolized. And in doing so, as this discrepancy increases, so too does the void between us increase; the void between actions and being, between fault and humanity, between us and our neighbors, between us and God. “Is this not the man who used to [be blind and] sit and beg?” Some were saying yes, that it was him because they were blind to his blindness. Others were saying no, that it was someone like him because his blindness was all they saw. He kept saying, “I am the man”; he kept saying, ‘I am more than my blindness, more than my fault or the fault of others who caused this, I am a man.’ And so too are the homeless men and women, so too are terrorists and victims of terrorism fellow human beings, so too is Jesus fully human and fully divine, despite his violating the Sabbath and performing miracles.

That’s what Jesus is teaching us today; that fault and blame do not and can never take away our humanity; our being created in the image of God and loved by God. It doesn’t matter how a homeless man or woman became homeless. What matters is that we never let these reasons, let any reason separate us from seeing the good in them; seeing the good that is to come out of their homelessness. It doesn’t matter who’s to blame for September 11th. What matters is that we never let our finding fault with them separate us from their humanity. Jesus said to the Pharisees, “I came into this world…so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” To say it other way, Jesus came into this world to show us that those who do not blame end up seeing others as God sees them, while those who find fault end up becoming blind to the God in others.

So the next time you seek to find fault with someone, first spend some time thinking about, praying about, meditating on how God’s glory is being revealed through their lives. The next time you jump to blame yourself for some shortcoming, go easy on yourself and remember that even through our apparent failures God is working in us to reveal God’s grace in the world. The next time you blame God for something you feel that God unjustly did to you, don’t react, but act; don’t react out of pain and fear, don’t react out of the injustice done to you. Instead, act out of the goodness which God has also blessed you with; act out of the opportunities that God has already presented you with. For when you do this, when we do this, our eyes are opened to see not what has been, but what can be; not how we are limited, but how God is limitless; not what divides us, no, but what unites us and holds us together. Amen.