The Rev. Jesse W. Abell Lent IV (Year A) March 30, 2014 John 9:1-41

This month the animated movie Frozen came out on DVD. You may have heard of Frozen . It’s a Disney movie, one of those musical animated films, like Disney used to, like Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, or the Lion King . It’s a good movie. It’s well done. In fact it was nominated for some Oscars at this year’s Academy Awards. Now it is only sort-of-inspired by Hans Christian Anderson’s short story “The Snow Queen,” but it’s still a wonderful story. Perhaps some of you have seen it. For those who haven’t, I don’t think I’m going to ruin it for you by talking about the starting premise of the story. The story is really about the relationship between two sisters: the older sister Elsa and the younger sister Anna. As children, they are very close to each other—they are best friends really. Anna particularly enjoys Elsa’s special talents. You see Elsa has a magical ability: she can create winter weather instantaneously, snow, ice, wind. They have lots of fun together, but then one evening, while playing in snow Elsa has created, Anna has accident is hurt. They are able to fix Anna up, but Elsa will forever carry the sense of guilt and blame for Anna’s accident. She feels so responsible, so burdened, by the mishap, that she shuts herself off from the world, even from Anna. What a lonely place to be. That sense of guilt and blame can be very powerful. It can isolate us and keep us from living life to the fullest. And yet, when something goes wrong, something in our human nature demands to know what the reason is, to point the finger at who or what is to blame. It’s nothing new. It’s a predicament as old as humanity itself. In today’s gospel reading, Jesus encounters one such case. While he is walking around the city of Jerusalem, Jesus comes across a blind man. Not just any blind man, but a blind man who was born without sight. There a couple interesting things about that. For one, nowhere in the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures, are there any stories about prophets healing those who are blind. But, the Hebrew Scriptures, in their prophecies about the coming Messiah, foretell that the Messiah “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me…he has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind.” 1 Healing the blind is a healing ministry distinct of God’s Messiah. 2 Another interesting thing to consider is that nowhere else in the gospels are told that Jesus has healed someone who was born with their disability. Jesus healed plenty of paralyzed people and restored sight those who were blind, but this is the first and only time that we’re told he healed a person born blind. Perhaps that made more of an impression on them; perhaps they thought it might be easier to heal someone who used to be able to see, than to heal someone who had never been able to see. The way the blind man is introduced so casually has many scholars thinking that this man was well-known to the community, so Jesus, his followers, and the religious leaders all know this man and his backstory.

1 Isaiah 61:1 in the Septuagint. 2 See also Isaiah 29:18, 35:4-6, 42:6-7 for prophecies about healing the blind.

Sadly, it’s not the most shining moment for the disciples. They don’t discover the man and then rush into action to help him, bringing him to Jesus to be cured. Instead, they try to assign blame, to figure out whose fault it was that this man was born blind. “Teacher,” they say, “who sinned, this man or his parents, causing him to be born blind?” Since he was born blind, you might assume that it must be the parents fault. But, then again, some rabbis believed that the human soul existed even before birth and that there was a chance that the soul could have rebelled even before a person was born.

And inquiring minds want to know! “So, Jesus, who’s to blame?” We can only imagine what this man’s life had been like. Perhaps he thought he was to blame for his blindness. Perhaps he lived with a sense of guilt and shame, not knowing exactly what wrong he had done but feeling burdened by it all the same. His life was one of isolation it seems. Those in the area noted that he used to just sit around and beg. Evidently he didn’t have anyone to care for him, so he had to beg on the street to get by. He was a survivor, but he survived alone, probably unwanted by most of those around him. Sin and guilt can do that to use. It can make us feel alone and shamed and burdened. I know a lot of preachers in mainline churches are shy about talking about the subject of sin. But, I’ll let you in a secret—perhaps it’s best we keep it amongst ourselves—sin is a reality in all of our lives. None of us are perfect. Only Jesus was perfect, and the rest of us have to live with being flawed and broken and just have to try our best. “Sin” is one of those words that now probably carries a lot of unhelpful connations after 2,000 years of Christianity. In Greek, it’s called hamartia. And in its original meaning, like in the Greek-speaking world of Jesus’ time, it didn’t necessarily have all of these moral overtones. In classic Greek literature, it was a hero’s “tragic flaw.” That proclivity or habit that the main character in a story has. A trait that is both their strong point and their weakness. Do you remember the ancient story of Oedipus the King ? He was that orphaned prince who was destined to kill his father and marry his mother. His birth parents try to get them out of their house in an attempt to avoid the prophecy about him from coming true. But Oediupus’ tragic flaw, his hamartia, is his determination. He finds out that he is adopted and what the prophecy said his fate would be, and it is his determination to avoid that fate that drives him to runaway and to unknowingly kill his biological father and marry his biological mother. His hamartia is his downfall. The Greek term hamartia is also used in ancient gaming. Imagine yourself back at summer camp, down at the archery range. You pick up a bow and arrow, and try to shoot the bull’s eye on a target. But you miss and your arrow goes into the ground. That’s hamartia too: “missing the mark.” This hamartia , what our English Bibles call “sin”, comes in all shapes and sizes. From intentional mistakes and errors to flaws and mistakes. It’s so widespread that it is simply a part of life. Our daily lives are filled with these sorts of errors. It’s a fact of life. We know that, so did the disciples. So they ask about the blind man, “Jesus, who screwed up to make this man blind?” But, Jesus reveals the great leap in assumption that the disciples make: They assume that bad things must be someone’s fault, that someone is always to blame. Jesus says, essentially, “No one. Sometimes bad things just happen.” Then he reaches down, and like an ancient esthetician at a spa, puts a little mud on the man’s eye lids and tells him to go wash it off. Miraculously the man is healed—something that confounds the religious leaders and outrages them.

There’s plenty of material to work with if you want to explore why the religious leaders feel so threatened by this miracle, but I want you to notice how things unfold at the very beginning: Jesus and his followers come across a commonly-known blind man. The followers want to pinpoint who is to blame, who missed the mark . But, Jesus skips right over blaming, to healing the man and making his life whole. We all are flawed. We mess up. We sin. We have to accept that. That’s why our baptismal vows say, “Whenever you sin, will you repent and return to the Lord.” NOT, “If you happen to sin…” but “Whenever” We could dwell on all those mistakes. We could live with regret. But then, like the blind man in the gospel story (or Else in Frozen ), we wouldn’t be fully living. You could hold on to those burdens. But they get heavy and they weigh you down. They keep your hands so full that you have trouble opening them to world and to those in need. That’s Jesus, in his wisdom, knows that just as much as forgiveness, we need healing from our broken. And Jesus wants to make us whole. The blind man had been blamed, he’d felt the guilt, he’d felt the isolation and the brokenness. But Jesus goes straight towards the healing and wholeness. That should be a lesson to us all. True, “sin” ( hamartia) is a fact of life. It’s all around us. But, Jesus is more concerned with helping us to get past those mistakes and to get on to healing and living more fully. That’s what Lent beckons us to do: to move past our brokenness into the wholeness that only Jesus can provide.