As a psychology major
at Randolph-Macon, I remember studying many fascinating experiments that have been done in the field of psychology.
One of these experiments that I really enjoyed was an experiment in selective
attention. Now the results of this experiment are so baffling that I probably
wouldn’t have believed that they were true except for the fact that my
professor first tested the experiment on us before explaining the results. The
experiment goes like this: we were shown a video of people passing a
basketball, some of them were wearing white shirts, others were wearing black
shirts. Our objective was to count how many times only the people wearing the
white shirts passed the ball. We sat and we watched focused on those people
wearing white shirts, and when the video was over we were asked how many times
the people in white shirts passed the ball, and most of us were happy because
we had the right answer. But then the professor asked us a strange question,
“Did you see the gorilla?” Did we see the gorilla? What kind of question is
that? So the professor played the video
again for us and told us just to watch and not to count this time. At first
things were just as we remembered it, but midway through the video sure enough
someone dressed in a gorilla suit walks out in the middle of the people passing
the ball. Not only does the gorilla walk out, but he actually stops in the middle
of them, pounds his chest, and the continues off the set. The gorilla had
probably been on the screen for 10 seconds in clear sight, and yet the majority
of us watching the video had no idea. This is called selective attention. It is when we become so caught up in looking
for one thing that we completely miss what is going on around us, even
something that is so obvious, like a man in a gorilla suit. As the old adage
goes, “we can’t see the woods for the tree.”
Jesus in our scripture lesson for this morning might have called this
selective attention blindness; not blindness in the physical sense, but instead
a spiritual blindness.
Our story from the John this morning starts out with
Jesus and his disciples as they are traveling the come across a blind
beggar. The disciples’ response to the situation
indicates where the dilemma in this story is going to be. First, the disciples
ask Jesus, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents,
that he was born blind?" In
those times illness and disability was seen as being something that was caused
by sin. The question the disciples are really asking is really whether or not
this man has committed some sin that has caused him to be blind, or whether his
blindness is a punishment against his parent’s for their sin. Jesus responds by
saying, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he
was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him.” This man has not sinned, but instead God’s
works are able to be revealed in him. This isn’t that challenging of a
statement for many of us today, but for the disciples this was mind-blowing.
Jesus is telling them that something they had always viewed as being a result
of sin is actually is actually a means by which God’s works may be revealed.
In our scripture we don’t get the disciples reaction to
this statement, whether they agreed or were upset; instead the story quickly
goes into the disciples questioning Jesus once again. They told Jesus to hurry
up and heal the man for daylight was almost gone and the Sabbath was almost
upon them. Once again we must recognize the practices and beliefs of that time.
For Jews of that time, and still some today, the Sabbath, this began at sundown
on Friday to sundown Saturday. There
were many strict laws about working on
the Sabbath, this list was in fact long of things that could not be done
including the making of clay. We see
that Jesus ignores the disciples protests, spits on the ground and makes mud or
clay, and tells the man to go wash in
the pool of Siloam and sight would be given to him. After just telling the disciples that the
man’s blindness was not the cause of anyone’s sin, Jesus shocks the disciples
again by committing what many believed to be a sin, working on the
Sabbath. These two elements of Jesus
works in this story, the rejection of an idea of the man’s blindness being
caused by sin, and Jesus’s working on the Sabbath are crucial to hold onto, as
they will become the focus later on in the story.
Interestingly enough, the story changes, and now instead
of focusing on Jesus and his disciples, John focuses on the once blind man.
People around town notice that this man has sight and they begin to say to each
other, “Wait isn’t that the beggar that used to sit on the road?” I thought he was blind? Maybe it is just
someone who looks like him. And they began asking what happened? How were your
eyes open to which the man replied, “The man called
Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, 'Go to Siloam and wash.'
Then I went and washed and received my sight.” All of this was very odd
and so they took the man before the Pharisees to be questioned.
As we see the man who had been blind from birth being
questioned by the Pharisees we once again see those two stumbling blocks that
we mentioned earlier at play. The evangelist John sets up the scenario for us
he says, “Now it
was a sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes.” As the blind man tells the Pharisees about how
Jesus had healed him, we see that the fact that the miracle was performed on
the Sabbath creates a divide amongst some of the Pharisees. Some argued that
this man was a sinner because he had done this work on the Sabbath day, while
others argued, “How could a sinner perform such signs.”
In order to help the debate the Pharisees turn to the man and ask him what he
thinks about this man Jesus. This may seem like a harmless question asked in
order to find out the truth but that is probably not the case. At that time it
was a mandate forbidding Jews from following any heretical movements, so it is
likely those Pharisees against Jesus asked the man this question assuming he’d
be afraid and reject Jesus, but that’s not what happened. The man replies, “He is a prophet.”
These are brave and powerful words from this once blind man.
Not satisfied with this answer the dismiss the man and
call for the man’s parents. If they can’t prove that Jesus is a sinner, maybe
they can dismiss the case by proving that the man who had been a sinner.
Remember that blindness was seen as being a punishment for sin; those who
committed a sin may become blind during their lifetime, but someone born blind
would not be a sinner but rather the result of their parent’s sin. The Pharisees desperately wanted to prove
that this man was a sinner and therefore his testimony about Jesus would be
tainted. When the parents arrive they ask the parents if this man was blind
from birth, and the parents respond with the truth, yes. When asked how he was healed however the
parents backed down in fear, they said, He is of age to answer that, ask him.”
So after finding out that the man was in fact blind from
birth, spoiling their plans of discrediting the man’s testimony to Jesus, the
Pharisees decide to once again question the man. This time they ask the man
straight up, Was this man Jesus who healed you a sinner? The man’s response is poetically honest, “I do not know
whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I
see." You can almost feel the
frustration of the Pharisees they want to discredit this man’s testimony so
bad, but yet have been able to do such, so once again that ask to hear his
testimony. Fed up the man replies, “I have
told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again?
Do you also want to become his disciples?" Well this angers the
Pharisees, but also gives them the leverage they think they need. They reply, “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. We know
that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he
comes from.” In other words, We
do not follow this random man off of the streets, we follow the law handed down
to us from Moses. It seems like a valid
argument, it seems as if the Pharisees finally have the upper hand until the
man once again chimes in. It’s funny that you know nothing about him and yet he
opened my eyes. Never have we heard of a man born blind being healed, and that
very law you follow teaches us that God does not listen to sinner but to the
righteous. If Jesus was not from God, how could he perform this miracle?
Flabbergasted and angry the Pharisees label the man and dismiss him.
Later the man once again runs into
Jesus and Jesus asks do you believe in the Son of Man?” The man responds show
me him so that I may believe. Jesus responds it is I, and immediately the man
responds, “Lord, I believe.” Jesus concludes by saying, “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not
see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” You see this whole
story is about blindness and sight, but what Jesus reveals is that the story is
just as much about spiritual blindness as it is about the physical. This blind
man was healed, his eyes were opened, but he did not just begin to only see the
world around him, he began to the Lord as well. Just look at the progression of
how he describes this man Jesus. When first asked by the random townspeople
asking how he sees, he simply refers to Jesus as, “the man named Jesus.” As he
is being questioned by the Pharisees and asked who does he say that Jesus is,
the man goes one step further and claims, “He is a prophet.” Finally after all
the questioning and when Jesus meets with the man again, the man cries out,
“Lord I believe.” The man’s eyes were
opened both physically and spiritually and now this man is able to go from
recognizing Jesus simply as a man, then as a prophet, and finally as Lord. “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 seems like it should be the end of the story, except
some Pharisees overhear this last comment from Jesus. He has just told the blind man that he came
to give sight to those who do not see, and to blind those who see. They ask
Jesus, “Surely we are not blind, are we?" Jesus responds, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you
say, 'We see,' your sin remains.” But what does that mean? Jesus tells the Pharisees, because you claim
to see you are in fact blind. Because you think you have it all figured out,
you have nothing figured out. I healed a man who was blind by birth and instead
of recognizing the miracle that it was, you criticized me for working on the
Sabbath and attacked the man I healed for being blind in the first place. You
put so much trust in the Law of Moses that you failed to notice God working in
the midst of you. Like the experimenters who failed to see a man in a gorilla
suit walk in clear sight, because the Pharisees were so involved in finding the
sin in someone else, they failed to see the glory of God in their midst they
had become spiritually blind.
We too in Christian culture often
fall into this sin. We hold up the law of Moses as we should, but instead of
using to work on our own holiness we use them to label others as sinners. Or
like the Pharisees we follow the law of Moses believing that if we follow
correctly we will earn our way into heaven, but Paul tells us that is not the
purpose of the law. In Romans 7 Paul says, “What then
should we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet, if it had not been for
the law, I would not have known sin.” In other words, the law does not save you, instead it helps
us to see our own sin and recognize that we need saving. Being a good person,
following all of the checklists does not get you into heaven, only by faith are
we saved. And so instead of using the law as some checklist to follow or even
worse as some tool for differentiating ourselves and discrediting others, let
us use the law as a means to build our faith.
Let us use it to help us recognize that which separates us from
God. The fatal flaw of the Pharisees is
that they were focused on the law and not how the law leads to Christ. They put
their trust in the law, not in God. Sadly sometimes as Christians it is our
very attempts to get it right that lead us astray. We can forget what we
worship is a Holy and living God, not a set of rules. Let us not be like the Pharisees who in their claims
of wisdom found only blindness, instead let us use this Holy gift (hold the
Bible) not as a way to prop ourselves up,
but as a way to humble ourselves, as a way of opening our eyes to our
own sin. So that we may not be blind but
see, that what we need most is not our own righteousness, but rather the grace
of God drawing us ever closer a love like Christ’s.
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