When was the last time that your eyes were opened? Can you recall it? What did you see that had been out of your range of vision before? (Pause)

Some of you might have remembered getting a new prescription for eyeglasses or having cataract surgery, but I’m guessing that most of you heard my question symbolically-kind of like John Newton who wrote “Amazing Grace” after his realization that the slave trade which had made him rich was immoral and that he had to stop it. In 1773 he expressed his conversion experience in the metaphors of sweet sound, lostness/foundness, blindness/seeing. In this he was in a long tradition of Christian mystics who described God’s breakthrough into their lives as acquiring “new eyes and ears.”

What we have this morning in the gospel reading is a wonder story, common throughout the Middle East and designed to show the power of whatever god the teller worshiped. But John has turned a rather simple tale into a literary masterpiece exploring the rich symbolic meanings it contains. In seven acts we see the parallel movements of the healed man journeying ever closer to spiritual insight, like the woman at the well, he sees Jesus for who he is, while at the same time, we see the Pharisees sinking deeper into spiritual blindness. The Healed Man as becoming more like Jesus in his facility in turning a trap around so that the questioners become the questioned. His sarcasm has a comic effect and makes him a sympathetic character.

John sets the incident in Jerusalem during the feast of Tabernacles, we know it as Succoth, a feast marked by devout Jews setting up booths outdoors and sleeping or at least eating there to commemorate their ancestors’ time in the desert; each day of the feast in Jerusalem a procession bringing water from the pool of Siloam to the temple took place; and each night the Court of the Women in the temple was lit by immense torches. This underscores Jesus as the Water of Life and Light of the World.

Another symbolic dimension of this passage is seen in the Healed Man’s parents who testify to his physical cure but otherwise refuse to engage the Pharisee’s interrogation out of fear of being thrown out of the synagogue. They thus refuse an opportunity to testify to the power of Jesus to enlighten and serve as a caution to John’s Jewish/Christian community of the 80's of the first century who were being thrown out of synagogues due to the heat the Jews were getting from Rome. Christians were already being seen as disruptive and subversive. In contrast, the Healed Man does not let his increasing isolation from his former ties and support system keep him from his dawning realization of who Jesus is: first he refers to Jesus as “a man,” then as “a prophet-not the prophet, then as “from God,” and finally he declares belief in Jesus as Son of Man. This deeper faith, John seems to be saying, is a treasure greater than synagogue membership.

Finally, for those among us who love textual studies of the Rule of Benedict, we have an inclusio! At the beginning of our passage there is the question of whether or not physical blindness is a punishment for sin. At the end Jesus tells the Pharisees that it is spiritual blindness, the consequence of a smug, self-created superiority that retreats from truth into tradition, that is sinful.
It seems pretty clear that John wishes us to see this story in terms of binary opposites: Jesus is light/the Pharisees are darkness; the Healed Man can see/the Pharisees cannot; Jesus and the Healed Man are good/the Pharisees are bad; the Healed Man embraces the truth/the Pharisees are mired in lies/the Healed Man is courageous/his parents are cowardly. John seems to want us to choose the first of all these pairs of opposites and reject the second entirely because they are contradictories. Each member of the pairs excludes the other and they can’t exist in the same subject at the same time; if you are one of them, you can’t be the other. If it’s light, it can’t be dark; if you’re female, you can’t be male; if something is true, it can’t be false. The western mind is often accused of seeing the world in terms of contradictions. And this leads to splitting (us against them), perfectionism (If I’m good, I have to be entirely good), arrogance (I or we are on the right side, so if you disagree, you must be entirely on the wrong side), even racism (if I have light skin I must be morally superior to people with dark skin).

In contrast (not contradiction) to this there is another way of looking at the world-as full of complementaries. In this way of experience one of a pair is meaningless without the other: light is meaningless without darkness; good is meaningless without bad; love is meaningless without hate. Not only that, our light contains darkness and vice-versa; our goodness has badness; our love is not without hate. We are all familiar with the Tao circle, half black/half white, an Asian figure of Ultimate Reality. And if we look closely we see that the black half has a small white circle within it as the white half contains a little black circle.

So, how do we relate this to today’s gospel which seems to be based on contradictories? I’m going to try! If we go back to our own experiences of enlightenment, even the ones that seem to be sudden and unheralded, we usually see that the thunderbolt of a call needs to be followed by a long process of conversion during which we learn to incorporate our insight into our daily lives. And I think most of us would agree that, no matter how sincere and dedicated we are, we always remain blind to something or somebody, and that doesn’t mean that we aren’t also enlightened

And the good news is that very often it is our blind, rejected side that becomes our path to God.
This is literally true of the Healed Man we see this morning. But we also see how his snarkiness enables him to express the courage he had. How many people have found God in a drinking problem that led them to AA? How many of us have allowed feelings of anger and hatred to lead us into a necessary confrontation with someone we love?

We can only do this if we can see ourselves for who we really are just as the Healed Man saw Jesus for who he really was. Rather than trying to live a spirituality of perfection in which we try to squash or deny parts of ourselves and so become strangers to ourselves and to those close to us, we might try to live into a spirituality of wholeness in which we can accept all of ourselves and all of others. This takes its own kind of faith-faith in the Jesus who loved all sorts of sides of all sorts of people, condemning only those people who decided that they had to be perfect. It requires faith in the Jesus who told us to be perfect, that is whole, and whose ministry was healing or making whole.

So, I leave you with two questions: What have been your experiences of having the eyes of your soul opened? And how can you love the despised parts of yourselves and others so that they become ways to our loving God?

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