If you were blind, that would not be a sin. But since you say you can see,
when you are actually blind, you remain in your sin.
John 9:41
So far, we have been to the desert, the mountain and
the well. Next, Jesus invites us to admit that we are blind and invites us to go
to the doctor for healing.
Tyler Perry is a successful
African-American playwright, actor and screenwriter. Perry attributes his
success to what he calls “spiritual progress,” especially the “spiritual
progress” that resulted in making peace with his own father. One of his profound insights was around
learning that “parents do what they know how.” He finally realized that he
could not change his history with his father, but he could change the way he
wanted to remember it! “My life changed,” he said, “once things changed in me!”
I, too, had to learn how
resentment can keep you stuck and how you can free yourself by going to the eye
doctor and have them opened. The ability to see in a new way is like being let
out of prison, having your chains cut and throwing off a heavy load. Like Tyler
Perry, it was only when I chose to “see my past in a new way” that I was no
longer a victim of it.
We cannot do anything about
our pasts, but we can choose whether
we want to be victims of it. Once I began to understand that my Dad “did what
he knew how,” I was able to move from anger to compassion. I thank God that I
was able to bury all that resentment, even before I buried him!
“Seeing in a new way” is
exactly the conclusion Jesus came to in his search for clarity during his forty
days in the desert. Coming out of the
desert, he began to preach “conversion.” “Metanoiete” means “change the way you
see!” Change the way you look at things and heaven will open up to you. Once things change in you, things around you will look very different.” The devil tried to get Jesus to change
things. Jesus resisted that temptation. Instead, Jesus called for an internal
change within people, believing that if people would change inside, things
outside them would also change. A new life begins with having your eyes opened!
Today we have a wonderful
story about a bunch of blind people: one who can’t see and others who won’t
see. All of them need Jesus in order to be able to “see.” In this wonderful
story, Jesus uses the occasion of healing physical blindness to tell us
something about the healing of spiritual blindness.
The man born blind, not
only regains his physical sight, but step-by-step he begins to see Jesus in a
new way. At first, he says he tells people he doesn’t know who this Jesus is
who healed him. As the story unfolds, he calls Jesus a “prophet” and finally
“Lord.”
The Pharisees and his
parents can see physically, but they are spiritually blind and refuse “to see
in a new way.” The Pharisees are blinded by their own rigid religious
structures. They can’t see the beauty of this great healing, a blind man
getting his sight. All they can see is that this healing took place on the Sabbath day and healing was
illegal on the Sabbath day. The parents are blinded by their fear of being
ostracized by neighbors, friends and organized religion if they admitted to
this healing. They conveniently choose
not to know and not to see. “Ask him,” they say, “he is old enough to speak for
himself.” Both Pharisees and parents are afraid of “seeing in a new way”
because it would mean their cozy little routines would be disrupted. It was
convenient for them not to see and so remain stuck in their chosen
blindness.
I am amazed when I talk to “stuck”
people. I believe that most people who are stuck are basically people who are
blinded by their inability to “see in a new way.” They whine and cry and wait
to be rescued, but they cannot change their minds and look at their situations
from a new angle. They can’t “let go” of their old way of thinking and seeing,
and so remain stuck in their blindness. They are like the monkeys I read about
several years ago. To catch these monkeys for the zoo, people would cut a hole
in a tree, just small enough for a monkey to his hand into. Then they fill it
with peanuts. When the monkey sticks his hand into the hole and grabs the
peanuts, he cannot pull his hand back out. Instead of letting go of the
peanuts, they howl and cry till someone comes and hauls them off to the zoo.
All they had to do was to let go of the peanuts. People are a lot like that:
they cannot let go of the way they see things and so remain trapped, whining
and crying all the while.
Some people simply cannot
“let go” of the way they see things. They clutch at beliefs like: life ought to
be fair, parents ought to be perfect, spouses should not let each other down,
the church ought to be perfect, things ought to make sense and people ought to
respect you, love you and meet your needs. And, of course, when life isn’t
fair, when parents and churches aren’t perfect, when spouses let them down,
when things don’t make sense and when people do not meet their needs, they fall
apart and remain stuck in their belief that if they just don’t like it enough,
it will go away. All they would have to do to free themselves is to “let go” of
their old beliefs and “see things in a new way.”
Jesus was right, “If you
were physically blind, there is no sin in that, but when you choose to be
blind, your sin remains, you keep your own suffering going.” Tyler Perry is right, too, when he says, “My
life changed once things changed in me.”
What about you? What situations do you need to “look at” in a
new way? What people do you need to
“look at” in a new way? Is the way you have been “looking at” these situations
and people still causing you pain? If so, ask God for healing! Ask God for a
new set of eyes! Once things change in
you, life will change for the better for
you!
