The blind who see, but do not see

Mark 10:32-52

Faith and sight are an interesting pair. Sometimes we imagine they are opposites, like when you cannot see a thing so faith is what fills in the gap in your knowledge. Sometimes, however, their relationship is deeper and more complex.

In John’s Gospel we get a glimpse of why this may be. Yes, I know we are reading from the Gospel of Mark today, but I’m going to take a tangent into John before returning to Mark for, I think, a very good reason that will become apparent soon. A brief synopsis of the John story: Jesus sees a man born blind on the side of the road. The disciples then ask him a stupid question (this is usually what the disciples do): “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus responds, “Neither. He was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” Catch that? His lack of sight will reveal things to the world. Then Jesus goes on to explain that he is the light of the world, in short that he is the one who gives sight—true sight—to those in need of it. Then, finally, after all this explanation, he heals the man. This is very similar, though an expanded version of what happens in today’s reading in Mark. But in John’s Gospel the story continues. The Pharisees investigate the healing and find that since the man was born blind he must have been sinful, and since he was sinful he could not be healed, because only a righteous man would achieve such a feat—this is the kind of cyclical logic that would earn the Pharisees any political office of their choosing nowadays. Anyway, Jesus comes back to the man who was blind and now healed and they have a conversation about who Jesus really is—the kind of conversation Jesus is always having with his disciples in the Gospel of Mark. It’s then that Jesus utters a couple of his absolute best one-liners; the first one going like this: “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.”

This reminds me of a Jose Saramago quote: “I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.”

Some of the Pharisees standing around look at Jesus like he’s crazy. They aren’t really metaphorical kind of folks, so they take him literally. “Jesus, obviously we can see. I’m looking at you right now. We aren’t blind!”

To which Jesus replies with his second confusing zinger. He says, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say ‘We see,’ your sin remains.”

When it comes to human nature and human sin, this might be the most important verse in the New Testament. Jesus is not saying that our eyes make us sin. He is saying that the human need to know things will eventually conflict with what it means to be a faithful Christian, because you cannot understand the way life works with your little brains. This is not about eyesight. It’s not that you can’t physically see; it’s that you will always misunderstand the world around you and your place in it; it’s that you will always want more than you have, to be more than you are.

You are fundamentally limited. This in itself isn’t really a problem, but your desire to be more can be. The idea that you see it all—that you know it all—that can be a problem. So, in today’s reading when Jesus heals Bartimaeus, the blind man, he heals not because Bartimaeus is disabled, and he doesn’t heal to make some larger point about himself (that would not jive at all with the Jesus who has been telling us to be quiet about the healing stories all along). No, instead, Jesus heals Bartimaeus because Bartimaeus understands he needs a Savior. He confesses his faith and then he is healed. Jesus doesn’t see anything particularly wrong with physical blindness. In John’s Gospel it becomes a mixed message for faith. But here the man is healed precisely because of that faith. And the faith is a result of having nowhere else to go. Who else was going to heal him but Jesus?

Blindness is a tricky metaphor in these healing stories, because in both cases the physical blindness and spiritual blindness intersect, and we tend to put way too much importance on what we can see. We become particularly confident in what it is that we physically see, and then we very quickly move from seeing to understanding and finally feeling as if we have conquered our reality. This is what happens when our guesses and wonders become certainties. We don’t lose our faith when we see something contradictory. We lose our faith when we are certain we are right.

Faith is not the absence of sight; it is our awareness of our blindness. We are all blind to the life God would have us lead. Faith is simply acknowledging that blindness. We are blind to the way the world really is, and we are blind to all the myriad ways we could make the world better. The problem is that we are so certain that we are seeing things clearly that that certainty is the crack in our faith that, untreated, will break it apart.

This is what happens both when a person drifts away from faith and when a person makes a conscious choice to no longer believe. In both cases they have decided that they can see the world better without God in it. They can make sense of their lives better by trusting that their physical eyes to show everything they need to see. Their world becomes what they can see, what they can prove, what they can testify to.

Faith is not opposed to understanding the world, but Jesus insists that our understanding comes with so much humility that we realize that our sight is still limited, narrow, and, above all, biased. We have a single point of view. The danger in that singular point of view is that it makes it easy to make ourselves into gods. After all, if our point of view is uniform, singular, and correct, then who are we but God?

This is what sin does to us. But here’s the honest to God truth: nobody has it all figured out. This is why Jesus heals the blind man. The blind man is us. And Jesus is all about healing us. He is all about helping us to see. The only trouble is that most of us, most of the time, do not want to see. Because when we see the world clearly it becomes evident that I am not God—you are not God—and most days it’s more convenient to pretend that I am. I would rather be God than be dependent on God. And that’s what sin does to us.

So we are blind—willfully blind—to how things truly are most of the time. “We are blind people who can see, but do not see” (Jose Saramago, Blindness).

The sight metaphor is one of the deepest, sharpest, and most profound metaphors in all of scripture because it smacks us right in the place that hurts the most. These eyes try to convey to me how the world is. We have lots of reasons to trust in these eyes to do well for us. They’ve worked for us to get us this far. But the next step is a much bigger one, and our trust cannot be in these eyes alone. If we believe only in what we see there is no promise worth imagining. I imagine this is why all attempts by Hollywood to show us heaven end up falling terribly flat. We cannot see things as they truly are. We are stuck. The next step is a step of faith—not to see, but to admit that we are blind. Only then can God really open our eyes.

Amen.