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Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Lent – March 2, 2008
Let’s go back to the question that sets another one of John’s long dramas in motion today; a question that has plagued and puzzled preachers, philosophers and anyone else who has ever been faced with turmoil in their lives. And, unless you live in some kind of bubble, it’s impossible to attain a certain age without arriving at your own version of the query the disciples pose today, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?”
Why did this calamity happen? No, not why did it happen, but whose fault is it? Who can we blame and therefore feel better about ourselves?
At the time, this was a perfectly reasonable thing to ask. In the ancient world disease was often viewed as an instrument of divine wrath; punishment meted out by the gods, who have no compunction about holding an entire community accountable for the actions of one person.
We see it in Homer’s “Iliad,” for example, which covers a small part of the Trojan War. One which began, remember, when Paris, the prince of Troy, sailed to Sparta, seduced and abducted Helen, and then took her back home. Helen’s husband, discovering that she was gone, naturally became peeved; he assembledan army to bring her back. It shouldn’t take too long; after all, he’s got Achilles – Brad Pitt in the movie - along for muscle.
Unfortunately, nothing ever goes as quickly as the generals’ plan. When the “Iliad” opens, the war has been raging for ten years. During that time, attacks, counter-attacks, human maneuvering and divine intervention have gone on. In one notable raid, another beautiful woman, this time from Troy, is kidnapped. Her father, displeased, decides he is going to bring her back. Thwarted in his own efforts, he appeals to the god Apollo, who comes through for him by spreading a deadly plague among the opposing army.
Achilles calls a meeting to determine the cause of the plague; who sinned? A soothsayer determines that it’s all the fault of the king whose arrogance would not allow him to return the woman who was captured to be his own war prize. The woman is returned; the plague is abated.
Hundreds pay the price for one man’s arrogance; what the Greeks called hubris: overbearing pride; a human trait frowned upon by the immortals dwelling on Mount Olympus. At root, the word means “wanton violence,” and when they see it, that’s how the gods respond.
In the story of Oedipus – you remember him –a complex boy - he is abandoned by his parents as an infant and later told by the Oracle of Delphi that he will kill his father and marry his mother. When Oedipus unknowingly fulfills the prophecy by slaying his father – who ran over his foot with a chariot – a dreadful plague is visited upon the citizens of Thebes. The same oracle Oedipus spoke to tells the queen – Oedipus’s mom – that the plague will only cease when the king’s murderer is driven out of town.
Through a series of tragic events, Oedipus discovers that the prophecy is true, he then puts out his eyes and flees the city; meanwhile his mother, whom he has accidently married, kills herself. It’s a light comedy.
Once again, hundreds of people pay a horrible price for one man’s hubris - this time Oedipus’s belief that he could defeat his fate; that he could outwit the gods who had set the circumstances of his life into motion even before he was born. The gods did not like to be messed with.
Along that line, you may remember the story of Prometheus who stole fire from heaven and brought it to earth, and, as punishment for giving people what had previously belonged to the gods, Zeus had him shackled to a mountainside and each day sent an eagle to eat his liver, an organ which managed to grow back every night.
Considered a hero, Prometheus paid a high price for overstepping his bounds and interceding on our behalf; he suffered greatly for usurping the divine will. But it is not just the Greeks who had issues with hubris, who understood the concept of forbidden knowledge as sinfully treading on the domain of the gods. According to classic Christian teachings, we pay a price as well; we are subject to our own penalties for our pride; not voracious eagles gnawing at our livers, more like vexing questions gnawing at our minds.
According to classic theologians, it was pride that led Adam and Eve to disobey God in the garden and attempt to be like Him, knowing good and evil. What was their punishment? Cast out of the garden of innocence, no chance for a bite of the tree of immortal life; condemned to suffer the painful doubts which come with the knowledge of their mortality. Later the Church would argue that we all pay the price for this not so original sin; we all suffer because of this too typically human violation of the divine will.
And it was our potential for pride that led God, in the very first of the Ten Commandments, to proclaim that “I am the Lord your God…you shall have no other gods before me.” Adding, “You shall not make for yourself an idol…for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.” (Aside from demonstrating that God’s mercy far exceeds his judgment, this passage also seems to serve as the basis for the disciples’ inquiry today.)
Well, following these biblical examples of bad behavior, it makes sense, doesn’t it, that pride would emerge in the teachings of the Christian church as the worst of all the sins, number one in the deadly list.
Yes, the Bible and the theologians speak often of sin: the deliberate and purposeful disobedience of a creature to the known will of God; that which is in opposition to God’s benevolent purposes for his creation; an ever present reality that has enslaved the human race and corrupted the created order. That’s the traditional view and it still fits today.
Among the numerous Hebrew words for sin, the most common is one meaning “revolt” or “transgression,” indicating a deliberate act of defiance against God; a form of idolatry; an attempt to replace the Creator with someone or something else, usually one’s own self or one’s own creation.
So far, we’re right there with this; no matter where we think it originates - in the garden or in our genes - most would agree that sin has characterized our existence and shaped our world. Not just on a broad scale, in our own lives we know that no matter how much we may wish to do the right thing, somehow we come up short. As Paul says, “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.”
In other words, sin is not always a matter of a presumptuous attempt to usurp the will of God; sometimes it’s merely a matter of missing the mark. In fact, of all the references to sin in John’s Gospel – and they are plentiful – the one Greek word that is used most frequently is “hamartia;” literally, “error of judgment.” To illustrate “hamartia,” the ancient Greeks used the example of missing a bull’s eye; you aim your arrow at the center of the target but somehow it lands outside – or even beyond – its goal. (When I took archery in college to satisfy a PE requirement, I initially had trouble hitting the target itself, let alone the bull’s eye. Despite what I considered my dead eye aim, I missed that little black ring in the center much more often than I hit it.)
Still I kept practicing and, gradually I improved. But even the most gifted archer – even the mightiest of the Greek warriors to fight in the Trojan War – never hit the bull’s eye every time. Again, St. Paul: “…all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Or, as Ecclesiastes puts it, “Surely there is no one on earth so righteous as to do good without sinning.”
And that, I believe, is what Jesus is talking about when he answers the disciples question today; “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind? Jesus answered, “Neither…he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” In other words, don’t worry about the cause; worry about the cure.
All that we think we know about the origin and the nature of sin – whether we learned it from the Greeks, from the Hebrews, or even from the teachers in our Church itself – is open to question. By his answer today, Jesus is challenging the conventional perceptions, including the one that sin and suffering are directly related.
While that punitive view of illness is no longer widely accepted, nonetheless it persists, says Susan Sontag, onlyin a different form. These days, illness is not a matter of sin;it’s a matter of will. “Illness,” Sontag writes, “is interpreted as, basically, a psychological event, and people are encouraged to believe that they get sick because they (unconsciously) want to, and that they can cure themselves by the mobilization of the will; that they can choose not to die.” Offering a psychological explanation of disease, she says, provides a sense of control over experiences and events – like grave illnesses – over which people in fact have little or no control.
In my experience as a clergyman, I’ve heard the same refrain over and over again following a death: “She just gave up” or “He lost the will to fight.” And I can’t count the number of obituaries that begin, “so and so lost their heroic battle with such and such a disease,” implying, of course, that some personal failure occurred, either of effort or of courage. Ms. Sontag also points out that “the controlling metaphors in descriptions of cancer are…drawn…from the language of warfare.”
All of which brings us back to the question – and its corollaries - we started with when we spotted the sightless man: who sinned? Who upset the gods? Who tried to tempt fate? Whose pride got in the way? Whose will was weak? Who lost the battle?
Jesus answers, “No one.” And he spits on the ground, making mud with the saliva, and spreads the mud on the man’s eyes. Reasons pale when it is results that count. “I do not know whether he is a sinner,” the newly sighted man says to the Pharisees, “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” No longer an object lesson for the disciples or the authorities or the people in the town or even his parents, the blind man is touched with the healing, saving hands of Jesus’ compassion and becomes fully human; now he can see. No longer trapped by his past; no longer bound by his fate; the battle is over. He has been set free.
That’s enough, isn’t it? My friends, we will probably never get rid of and will never fully understand the nature of sin and suffering; but what we can do is offer a hand – even if it’s a muddy, less than pure, hand – and do the work of God; let in some light, ease some pain, and bring some peace. If we can do that, we may not always hit the bull’s eye, but we will be on target.