The Fourth Sunday in Lent (Year A, RCL)
March 2, 2008
The Reverend Paul R. Abernathy, Rector
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“Did you really mean what you said?!”
I was the curate at Calvary Episcopal Church, Columbia, Missouri. My first job following seminary and ordination. I was the preacher that morning;
the sermon, based on today’s gospel passage.[1] I thought that I had been faithful to the text, preaching of God’s power to
heal, to bring wholeness out of infirmity.
When the service was over, I stood at the door greeting the departing worshipers. Priscilla, mother of Colleen, a bright, beautiful sixteen year old,
and Brian, an equally bright and inquisitive twelve year old who from birth had been afflicted with cerebral palsy, approached me. Dabbing tear-filled
eyes, she did not extend her hand.
“Did you really mean what you said?!” she asked emphatically. Instantly, I knew what she meant. How callously unthinking I had been. But my
stammered apology was lost in the onrushing urgency of her words. “Am I to believe that Brian was born with CP so that God could prove his power?!”
I couldn’t answer. It wouldn’t have mattered. Priscilla hadn’t finished. “Paul,” she sobbed, “is God that cruel?!”
Thirty years ago on a Sunday in Lent, a passionate mother – who knew far more intimately than I the inscrutability of God, the inevitability of struggle,
and the perseverance of love – preached to me. Through Priscilla, I began to learn the lesson of the banality of biblical literalism. Through Priscilla,
I was launched on a lifelong path of discerning truth through the lens of metaphor.
A blind man is given the power to see. Not with sight, once lost and now restored, for he had been born blind. This is first sight. Even more, new
vision. Of what? That Jesus is the Christ? The one come from God? The one through whom God’s works are revealed? No. The man knew nothing of Jesus’
identity, but only what Jesus had done for him. So, if not that, then what?
I think that the new vision was, is the truth to which Jesus, in his life and ministry, pointed, the truth summed up in his first words, “The
kingdom of God is at hand.”[2]
A vision of a new age. A radical age – from the Latin, radix, meaning root or, more poetically, heart. Not a restoration of what had
been before. Not a recreation of what had been lost – as in the Garden of Eden, an age of innocence and purity, an age long ago abandoned,
forsaken by humankind in favor of our now characteriological selfish self-interest, an age to which we long to return. No. For, like the Garden of
Eden, an age of innocence and purity never was!
This new age is radical precisely because the vision of it is perceived, can be perceived only with the eyes of hope, the eyes of the heart.
The eyes of those in every era who, when beholding the status quo of the suffering of the many and the privilege of the few, refuse to bemoan the way
things are, wondering why or to dream of things that are not demanding why not. Rather, they see what is, and then, behold what is not – the universality of
equality – as already come, for the vision of it is alive and thrives in their hearts.
Perhaps this explains why it seems that only those who know that they are blind – or poor or oppressed – are able to behold the radical vision. For it
is only when I know my need that I also can behold its fulfillment. When I know that I am blind, then I cry for light. When oppressed, for freedom.
When sick, for healing. When despised, for love. When rejected, for welcome.
So it is, I suppose, that those who do not know that they are blind or who have been blinded by the fact that they are rich in privilege, free to
exercise power, fully wrapped in the mantle, surrounded by the comfortable trappings of the way things are – people like us! – do not, cannot see
quickly, clearly a new radical vision.
No wonder. Anything radical shakes the foundations, terrifying the occupants of the house on the street called, “Status Quo.”
But, blessedly, I don’t believe that we have to be in grave need to see the vision. We simply have to want to see it, even when the fear of
change, which is both the vision’s promise and its cost, clutches our very throats.
The promise in the cost of our fear is that we may be motivated to act. To stand, to serve with the blind, the oppressed, the sick, the despised,
the rejected. To strive with them – who but for the grace of God, who but for the circumstances of our birth over which none of us has control,
could be us – to bring the radical vision of the universality of equality to life and to light.
Thirty years ago, Priscilla asked me if I really meant what I had said – that the afflictions of this life were occasions for the revelation of
the healing, redemptive power of God in Christ. Indeed, that is what I had said. What I now mean is this: the calamities of this world,
even more, the tragedies of depravation in the lives of our sisters and brothers are supreme opportunities for all, for us to see, and then, to serve.
The ancients believed that there was a causal connection between sin and suffering. Thus, the disciples, seeing the man born blind, could ask, “Rabbi,
who sinned?” Jesus, speaking to the privileged Pharisees, made clear that the sin isn’t in the suffering, but rather, in refusing to see it
and even worse, in seeing, yet, doing nothing, and still worse, in seeing and doing nothing more than what one has always done as if that were enough.
My sisters and brothers of St. Mark’s, as individuals and as a community, may Jesus never have occasion to say that about us.
