John 9: 1-38

By Harry T. Cook

John Newton did not write those words in his hymn “Amazing Grace” because he could not physically see. He wrote them because, over time, he began to see things differently – things having to do with the treatment of African people sold in slavery. What he had once seen as a terrific profit-making business he came to see as a hell on Earth for both slave and slave trader.

The reading from the ninth chapter of St. John proper to the liturgies of this Fourth Sunday in Lent is about blindness, all right. But it is as much about the blindness of those who could physically see as about the blindness of the actually blind.

On one level the story is about a blind man. It is said that Jesus’ attention to him availed him the sight without which he had been born. One case of blindness taken care of. One to go. Even before the gift of sight, Jesus’ own disciples are depicted as wondering whose sin it was that caused the man to be born without sight. Pre-natal sinning? Or parental sinning? Please!

The immediate reaction of the self-appointed religious authorities to what might otherwise have give way to a brass band and a ticker-tape parade is suspicion – especially because a “work,” no matter how miraculous-appearing, was performed on Shabbat, the day prescribed by tradition Judaism as a day of rest.

Six days shalt thou labor and do all that thou hast to do; but the seventh day is [just that] the Shabbat of the Lord thy God. In it thou shalt do no manner of work . . .

And so we hear the pharisaical “Harrumph!” There is no joy for them in the great gift of sight, only resentment that the Sabbath laws have been transgressed. Better the man should have blundered around unsighted until after sundown? Never mind. They see their work set before them. The man must be put out of the synagogue – out of the assembly or the congregation. There Jesus encounters him again – the point of that detail being that John’s Jesus operates, as was said in an earlier passage, in spirit and in truth bound by no stifling rule, policy or procedure.

If the Pharisees’ argument sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same one that just now is vexing the Episcopal Church. On one side are those who say the Bible condemns gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual people – though I doubt if the compilers of Torah some 400 to 500 years before New Testament times thought out such classifications so distinctly.

On the other side are those who say “rejoice and be exceeding glad” that people of all sorts and conditions can live and love and work in peace together for the common good, and call the same Jesus Christ their friend and mentor. And the brass will crash, and the trumpets bray. Ta-da! Huzzah! Or not. One of the commandments will no doubt have been broken as gay men or lesbians seek to express their love as human flesh will do. Look it up: Leviticus 18:22 – and if you’re a guilty party, death cometh to you.

As a priest, my particular sin is that I have broken the commandment found at Leviticus 19:27 – look it up. I have rounded the corners of my beard. I have shaved. Or you with tattoos: check out the very next verse as Leviticus 19:28. I’ll walk with you to the gallows.

Do you see how ridiculous all this is? It’s not what the gospels envisioned. It’s not what the Jesus of the gospels envisioned.

And “envisioned” is the word, is it not? To “envision” is to have vision in the first place. If one is blind to the significance of a thing, there is no vision with which to envision it. That was John Newton’s problem until, at length, he “saw.” As he wrote, I once was lost but now am found.

How could he say he was found? He was found in the same way as Luke’s prodigal son was found. He came to himself, as the saying goes, and actually saw the truth of the matter before him. The prodigal son picked up and went home. John Newton not only got out of the slave trade, but went on to work night and day to abolish it. Finally sighted, he saw what was important.

Maybe our Episcopal Church and our Anglican communion one day will find themselves and begin to see. That would be truly amazing grace.

Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.