We have eyes: can we see?

 1 Samuel 16:1b, 6-7, 10-13a David is anointed king of Israel

Ephesians 5:8-14 ‘Arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.’

John 9:1, 6-9, 13-17, 34-38 ‘He went and washed and received his sight.’

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Today’s gospel is a beautiful and powerful passage of the man born blind whose sight is restored.

It’s part of a longer passage – John 9.1-41 - with more rich detail within it.

This morning let’s focus on this restoration of sight, what it meant for that man, and apply this to how we see, or fail to see, and what this looks like in our lives.

First let’s draw out some intriguing and striking details.

Jesus’ action of taking dust and mixing it with saliva to make mud: what’s going on there?

It alludes to Adam being created from the dust of the ground, Jesus was demonstrating that He is the same God who created humanity in the beginning, and now he is performing in this man’s life a new creative act.

And the saliva? This was thought, in the time of Jesus, to have healing properties.

That’s not so bonkers if you think that if you cut your finger, for example, you instinctively put it to your mouth and suck it

The pool of Siloam, which means ‘sent’.

There are two dimensions to this man’s healing: a physical one, that’s why mud and washing in the waters is involved and a spiritual one the man is ‘sent’ to the pool and then sent from there as an eye-witness, excuse the pun, of what Jesus had done for him, whih man

So for us then this is about Christ’s capacity to heal and restore the body and also to give us spiritual sight too.

And this sight and vision of God is revealed at the pool of baptism, from which we too are sent to be witnesses to the goodness of God.

This gospel reading is, in one sense, as meditation on one of the opening verses of St John’s Gospel: ‘And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.’ (John 1.14)

This is what you could call embodied spiritual seeing.

This theme of seeing, or as the Gospels often put it, ‘beholding’ is really important: ‘Behold – see – the Lamb of God’.

Thoams says until I see the marks in his hands…

Christianity is not just spiritual it’s physical too with Thomas’; seeing is his touching and placing his hands in those sacred wounds.

We live in a world where the material, things you can touch, measure and evaluate are the things given value and prominence over and above things that cannot.

The Christian life – prayer, study of the scriptures and sacramental worship – trains and forms us to see beyond what is on the surface, or just the measurable things.

I don’t know if you have come across the ‘Invisible Gorilla’ experiment?

It was a psychological experiment to explore what the researchers called ‘inattentional blindness’, i.e. not seeing something right in front of your eyes.

In the experiment participants were shown a video of two teams of people—one wearing white shirts and the other wearing black shirts—moving around and passing basketballs.

The viewers were instructed to count the number of passes made by the team wearing white shirts.

Then, about 30 seconds into the video, a person wearing a full-body gorilla suit walked into the middle of the scene, stopped, faced the camera, thumping his chest, and then walked off.

In the experiment about 50% of the participants failed to notice the gorilla!

The researchers concluded that when people are deeply focused on a difficult, attention-demanding task, they tend to experience ‘inattentional blindness,’ failing to see unexpected objects or events even when they appear directly in their line of sight.

So what are we missing?

What is our spiritual ‘inattentional blindness’?

What does the story of the man born blind whose sight is restored tell us we need to see?

The psalms and prophets Isaiah warns about idols, ‘who have eyes but cannot see’.

The man’s eyes are fully opened to who Jesus is and his power to heal.

Here’s the moment when his seeing is properly revealed:

Jesus said, ‘Do you believe in the Son of Man?’ The man born blind answered, ‘And who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?’ Jesus said to him, ‘You have seen him, and it is he who is speaking to you.’ He said, ‘Lord, I believe’, and he worshipped him.

Wow!

What vision and sight he is given, what a response!

May we, who were led to the pool of baptism, and washed in the restoring waters, continue to have the spiritual insight to see Jesus Christ as ‘our Lord and our God’.

May we see Christ in our neighbour: ‘Lord, when was it we saw you cold, hungry, naked, sick or in prison?’

And when a piece of bread, or that’s what it appears in material terms, placed on our hands, may we have the insight to see as Jesus promised, ‘for it is His Body.

On this Mothering Sunday we might also reflect that it is a wonderful thing that when a mother holds her baby in her arms and at her breast, it is the perfect distance, in terms of the child’s development and the mother’s wellbeing, for that child to see and know her mother for safety and peace.

May the Lord hold us so that we can see him and know him and, in seeing and knowing (for true knowing is insight) may we be sent in his name, so that others may behold, may see, his glory.

Amen.