You’re Wrong

One of the life lessons I was taught as I prepared for seminary to become a pastor was that the first part of seminary was essentially to break a person down in order to build them up again. And no it is not like the miiitary idea of breakinig a person down to build them up again. It is this idea that you need to essentially shed a lot of ideas you thought you knew about the Bible and faith in order to build them back up better and stronger. Now I don’t remember a moment personally where I had this profound breaking down, but I do remember my fist call in California sharing something with our high school group that had a much bigger impact than I thought.

We were on a trip and I was teaching the kids about the psalms. We happened to be reading a psalm that wasn’t written by David and I just let them know that if they looked at the header of their Bibles they might see a title that mentions what it’s about and maybe even who wrote it. Little did I know that this statement would send one of our youth into a total breakdown. I don’t know if a Sunday School teacher, someone else, or just her own assumption that all the psalms were written by David. We sidetracked the whole Bible Study because this youth needed help moving from what she thought was the truth to a new truth. But it wasn’t that simple because she had a crisis of faith. She felt she had either been lied to or that I was completely wrong. It’s been many years but I feel I handled that conversation well, but to be honest I’ll never know.

It reminds me of a quote by Neil deGrasse Tyson, "One of the great challenges in life is knowing enough to think you're right, but not enough to know you're wrong". We often get so caught up in our personal understanding of a topic or the world, and especially the Bible that we think we’re right when we might but we might actually be wrong. When I saw Neil deGrasse Tyson say this on an ad for a class he was teaching it really struck me, and both reinforced and challenged me. It reinforced my understanding that, like seminary, I need to constantly be learning and relearning what God wants for us in this life, while also knowing that I will not fully know everything about God and a life of faith.

And this, I feel, is right at the heart of Biblical text today. I say that because it happens multiple times. As Jesus and the disciples encounter the blind man from birth, the disciples want to know who sinned to cause this man to be blind, him or his parents. The disciples have been taught that Exodus 20:5 which talks about the sins of the parents passing on to be applied to any kind of ailment. So the disciples assume this man is a sinner or that his blindness is the result of previous sin of an ancestor because that is what they had been taught.

Then when we jump ahead to the, now former, blind man interacting with the town and the Pharisees, we see that they are caught in multiple assumptions. The people assume this isn’t the same man, including his own friends. We know this man is a blind man but now he’s not so maybe he’s just someone who looks like our friend as if he suddenly had an identical twin. Then the Pharisees become divided because there is another assumption, this time over Jesus. Only someone from God can heal someone who was born blind, yet at the same time, if this man was from God then he wouldn’t break the Sabbath which then makes him a sinner. The Law teaches them both things, he’s from God because of what he can do, and he’s a sinner because of when he does things.

What’s crazy, once again, is that they’re not upset that he healed someone on the Sabbath. Remember last week they were upset with the man who couldn’t walk because Jesus told him to carry his mat on the Sabbath. They were upset Jesus told him to do that, not that Jesus healed him. Now they’re upset this time because Jesus mixed water, his spit, with dirt which made mud or clay. Jesus was a lawbreaker for this act of mixing. And this one group of Pharisees are so upset by it that they can’t see how miraculous this act is for this man. Then this young man tries his best to explain what he knows about his encounter with what he is calling a prophet. They eventually conclude that they can’t trust anything he says because since he was born blind he was born into sin. They know enough to think they’re right but not enough to know they’re wrong.

Another way to put it is that the people who aren’t willing to change the way they have thought their whole lives are blind. This is actually what Jesus tells the Pharisees at the end of the Biblical story. They see what is happening right in front of their eyes and yet they aren’t willing to actually see it. This ending actually ties all the way back to the beginning when Jesus’ disciples assume the blind man is a sinner. Jesus tells them that there is darkness and light and that he is the light.

So when we talk about this blind man and the mud, and him washing in the pool, and receiving his sight we are also simultaneously talking about moving as the blind man does from darkness into the light. And in this, it’s ironic that the blind man who in no way is a scholar of the Word of God, is the one man who now sees the light. He speaks from his actual experience an encounter with the living word of God, the Messiah. And this quote from him that he doesn’t know whether or not Jesus is a sinner, but that he was blind but now sees is a foreshadowing of his faith when he again encounters Jesus. He was able to see physically and now he is able to be in the light and see the actual Messiah. When he does he worships him for who he is and what he’s done.

This man, has been rebuilt. Though we don’t hear it in the text we can probably assume that he thought he was a sinner because he was born blind, because that is what he was taught. But this man transforms so much in this text. He goes from being literally blind to seeing. He goes from not being sure who this man was that healed him to proclaiming him a prophet and that what he did could only come from God, to then having Jesus tell him he is the one who they are waiting for…the Messiah. The man has in so many ways been transformed by this encounter with Jesus. This man was an opportunity for the light of God to take hold in this world.

One of the great challenges in life is knowing enough to think you're right, but not enough to know you're wrong. God is so full of miraculous surprises that we can’t ever rule God out of what God might be doing in our lives or in the lives of the people in the world around us. It might cause us to rethink or reshape what we thought, just like it did for the disciples, some of the Pharisees and probably even the blind man himself. But when we allow God to reshape our world and our own thinking then we can be like the blind man and move out of the dark places of this world and proclaim, “I was blind but now I see”. And we can celebrate with each other and the world when we are able to grow in our faith by allowing ourselves and each other the grace to be wrong and trust that God is continuing to make all things new by moving us from darkness into the light. For that kind of love and grace from God we give thanks and praise. Amen.