I am going to eventually get to our John 9 story of the healing of the blind man, but in a rather circuitous route. But first some stories, comments and a totally different Scripture to start from.
Sometimes the most profound truths are found in children’s books. One of my favourites is Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No good, Very bad day by Judith Viorst. (McClelland & Steward, 1972) (https://www.amazon.ca/Alexander-Terrible-Horrible-Good-Very/dp/1442498161) I assume many of you have read or heard it. It begins ‘I went to sleep with gum in my mouth and now there’s gum in my hair and when I got out of bed this morning I tripped on the skateboard and by mistake I dropped my sweater in the sink while the water was running and I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.’ This refrain repeats again and again as Alexander gets no prizes in his breakfast cereal, has to sit in the middle seat or the car, gets in trouble at school, has conflict with his friends, gets a cavity at the dentist and gets scolded multiple times by his parents. ‘It has been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. My mom says some days are like that… even in Australia.’ Bad things happen in life. Children know that already at a gut experiential level. We mess up. Others mess up and hurt us. We have accidents. Things don’t work out like we thought they should. Our relationships become fractured. We hear a diagnosis. We have a health crisis. We lose a job. We have financial strains. We worry about the future. There are Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Days. We all have them. Like the story, things can seem to spin out of control, one bad thing layered on top of another – and we really start to wonder if it is somehow our fault, we are to blame, we get down on ourselves, we feel cursed to use an old phrase, or maybe deep down we blame God, or think that this is somehow some sort of punishment by God. We maybe don’t intellectually believe God is involved so directly when bad things happen, but we still go there in our gut, our spirit, in our sub conscious wonderings. It is hard to hear and believe that some days are simply like that, bad days will happen because we are human, not because it is our fault or God’s fault. Alexander goes through this whole day feeling so bad about himself and the world around him, but is reminded by his mother that others go through this too, and that a new day will come.
You may have noticed that I limped a bit coming up to preach. I’ve tried to hide it, but I can’t. Yes, I was injured last Sunday. It was stupid really. It happened early afternoon. I joined a friend to cross country ski at Schneider’s Bush, only the 2nd time there this winter with our intermittent snow – maybe the last ski of this season? How true that became. We skied to the far south corner with the big hill. It was more icy with the sun that day before. I’ve done that hill many times, but this time, about ½ way down, skis stuck in the icy ruts, I couldn’t slow myself, hit a little ridge, and I started to fall and wiped out, doing the splits front back – left leg sliding back with my full weight landing on my right leg super extended forward. In an instant, I had pulled the back of my right hamstring and surrounding muscles. I somehow managed to stand back up, but needed to limp down the hill with my skis and poles as makeshift crutches and then inch my way out back to the road through a short cut, my friend bringing me my van. I could hardly do the gas pedal and brake without flinching. I’ve now got a deep purple and blue bruise this big on the back of my leg, and I have hobbled through this week at a frustratingly slow and painful pace. It was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. The physiotherapist tells me it will take several weeks to heal, but she has seen this before, and with rest, the kinds of gentle exercises and time it will heal and I can get back to my normal physical activities. I know that and am trying to be patient. But it has been interesting to listen to my sub-conscious self talk. I have been surprised at how down I have gotten on myself. It’s all my fault. What if I had taken a different route? What if I tried to fall better? What if I had bought wider skis, what if, what if? Why does this leg heal so slowly? I’m missing all my end of winter curling and hockey. People are looking at me funny with my awkward walking. I wonder what they think. What did I do so wrong? Maybe I deserved this? How will I get everything else done I need to do this week. This will never heal, and so on… None of this is what I really believe intellectually. I know it was simply an accident, and accidents happen and I will heal. But it can be so easy to get down on yourself and do the blame game when something goes wrong in life.
Which brings me to Deuteronomy 28 and the Anabaptist Bible Study group from a few weeks ago. Don’t worry – we’ll get to John 9 yet. We have shared how Menno Media has this Anabaptism 500 project, where Bible study groups from across the Anabaptist World read and study assigned Bible passages to create a new Anabaptist Community Bible. We did a 1st set of 3 randomly assigned passages already, and just started the 2nd set this week. In our first set, we were given Deuteronomy 28: 15-68, a passage we dreaded working through. See, that passage is basically 53 verses of curses, what will happen if you don’t obey the Lord your God and all his commandments and regulations. We did reference the previous 14 verses of blessings, but our verses were an almost comical rendition of the worst set of curses you could find in the Bible. Look it up when you get home. We met appropriately on Ash Wednesday. There is everything from consumption, fever, inflammation, plague and untreatable rash to the brutal defeat by enemies and entry back into slavery to utter destruction, starvation and the desperation of cannibalism, to being scattered to the ends of the earth. ‘Your life will seem to dangle before your very eyes. You will be afraid night and day and won’t be able to count on surviving for long – on account of your tortured mind, which will be terrified because of the horrible sights your eyes will see.’ (vs. 66-67) This is what curses look like, and we struggled as a group to understand what we might learn from this passage, and what this passage says about the nature of God. This is much more than a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day! I also thought it is was important to bring even a passage like Deuteronomy 28 into a Sunday morning worship service, because we don’t typically use or struggle with passages like this in worship.
As a Bible Study group, we found two things helpful. One was to ask for whom are the descriptions of these kinds of curses genuine to the kinds of sufferings they have actually experienced in real life. The people of Israel experienced this in the time of exile, they felt cursed, in a time when Deuteronomy was probably written down. People now suffer terrible things, in so many parts of our world, and in our own society. So many are pushed to the edges of society and surrounded by violence and poverty and desperation. So often in these situations one thinks of this as being cursed, of somehow being their fault, the result of poor choices. Our group found ourselves with much more empathy, trying to put ourselves in other’s shoes, knowing people do experience terrible horrible things they need to make sense of. The second was to recognize how the many voices within the Biblical text keep struggling with this question of the bad things that happen in life. Yes, there are natural consequences to what we do, to our individual and collective sins, but one cannot conclude the other way from suffering that sin has necessarily proceeded. Deuteronomy has this simple obedience-blessing correlation – choose life or death, blessings or curses, and yet even this early Biblical book is more nuanced and complicated – as Gerald Gerbrandt writes in his Commentary ‘God’s relationship with Israel begins with grace, with unmerited election and deliverance.’ (Gerald Gerbrandt, Deuteronomy – Believer’s Church Bible Commentary, Herald Press, 2015, p. 460) In the book of Job, after his life has fallen apart, his friends basically use a simple Deuteronomy theology to tell him to repent, he must have sinned so badly to have all these bad things happen to him, a theology the book ultimately rejects. God is bigger than this mechanistic connection and correlation. There is a rejection too of the correlation between good and faithful living and automatically being blessed – a kind of perfect blessed life as a badge of faithfulness. Hashtag blessed. That too was not the experience of Job. It is all much more complicated.
Which brings us finally to John 9, our Lent passage for this morning, to this remarkable story of the man who had been born blind. The first thing I wonder about is what his life had been like before meeting Jesus, and the life of his whole family. What heaviness and sadness did they live with, what ostracizing from their community, what feelings of being cursed? They had to deal with this strong assumption that either the man or his parents must have sinned. How else could you understand something so bad happening, put words to something like childhood blindness that people couldn’t comprehend? We do that with things we fear. Near the end of the story, the Pharisees even say ‘You were born entirely in sins and are you trying to teach us?’ (verse 34). Jesus rejects this theology. It is about God’s works being revealed in him; it is about healing and grace; It is about belief and worship. It is about the spiritual connection and relationship to God – about truly seeing.
The Pharisees, like so many of us at times, get trapped into a mechanistic relationship between the good and bad that happens in our world. They can’t understand the joy of this man being healed, and the potential integration and welcome of him and his family back into the community. They keep finding sin everywhere. They bring the man in, and then the parents for questioning. They don’t believe the miracle of healing. They find fault and sin with the man and with Jesus. Jesus finally says that they are the ones who have become blind, who cannot see – a kind of spiritual blindness.
It makes me think about blindspots. One of the Pharisees blindspots is their very theology that sees suffering as proof of sin, which leads inevitably to rejecting many of the people around them as unfaithful, as outside the welcome of God, of putting up boundaries and barriers to God’s grace and love. What blindspots might we have, barriers that prevent us from seeing the working of God in our lives, whether things are going bad or good? At the Lenten Guided Prayer evening Thursday, we named some of our own blindspots and places pieces of clay on the table. Anxieties, Lack of compassion, tiredness, Insecurities, nervousness, Fear of Missing Out. Might it be our busyness in life? The many things that distract us? Our devises? Our jobs or our leisure activities? Is it sometimes our sophisticated modern world views? Is it our inner judgements of others, or even ourselves, in hard situations, and how they must have got there, and this clouds our compassion? Can we actually see God as being present even when life is terrible/horrible/no good?
I do love watching this renewed man in the story, now able to see. His eyes are healed, but healing happens on so many levels – with his family, with his community, with his sense of self. There is this joy and freedom we observe. The Pharisees put him through the ringer, and he just takes it and celebrates and witnesses to Jesus. After a long series of questions, he simply says ‘He is a prophet,’ and later, and I can see the grin in his eyes, ‘I don’t know if Jesus was a sinner, but I know that I was blind and now I see… Do you want to hear the story again? Do you also want to become his disciples… Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes.’ Later, when he meets Jesus again, he simply says ‘Lord, I believe,’ and worships him. He has been freed to live a full, honest and rich life – no matter what he might all yet face in life – he knows he is loved and God is with him, even if he is not perfect and life is not perfect.
Kate Bowler is a religious professor at Duke University, bestselling author and podcaster. Already in her 20’s she wrote a book called (Blessed, a History of the American Prosperity – https://katebowler.com/blessed-5/), a book that challenging the American Prosperity Gospel and the flip side of what we have been talking about this morning – that you will be deeply blessed and prosperous, rewarded by God through faithful following, and that usually means lots of money, possessions and a perfect family. Another of her books is entitled ‘Everything Happens for a Reason – and other Lies I’ve Loved – https://katebowler.com/everything-happens-for-a-reason-2/) I love her titles. At age 35, she was unexpectedly diagnoses with Stage IV cancer, and had to personally face all her own fears and come to terms with her own limitations in a culture that says anything is possible. She writes ‘we are as fragile as the day we were born, and we’re going to need one another if we’re going to tell the truth: Life is beautiful and terrible, full of hope and despair and everything in between – and there’s no cure for being human.’ (front cover) – her book appropriately called ‘No Cure for Being Human (And other Truths I Need to Hear – https://katebowler.com/no-cure-for-being-human/) . Just maybe, this is the adult version of the children’s book we started with – Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. As humans we will suffer and we will have hard times and good times. Sometimes we will see the strands that led us there, even our own failings with their consequences. Sometimes things will simply happen to us and around us, out of our control. Sometimes we will blame ourselves, others, or God, or even feel cursed. Sometimes we will be blind to it all. But sometimes, by the grace of God, we will recognize that God is actually still present, working in and around us, despite whatever is going on. We will trust. And we will respond with more compassion and understanding, with love and grace and a renewed sense that we can see God at work. We will see, and declare ‘Lord, I believe,’ and offer our worship and praise. Then our eyes are open and we see the light. The song of response we will sing was written by a Jew and a Palestinian, struggling with the chaos of conflict and division, with terrible, horrible, very bad things, and yet declaring ‘Between darkness and light I will always walk, and wherever I will go, I will open a window of light and will plant the seeds of love.’ May it be so. Amen.