Have you ever given or received a present marked “Some Assembly Required”?
Or, more accurately: How many times have you given or received a gift marked “Some Assembly Required”?
When we’re the recipient, we’ll sigh, make a snarky joke about “the gift that keeps on giving,” and then set to work putting all the pieces together. Sometimes we’ll even follow the instructions. And sometimes — sometimes — it goes together easily, correctly, with no pieces left over.
In any case, a gift that requires some — or much — assembly also requires some — or, often, much — commitment.
If you live in New Jersey or nearby, you know about highways and highway construction. Except in the coldest and snowiest months, a road somewhere in New Jersey is being built from scratch or rehabilitated.
We in New Jersey like our roads. We like them wide, we like them smooth, and we like them fast.
(The only thing we would like better than our roads is a “Star Trek” transporter to get us from Point A to Point B almost instantaneously, and that’s not happening in this lifetime, as far as I know.)
So the notion of “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths” is right up our alley.
Sorry, Robert Frost. In the crusty, taciturn New England of your era, good fences may have made good neighbors, but in today’s social climate, we can’t afford any more walls between ourselves.
Six feet, masks and plexiglass are intense enough as it is. We don’t need stone or steel. We definitely don’t need hearts of stone steeled against charity and justice.
Let’s start with a little confession: I don’t talk about Jesus all that much. Not really.
I’ll say “Praise God!” or “Praise Jesus!” sometimes when some little good thing happens in my life, but it’s almost a reflex and not a reflection.
No, I won’t start a conversation about any person of the Holy Trinity, though I will talk at length if I’m asked or otherwise engaged in a conversation.
That may seem strange, when you point out I’m an ordained clergy member, a preacher and teacher and online (and occasionally live) homilist. But it’s true.
When we embrace The Way that Jesus blazed, we recognize that almost everything he preached was countercultural. Then and now.
Dining and bunking in with tax collectors and prostitutes, and forgiving their sins when they repented and promised to go and sin no more: Jesus was able to reconcile these dregs of society with the God of mercy, even if First Century Hebrew society left them at the margins.
We know that Scripture, the Word of God as written down by (mostly) men inspired by the Holy Spirit, has gone through numerous translations. Countless translations, actually, from the original. With tweaks to keep certain images and references understandable if not totally relevant to the day in which they’re proclaimed or read.
And although we believe that not much has been lost in translation, and definitely none of the underlying interwoven truth, there can be no doubt that approximations have crept in when one highly nuanced language has 15 words while another squishes them all into one.
Which is why today’s Gospel is challenging to hear, let alone absorb. Because, in the version we heard, Jesus seems to be demanding an either-or rather than a both-and, and that’s not what we’ve come to expect from him.
A homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent, March 22, 2020: Jn 9:1-41
Kittens are born blind, essentially. (Puppies too, but let’s not mix apples and oranges, to coin a phrase.) Baby felines’ eyes and ears are sealed for the first week or even weeks of their lives, to allow their senses to develop and their sensory organs to strengthen before they’re exposed to the strong stimuli of the world.
And once their eyes are opened, cats famously can see in near-total darkness, which makes them superb nocturnal prowlers, as anyone who’s ever heard a tchotchke go flying off a dresser at 3 a.m. can attest.
In the darkness, cats can see what most other creatures can’t, especially the humans who serve as their personal assistants … uh … are their pet owners.
Think about all the times you plodded down the hallway barefoot at night with the lights off to check out some creaking noise in the kitchen or bathroom. Stubbed your toe, didn’t you? Whacked your shin, right? Humans aren’t built to see in the darkness.
Which is why we got the ultimate gift of a Messiah, the bringer of true light.
In today’s Gospel, St. John goes into specific detail about the man’s blindness. He was born blind. We’re not completely sure how old the man was, other than he was an adult, or at least past his bar mitzvah — “he is of age.” He was reduced to begging for his daily bread, however much or little there was of it. Everyone knew him as a blind man, the man born blind, sightless from birth.
Let’s take a second to look at some details of this man’s life through more modern eyes, no pun intended. If he had been born without eyesight, we know from our current science that his other senses likely were heightened. Acute hearing, taste and smell. Fine touch. His mind and memory would know family and friends by their voices, their scents, by the shape of their faces as traced by his fingers. He’d know them in the dark that was his normal.
So when Jesus gives him sight — a new normal, but an extraordinary one — the man is astounded. Does the desert sunlight hurt his eyes? Does the glory of God, shining through the Son?
The Gospel says the man is grateful, but that’s debatable. Everything he knew is gone: the map of the city he stored in his head, the faces he knew by touch, even his livelihood, as dodgy as it was. He has no skills or trade, because those in the 1st century A.D. were sight-dependent. He can’t read.
He has to build a new life from scratch, which nonetheless he seems willing to do.
Like a kitten, perhaps this man was born blind because he needed all this time for his eyes — both his physical eyes and, more significantly, the eyes of his soul — to mature enough that he could see.
See the truth.
St. John makes clear — in this, and in all chapters of his Gospel — that Jesus is the Way and the Truth and the Life, that Jesus leads all of humanity out of the darkness. John uses the man born blind to illustrate the radical transformation, the total shedding of a prior life in exchange for an everlasting one in the Kingdom of God, needed to follow the trail Jesus is blazing.
For the man born blind. For all of us.
We all are born blind, more in the way kittens are, perhaps, than in the way this man was. Each of us has an eye-opening experience of faith in our own time, in our own way. Some of us open slowly, carefully, deliberately, delicately: an awakening at dawn, as our spiritual lives dawn and grow brighter through the days of our lives. Some of us — BAM! — get a flash, a lightning bolt, a cardiac shock that leaves us bug-eyed and mouths agape, and with the rhythm of our lives topsy-turvy like the man who could beg no more.
Our common challenge, regardless of how our eyes are opened to the Word of God in Jesus, is to acknowledge that once our spiritual eyes are indeed opened, we must continue to grow in our relationship, mature in our relationship, treat our relationship with God as one that deserves the kind of attention we lavish on any loved one.
We have to build a new life, maybe even from scratch. Is that something we’re willing to do?
We may never be able to see through the darkness the way cats can. But we always will be able to see the light if we allow Jesus to open our eyes.
And once their eyes are opened, cats famously can see in near-total darkness, which makes them superb nocturnal prowlers, as anyone who’s ever heard a tchotchke go flying off a dresser at 3 a.m. can attest.