The Hidden Light
1 Samuel 16. 1-13; Psalm 23; Ephesians 5. 8-14; John
9. 1-41
I suppose a number of you have seen a shadow-play. The
shadow-play takes place in the darkness. There’s this big screen
with a fire lit behind it, and the audience watches as the puppeteers
tell their story by casting silhouetted shadows on the screen.
Because the characters are all in shadow, you can’t see their faces or
the features of their dress, and there are no colours apart from black
or white. Because of this, anyone who is watching must use their
imaginations to fill in the gaps, to give form and emotional detail to
the character’s faces as they make their journey’s through the highs
and lows of the tale as it unfolds. Now, the story we read from
John’s gospel just now works a bit like a shadow-play. The writer
delivers his story not with colourful figures rich in detail, but with
characters barely drawn, silhouettes in light and dark. And the
reader, or the hearer in this case, is invited to read between the
lines, to exercise discernment about the degree to which the story’s
truth is visible for all to see, or secretly hidden in the shadows.
At first glance, what we have here is a simple miracle story about a
Jewish man, born blind, whose sight is wondrously restored by Jesus on
the Sabbath day and therefore cast out of the synagogue for his
trouble. Eventually he becomes a Christian, a believer in
Jesus. But look again. Is that all there is to this story?
Most commentators will tell you that the story is ‘really’ about faith,
that faith is here represented as a seeing, with lack of faith as its
opposite, represented here as a kind of spiritual blindness. Note
that when Jesus finds the young man after he has been cast from the
synagogue, he asks him a question: “Do you believe in the Son of
Humanity?” The fellow replies, “And who is he, sir, tell me so
that I may believe in him.” Jesus replies, “You have seen him,
and the one speaking with you is he.” At that point, the young
man cries out: “Lord, I believe” and worships him. This passage
makes quite a solid link between seeing and believing. When the
man ‘sees’ who Jesus is, suddenly he has faith in Jesus, the kind of
faith which falls to its knees in worship. Seeing is firmly
established as a metaphor for faith. And the case is
apparently strengthened further in the commentary that follows, where
Jesus says: “I came into the world for judgement so that those who do
not see may see, and those who do not see may become blind”. In
other words, Jesus comes to give faith to those without it, and to
expose the lack of faith in those who pretend to have it. Faith
is seeing, and lack of faith is blindness.
But hang on a minute. I’m not so sure that this traditionally
correct approach is nuanced enough. Consider, if you will,
the following questions. First, if faith is seeing, then why
doesn’t John have the young man make his declaration of faith when
first he is healed by Jesus? Why the long lag between seeing and
believing? Second, and intimately related to this first
question: if faith is seeing, then why does the young man not
‘see’ into the true identity of Jesus until right at the end of the
story? When first asked who Jesus is by the Jews, the young man
replies ‘He is a prophet,’ which is true, but only partly true.
In the gospel of John, Jesus is pre-eminently not a only a prophet but
the Christ, the Son of Humanity, the pre-existent Word of God made
flesh. And later, when he is questioned more thoroughly, the
young man declares that Jesus must have come from God, which is true,
but again not true enough. In John’s gospel, Jesus not only comes
from God, but is God: he has been as one with the Father from the
beginning. And there is a further point which the traditional
reading cannot account for. When the young man finally makes his
confession of faith, it is not a ‘seeing’ which makes the difference,
but a hearing. Jesus says to the man, “You have seen the Son of
Humanity, I, the one speaking to you am he”. And it is then, and
only then, that the man fall to his knees in worship. Did you
catch that? The man had seen Jesus before, but it did not give
him faith. Faith finally comes to him only in the wake of this
self-revelatory speech of Jesus: “I am he”.
Now, why am I telling you all this? What does it matter if faith
is a matter of seeing or a matter of hearing? What does it matter
how faith comes, as long as it is faith? Well, it matters quite a
lot actually. Because if faith comes by seeing, then it is not
really faith. It is knowing. And knowing is the means by
which we try to reduce God to our size and make of God some kind of
idol that we can get our heads around. But a God we can get our
heads around is not the Christian God, the God who made the heavens and
the earth, the God of Jesus Christ. It is a God of our own
making, a version of our dreams or fears, projected into the heavens
and given the name ‘God’, a God we can control and domesticate. A
tame God who never asks us to change.
The Gospel of John was actually written, in part, to combat that
segment of church and society that had begun to associate sight,
knowledge and faith in this idolatrous way. These people, who
were later called Gnostics, believed that one could know God up close
and personal, that one could have a personal hotline to Jesus and his
power, that one could ascend to a direct knowledge of God through a
secret path of wisdom which left behind the limitations and sufferings
of the body and of ordinary life. To these beliefs and practices,
John pronounced a resounding “NO!” No, he says, one may not
escape the body and its sufferings, because even the divine one of God
took on flesh and suffered like the rest of us. Indeed, John has
the divinity or glory of God coming to light not in beatific visions or
specialist knowledge, but in the disfiguration of a crucified man,
raised above the earth. Jesus is indeed the light of the world
for John, but this light lies hidden in the enigma of suffering and of
signs that are difficult to interpret. So faith is certainly not about
seeing and knowing. On the contrary, as Jesus says to the
disciple Thomas, “Blessed are those who do not see, and yet come to
believe” (20. 29).
If only these Gnostic ideas had died out with the Gnostics. But
they have not. They are alive and well and living in your local
branch of Christian fundamentalism! Fundamentalism is dangerous
to genuine faith because it has no humility. It believes in right
doctrine, and the ability to know what right doctrine is. It
believes in wrong doctrine, and the ability to locate it in
others. It believes that there is a war going on between
believers and unbelievers, and that it can calmly discern the
difference between the two. And it believes, finally, that God is
on its own side, but not on theirs. Fundamentalism is based on a
faith which can see and know, rather than on a faith which believes and
trusts in a God who withdraws from our eyes in the figure of the
suffering one. Note this too, that fundamentalism is alive an
well not only within the churches, but also beyond the church in the
general community. It surfaces, for example, in the certainty of
people who approach the church for a ritual service, in baptisms,
weddings and funerals. Many of these folk get quite upset when
the church will not order these services according to the customer’s
already-determined demands and purposes. Why? Because, in
many cases, the “customer” is a fundamentalist of the neo-pagan
variety, who cannot accept that the church has a calling and a duty to
resist this new kind of cultural orthodoxy in the name of Christ.
To these modern Gnostics, who ask as the Pharisees did, “Surely we are
not blind, are we?” Jesus replies, “If you were blind you would not
have sin, but now that you say ‘We see,’ your sin remains.” You
see, for Christians the point is not to be able to see, but to believe
that God sees us, not to claim a certain knowledge or experience of
God, but to trust that God knows us. The interesting thing about
light, as the writer to the Ephesians notes, is that it exposes and
makes visible everything in the world but itself. So if Christ is
the light of the world, we can trust him to make visible our own paths
through life, including the sin that so easily entangles. But we
should not expect to see or experience Christ with any sense of
certainty until that day when he is revealed in all his fullness.
To stare into the sun is to be blinded. But blindness, for
Christians, is not such a big deal. “Faith is the intimation of things
not seen,” says the writer to the Hebrews (11.1). And Paul says
something similar: “We walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor 5.7).
The life of faith turns out to be, then, not a full-colour motion
picture for those who can see clearly, but a shadow play in which the
fully sighted have no significant advantage over those who see not so
well. The things of God are hidden in the enigmas of the
world, in parables and signs which are difficult to interpret;
and pre-eminently in the sufferings of Christ and those who suffer with
him and for him by their baptism. Remember that the ‘healing’ our
young man received was soon transmuted into persecution by those who
refused to share his growing sense of faith.
So it is for all who are baptised into Christ’s ways. For that is
the way of things in a world that prefers the light of the Television
and the enlightenment of three-minute-interviews to the dark light of
faith, hidden in the career of a suffering God. It is the world
in which ministers of the gospel, no matter how hard we try to make
ourselves understood, will only rarely be understood—because the people
whom we address are blind to the God and the gospel to which he is
bearing witness. It is a world in which, as for the Jewish leaders in
our story, the message of the gospel falls upon deaf ears because of
this all-pervasive belief that God and the ways of faith are ours to
possess and manipulate for the sake of our own consumer ends. In
a world such as this, Christians are called not to know, but to be
known, not to see, but to be seen by God, who gazes upon us with a love
so wide and long and deep that it surpasses all our imaginings.
All glory be to God—Earth-Maker, Pain-bearer, Life-giver—as in the
beginning, so now, and forevermore. Amen.
Garry Deverell
Fourth Sunday of Lent 2002
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