Lord, Give Us the Sight of the Blind
A Sermon by Seminarian Paddy Cavanaugh on the Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year A, March 19, 2023.
1 Samuel 16:1-13; Psalm 23; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41
As I read today’s Gospel lesson about Jesus restoring sight to a blind beggar who had recognized him, despite the rebukes of the Pharisees and even Jesus’ own disciples, I was immediately reminded of someone I met nearly a decade ago. Before I came to seminary I was a caseworker in Boston assisting the chronically homeless to transition into housing. One of my clients, who I’ll call Louis, had immigrated to Boston from Haiti in the 1980s, fleeing political violence. One day while walking home from his job as a dishwasher, he became the victim of a crime that left him totally blind. Once he was released from the hospital, he found that not only had he lost his sight but, he had also lost his ability find gainful employment, and could no longer support himself. And so, after exhausting all of his resources, Louis had to leave his apartment and began living in shelters and relying on the kindness of strangers in order to eat. Like the blind beggar in the Gospel, we see that despite two thousand years of progress, disability and poverty far too often go hand in hand.
Now, Louis had been living on the streets for nearly twenty years by the time I met him. His girlfriend, Charlotte, who herself was once unhoused, brought Louis to my office to sign him up for public housing on a bitterly cold February morning. As the three of us sat together in a dingy conference room drinking watery nonprofit coffee, I could immediately tell there was something different about Louis, just from his gentle presence.
At this point in my career I had heard enough heartbreaking stories to become rather skilled at compartmentalizing my emotions so that I could focus on meeting my clients’ immediate material needs. However, as I listened to Louis’s story and the grace with which he told it – the way he emphasized all of the helpers and guardian angels that God had sent him, I found myself struggling to hold back tears. You see, Louis had spent the past several decades on sidewalks, on park benches, in parish hall soup kitchens, and in lobbies of countless social services offices like mine, simply sitting in darkness and waiting to be seen. And while Louis was waiting to be seen, Louis saw everything.
He saw incredible kindness, he saw cruelty, and he saw every human response in between. And yet what was most remarkable about Louis’s story, which to any comfortable person, such as myself, would have been a story of abject tragedy, to Louis was a story of God’s loving faithfulness. Louis told me repeatedly about all of the times God had sustained him by the goodness of countless strangers who had come through for him when he thought all hope was spent. He spoke with conviction when he told me that the world was full of so much goodness and love, that there was no doubt in his mind that God had been with him at every step of his life. Despite my best effort to swallow my emotions, Charlotte and I were both in a puddle by the time Louis finished his story. And somehow, sensing my silent tears, Louis calmly reached out, held my hand, and said in his gentle voice: “Mr. Paddy, God has been so very good to me. He’s kept me safe, he’s brought people like you and Charlotte to help me, and he’s going to take care of everything, just like I know he’s taking care of you.” It was a moment of palpable grace.
Like the blind beggar in the Gospel reading, Louis’ blindness and poverty had not impeded his ability to see Christ’s loving presence in the midst of a world that was largely blind to Louis’s presence. And I don’t think his is merely a story of spiritual perseverance against unfavorable odds. Quite the opposite, I believe, that Louis’s poverty and lack of physical sight are deeply connected to his possession of spiritual sight at a level that can be difficult for many of us when our needs are over-met.
On that note, let me be clear, I am not Jesus in this story. By all measures of education, income, and authority, I was in a position far more similar to the Pharisees in today’s Gospel, who held the social and economic power to transform the blind beggar’s circumstances, and yet chose instead to turn the mirror of responsibility back onto him. The Pharisees’ and the disciples’ attributed the blind man’s poverty and unsightedness to a deficit of moral character. They said his circumstance in life were his own fault. It’s an argument that sounds all too familiar even today, does it not? It’s a version of the classic “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” argument, which Dr. Martin Luther King reminds us is a cruel thing to say to a bootless man.
On the other hand, let me also be clear about something else, lest we fall victim to one of Christianity’s historic blind spots to antisemitism. The problem with the Pharisees in the Gospel lesson was not their Jewishness, or even that they were Pharisees. The Gospel writer John was Jewish, the blind man was Jewish, and of course Jesus was Jewish. And more than that, we know that Jesus was friends with some Pharisees, like Nicodemus, and some biblical scholars have even suggested that Jesus may have been a Pharisee himself, or was at least close to their tradition.
Rather, the problem with these Pharisees in John’s Gospel was their unwillingness to see that which was clear as day to the blind man – to recognize Jesus as the source of love and healing. The story cleverly plays on our expectations of sight and reveals a common paradox about what our vantage point might allow or obstruct us from seeing. The Pharisees at the top of the social hierarchy, possessed physical sight, and yet were spiritually blinded by the power and comfort of their standing. On the other hand, the blind beggar at the bottom of the social hierarchy possessed the spiritual sight which the Pharisees lacked, allowing him to recognize that the love and healing which flowed from Jesus, ultimately flowed from God.
And just like my client Louis, I believe it’s not merely accident or allegory that a poor blind beggar was the one to recognize Jesus when others struggled to see. A friend of mine, James Parker, who runs a writer’s group for the unhoused in Boston wrote an article in the Atlantic in which he said: [the poor have a] “simple X-ray perception of society seen from the bottom up. It’s clinical, it’s prophetic.”
You see, the poor, the disabled, and other classes of marginalized people so often possess crystal clear vision about the balance of love in the world, not for supernatural reasons or because being poor or disabled automatically makes someone more spiritually enlightened. Rather, those on the margins are often more perceptive to where love is or is not distributed throughout society because this distribution of love directly impacts their ability to exist in the world.
God shares this X-ray vision of society and invites us to share it too. This is why the Gospel is so often proclaimed to us from the perspective of the poor; it’s why Jesus said he chose the blind to reveal God’s works (John 9:3). We learn from today’s Gospel that God comes to us not only from a lofty point outside of the world, but from also from below. Not always illuminating us with resplendent light, but whispering wisdom to us from a stranger in the darkness. It’s an invitation to us of means and ability to reorient ourselves to this vantage point so we can see as God sees, and this is a profound blessing of sight for us.
Curiously, the blind beggar recognized Christ for who he was even before his sight was restored. That's the paradoxical vision that God invites us to share. God invites us to see with the sight of the blind. [pause] God invites us to see with the sight of the blind so that like the poor blind man who recognized Christ, we might recognize Christ in the poor and be healed.
This undoubtedly requires faith that something we cannot see, something as incredulous as God’s incredible love is actually there for us. So friends, if ever you find yourself struggling to find the faith to believe, then simply remember that people like Louis, and the blind man. They are carrying the faith for you in these moments. Then keep your eyes open for that glimmer in the darkness.
As I prepared to walk Louis and Charlotte back out into the cold winter streets, Charlotte lovingly put on Louis’ coat, handed him his cane, and began walking him to the door. As she did this, Louis flashed a wry smile in my direction and said “Charlotte’s my eyes, I’d literally have no idea where I’d be without her.” Charlotte quickly interjected and said “No, Louis’s really my eyes. He sees things I could never see.”
Let us pray.
Lord, give us the sight of the blind. Remove those barriers which keep our eyes affixed on darkness; and reveal yourself to us more fully, so that we, like those who see in darkness, may too be brought into the radiant splendor of your love. Through Christ our Lord, amen.