Learning to See

​That’s another really long Gospel reading! Just so you know in advance, our Gospel readings are not going to get any shorter until Easter!
 
Thankfully, our reading is another great one. The whole story works like a parable about light and darkness, blindness and sight.
 
It begins when Jesus heals a man born blind on a sabbath, which, predictably, agitates some of the Pharisees.
 
Thanks to Jesus, the formerly blind man literally moves from darkness to light and from blindness to sight. Just as important, the formerly blind man learns to see Christ as a prophet and more than a prophet, as the light of the world shining in the darkness. At the same time this man learns to see physically, he also learns to see spiritually.
 
Jesus ends our passage with an ominous warning about the blindness of people who think they can see. In context, Jesus means that people whose eyes work fine may well turn out to be spiritually blind, unable to see Christ for who he is. Understanding that Jesus means them, the Pharisees protest, leading to Jesus’ strongest words in the whole passage. “If you were blind you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.”
 
It’s a powerful warning to any of us who are tempted to claim that we can see fine, that we know God’s will and what God is doing.
 
This story is profoundly relevant to us today. But to see how, it helps to look first at our Old Testament reading. It, too, is a story about spiritual blindness and learning to see.
 
So, years before our Old Testament reading opens, the prophet Samuel had anointed Saul the first king of Israel. Saul had proven to be a great warrior, but Saul disobeyed God, and God eventually rejected Saul from being king over Israel.
 
Immediately before our passage, Samuel had the unhappy task of announcing God’s rejection to Saul. Saul was horrified. Saul immediately confessed his sin, and begged Samuel to relent. Samuel refused, and they parted, never to see each other again.
 
This is where our reading picks up.
 
The break between Samuel the prophet and Saul the king threw the entire kingdom into chaos. Saul was obviously terrified by Samuel’s judgment. As we see in our passage, Samuel hesitated to move on and, when he prepared to do so, he feared Saul’s reaction just as much.
 
The times were even harder for ordinary people, who could find themselves in a very difficult position. When Samuel arrived in Bethlehem, no one was glad to see him. “The elders of the city came to meet him trembling, and said, ‘Do you come peaceably?’” Samuel reassured them. But I’m guessing the people kept worrying, but now about Saul’s reaction when he learned what Samuel had been doing in their village.
 
Here we need to step back for a minute. This is God’s people, the covenant community. They are the ones through whom God plans to bless the entire world. They are the ones through whom God’s light is supposed to shine.
 
And not long before our reading, everything had seemed to be going so well. They had a strong and successful king appointed by God’s prophet. But now their king no longer has God’s favor. The prophet himself is uneasy and uncertain. The people are caught in the crossfire. They have all become more or less blind to God’s light.
 
Samuel’s blindness is most visible, so to speak, in his meeting with Jesse’s family. Samuel “looked on Eliab,” Jesse’s oldest son, “and thought, ‘Surely the Lord’s anointed is now before the Lord.’ But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see.’”
 
“The Lord does not see as mortals see.” And Samuel, God’s prophet, was not seeing as the Lord sees. Like the Pharisees in our Gospel reading, Samuel’s eyes work fine, but he was, in that moment, blind to what God was doing right in front of him.
 
But Samuel was unlike the Pharisees in our Gospel reading in one crucial way. The Pharisees were so convinced of their own rightness, so convinced of their ability to see God’s will, that they could not believe God might surprise them. As a result, they stubbornly closed their eyes to God’s light standing right there in front of them.
 
Samuel was not that stubborn. Samuel couldn’t see his way forward, but Samuel could acknowledge his own blindness. Samuel could let go of his first opinion and wait for God’s guidance.
 
That meant Samuel could be healed of his blindness. In that, Samuel turns out to be more like the man born blind than he was like the Pharisees. Like the blind man, Samuel could gain his sight, he could learn to see as God sees.
 
And when David finally showed up, even though David was the youngest and probably the smallest of Jesse’s sons, Samuel could see that “this is the one” God has chosen.
 
Sadly, we won’t continue with David’s story in our Sunday readings.
 
For now, I’ll just say that everyone involved in our reading keeps David’s anointing a secret for the next several years. The people of Israel, including its reigning king, were blind to what God was doing, and they remained blind as the kingdom gradually collapsed around them.
 
But God was at work the whole time, just out of their sight. God was raising up a new king, a man after God’s own heart, a man who would restore the kingdom, a man from whose line Jesus himself would eventually come in fulfillment of promises God made to David. David’s rise to the throne is a story of God working away, out of sight, when all seemed hopeless.
 
The question for the people during those years was, were they more like the Pharisees, trapped in their blindness? Or were they like the man born blind, like Samuel, capable of learning to see?
 
I find it perversely comforting that the people of Israel remained blind to what God was doing for so long, and that even the great prophet Samuel was blind to it for a time. That’s because I can be so blind.
 
We live in a difficult time. I think about our country, at war abroad and deeply divided at home. I think about the Church in our country, which sometimes seems to have lost its faith, courage, vigor, and hope. I think about the challenges we face in our diocese and the transition here at Saint David’s. I think about the transitions in my own life.
 
God is at work in all of it. Christ is with us always. And, sometimes, I struggle to see God’s hand at work in the world about us.
 
The question for me, the question for us all, is, are we trapped in our blindness, or can we see God with us?
 
The good news of our Gospel reading for those of us who sometimes cannot see is that Christ comes to heal our blindness.
 
If you, like me, sometimes feel a little blind, pray. Start by remembering that Christ is with us always, and ask God for sight. Then make a conscious effort to look for God’s light, including in places you might not expect to see it.
 
In Christ’s name. Amen.