“Who Sinned?”
The Fourth Sunday in
Lent
30 March 2014
Saint Mark’s
Episcopal Church
Santa Clara,
California
I Samuel 16:1-13
Psalm 23
Ephesians 5:8-14
St. John 9:1-41
INI
Living in the Past
I just finished reading a book for my book club. It’s by an author, a Turkish man, whom I
admire greatly. The title of the book is
Silent House, and the author is Orhan Pamuk. I thought of one of the characters in this
novel as I read the readings for today.
Her name is Fatma. She came from
a well-to-do Istanbul family and married a doctor. Now, her husband having died several years
ago, she hides away in a seaside mansion that is crumbling with time, awaiting
the visit of her grand children. Her attitude
toward life can be seen in this brief passage from the book:
“No, I wouldn’t fall for a lie in
the form of a serpent. I never drank,
except once. I was overcome with
curiosity. When nobody at all was
around. A taste like salt, lemon, and
poison on the tip of my tongue. At that
moment I was terrified. I was
sorry. I rinsed my mouth out right away,
I emptied out the glass and rinsed it over and over and I began to feel I would
be dizzy. I sat down so I wouldn’t fall
on the floor, my God, I was afraid I would become an alcoholic like him, too,
but nothing happened. Then I understood
and relaxed. The devil couldn’t get near
me.[1]
Fatma is greeted by a great deal
of sin in her life. She despises the
degradations visited upon her by the excesses of her husband, who was banished
from Imperial Service in the Ottoman Empire, and was sent to live in anyplace
other than the capital. There he works
on an encyclopedia to bring the Turkey of the east and the Europe of the west
into an intellectual understanding. His
wife, Fatma despises her dead husband, and now she is forced to live with her
manservant, Recep, who is actually the illegitimate son of her husband. Recep is a dwarf.
So you may be wondering what is
the connection of this story. The Gospel
for today is about blindness, about living with assumptions that may be the
cause of our own blindness. Fatma lives
in a blindness that doesn’t allow her to forgive her husband, even in death,
nor to understand or know her grand children.
For Fatma, and for the Pharisees, the neighbors, and indeed even for the
disciples there is an assumption that precedes their awareness of what is going
on about them. The assumption is that
the times, the individuals who live around them, and specifically the man born
blind are damaged because of their own sin, or perhaps of the sin of others.
I wonder if that is our own
assumption as well. When I drive on the
freeway, my overarching assumption is that everyone else driving with me is a
fool – a sinner ignorant of how one really ought to drive. Like Fatima, I can become obsessed with the
“sinfulness” of others. I obligingly
cast stones at them. It is a habit that
infects our society, where we assume that anyone who doesn’t agree with us is
somehow manifesting sin.
Seeing the Mote in our Own Eye
Saint Paul sees a different point
of view. “Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light.”[2] Notice that both the darkness and light are
something that is not outside of us, but is rather our essence. The real danger is that we are darkness, and
in our darkness can only see the darkness in others. The grace that Paul hopes to convince us of
is that we are really light, reflecting the light of the grace that God has
given us.
If you read Face Book you will be
overwhelmed by the social media’s ability to allow us to cast stones, to see
all as darkness, and to objectify that darkness in the lives, politics, and
hearts of others. That is the operating
principal in the Gospel reading. Neighbors
and Pharisees and Disciples can only see the man’s blindness guised in his own
fault, in his own sin. They are stuck in
such a perception and condemn him to be equally caught in its malaise.
Jesus asks us to see the mote in
our own eye, before noticing the speck in our sister’s eye. Such an attitude might silence the bad talk
that we have for the others who don’t agree with us. What might our social discourse be like if we
saw only light and goodness in the speech of others, or met that speech with
our own light and goodness.
Fatma lives a life of
disappointment. Her very family does not
meet her standards for living. Thus they
attempt to bring together all the disparate parts of a politicized and
polarized Turkey without her wisdom.
They’re on their own – a realization of the sins of prior generations. This
ought to sound familiar to us, as we view what goes on about us and assume only
the worst.
Resources for healing
The psalmist has a good
perspective, and one that may be lost on us because of our own intimate
familiarity with the 23rd psalm.
“You spread a table before me in the presence of those who trouble me;*
you have anointed my head with oil, and my cup is running over.[3]
Jesus brings healing into the
midst of the relationship of the blind man and those about him. The psalmist is aware of the healing nature
of God’s grace even when it is provided in the midst of “those who trouble
me.” Who troubled Fatma? It was her husband’s transgressions, and
unbeknownst to her, her own inability to forgive him. Who troubled the blind man? It was any who only saw his defect and who
avoided seeing his evident wholeness in God’s eyes. And finally who is troubling you? Whose sins are so great that you cannot
forgive? Who’s troubled life seems to
invade your own sense of goodness and forgiveness?
In college, during the communion
at the community Eucharist, I used to kneel there, not singing the hymn,
ostensibly to pray – but really to look at those going to the communion
rail. What did I see in them? Their grace?
Not always. John was a classmate
who troubled me, always wearing shabby clothing (his family was wealthy) always
seeming to do things that disturbed others.
And there he was coming down from the altar having just partaken of the
Body and Blood of Jesus. Baptized as I
was, fed as I was, forgiven as I was – my antipathy for him had to give way to
some other attitude.
Jesus heals the blind man
because of his faith, and surely does the same for us, for we are all blind to
some extent. We all seem to lack the
ability to understand and perceive the grace that surrounds every human
being. Yet Jesus still stands in our
midst urging us on. Some come to the
table that is spread in the presence of those who trouble you. Receive the bread and wine, receive the body
and blood. But most of all receive the
healing not only for yourself, but also for the world around you.
SDG
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