Devotional 3-24-14

March 24, 2013

Believing is Seeing

Please read John 9:1-41

Today’s gospel passage deals with a man born blind, a beggar Jesus encounters in the streets of Jerusalem. As he often does, John uses a foolish question to set the scene for Jesus’ teaching: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (9:2). Physical impairments were, and are, often seen as God’s judgment for an individual’s sin. By the end of the story it is the man born blind who can see and the others who are blind. Jesus teaches that seeing is about believing.

We are all born blind. Our ideologies and our vision are shaped and molded by the belief systems of our families, our culture, our religious institutions, and our political systems. We come to believe so deeply our own traditions that they filter what we see…and what we fail to see. We can be blind to our own faults and the faults of our nation, our family, or our church. We can be blind to any sense of justice or righteousness that is outside our own narrow interests.

Much as we like to sneer and snarl at the Pharisees and ridicule their inability to see Jesus for who he was, don’t the Pharisees represent us? They are upset because the healing took place on the Sabbath. Then they didn’t believe the man was really healed so they interrogated him, then his parents. Their belief systems were challenged. Their customs and traditions were confronted by something new and different. Frustrated by the man’s claims, they threw him out of the Temple. “You were born entirely in sins, and are trying to teach us?” (9:34). Because they did not believe, they did not see.

Often, we get so entrenched in our beliefs and fixed in our interpretation of reality, we are unable to see the truth. For example, we believe so strongly in our nation and its founding democratic principles that we fail, or we refuse, to see the poverty and injustice that exists in our country. Because we do not believe, we do not see.

Jesus challenged the belief systems of religious leaders in his day, and he continues to do so today. May we believe, so that we can see.

Open my eyes, that I may see
Glimpses of truth Thou hast for me;
Place in my hands the wonderful key
That shall unclasp and set me free.*

*Clara H. Scott, “Open My Eyes, That I May See” (No. 454) in The United Methodist Hymnal (Nashville, Tennessee: The United Methodist Publishing House, 1989).

Jeff Taylor