Have you ever thought about how light is not something you can so much see as it is something that allows you to see.  If you look at the sun (but please don’t) you are looking at the source of light.  The brightness of the source of light is too much for us and actually we are able to see the world around us as the result of light bouncing off of things or being refracted.  In daytime hours, the sun’s light colors the world around us depending upon what it is that is reflecting the light’s rays.  The possibility of physical sight is dependent upon light and its refraction in our eyes.  You could say that light itself is in service of sight.

We rely on our sight to operate in the world for work and play.  That being said, it is also true that people who are totally blind can function and enjoy life as much if not more so than “sighted” persons.  So it seems that there is more than one way of seeing.  Physical sight is important, but not absolutely necessary, and in some cases, can actually mislead us.

Have you ever found yourself thinking that you have seen something in a certain way only to find out later that either someone saw something totally different or simply no one or thing can corroborate what you remember having seen.  When two people experience the same thing, what they remember seeing can be very different.  Of course this can be the result of several factors: personality, attentiveness, and perhaps most importantly what that person has been trained to see.  You can see number of you tube videos revealing just how much this is true.

In today’s scriptures, we hear how God’s choice of a king for Israel is not in line with whom Samuel thinks should be chosen.  After going through all of Jesse’s sons, God instructs Samuel to ask Jesse (1 Sm 16:1b, 6-7, 10-13a):

 “Then Samuel asked Jesse, ‘Are these all the sons you have?’
Jesse replied, ‘There is still the youngest, who is tending the sheep.’
Samuel said to Jesse, ‘Send for him…
‘There—anoint him, for this is the one!’
Then Samuel, with the horn of oil in hand, anointed David in the presence of his brothers;
and from that day on, the spirit of the LORD rushed upon David.”

God’s choice was David, the youngest, who has the important though overlooked task of tending the sheep.  The overlooked son is the one whom the Lord instructs Samuel to send for  and then to anoint as king.

This narrative plays itself out in a somewhat different setting in John’s Gospel (Jn 9:1-41) story of the man born blind.  Like David, this man born blind has been overlooked all of his life, primarily on account of his blindness which was viewed as the result of his parents’ sin.  Jesus sees the man born blind and promptly smears or anoints the man’s eyes by spitting on the ground and making clay with the saliva.  After sending the man to wash the mud off, the man can see now for the first time in his life.

Oddly, in the Gospel story, Jesus suddenly is not heard from, all while the drama erupts between the blind man who now can see and those around him (including the Pharisees) who question him constantly about being healed, who healed him, and whether or not the one who healed him was a sinner.  Horrified that Jesus performed this work on the Sabbath they continuously harass the man and his parents.  The blind man’s responses to these nagging questions are astounding.

So they said to him, “What did he do to you?
How did he open your eyes?”
He answered them, “I told you already and you did not listen.
Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples, too?”

The man answered and said to them,
“This is what is so amazing, that you do not know where he is from, yet he opened my eyes.
We know that God does not listen to sinners,
but if one is devout and does his will, he listens to him.
It is unheard of that anyone ever opened the eyes of a person born blind.
If this man were not from God, he would not be able to do anything.”

Finally, the blind man’s responses are too much for the Pharisees and they cast him out of the temple.  The blind man who now can see is experiencing first hand what it means to really see.  He is having to operate within the scenario of blindness that surrounds him.  This is the intentional blindness that will not allow hardcore mindsets of exclusion to break down.  Theologian James Alison in Faith Beyond Resentment (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, Ltd, 2001, p. 16) describes how the alleged sin of blindness for this man attributed to his parents has now subverted the whole idea of sin by revealing it as the actual participation in the mechanism of exclusion.  The sin of exclusion is playing itself out in the Pharisees’ refusal to see that this man, who has been the outcast, is included and indeed the one anointed and sent to them in challenge.

The blind man who now can see is simply stating that he was healed and frankly quite perplexed that the Pharisees are so bent on trying to claim that a healing such as this could not be from God.  The man’s sight grows as the light of faith increases within, while at the same time the blindness of the Pharisees seems to become more fixed.  This is quite a disturbing scene, but one that we see play out upon the stages of our religious, political, social, and personal lives on an everyday basis.

Jesus, upon hearing that the healed man has been thrown out, enters the scene again and confronts the healed man directly:

“Do you believe in the Son of Man?”
He answered and said, “Who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?”
Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, the one speaking with you is he.”
He said, “I do believe, Lord,”

David, in the field caring for sheep chosen to be the king of Israel and now a man born blind healed and sent to confront the blindness of complacency and bigotry.  I’m afraid we fall along both sides of this, at times being the one excluded and overlooked and at times being the one who excludes and overlooks.  Would that we accept the salve of healing that can give us the sight that emanates from inner faith in the Light of the Universe!  Can we begin to let go of patterns of sight that in fact blind us to the possibility for healing and transformation all around us?  We are all called to be David, to be the man born blind now healed, to be the Pharisees in need of receiving the Light that gives true sight.  There is so much color to see in our world and universe, yet we hold onto only a handful or sometimes only one color and exclude the others!

I pray that we can bounce the Light of the World and refract it in a way that illuminates the great diversity which truly can unite us if we receive it.  Then shall our eyes be enlivened and inclusive, as Paul tells the Ephesians today (Eph 5:8-14):

“Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.”

 Peace

Thomas