“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” —John 9: 2
Think about that question for a moment. We like to imagine ourselves as enlightened people who don’t play the blame game when it comes to misfortunes. But think about the way big disasters are reported on the news media. Day One, we get news of a big explosion or shoot-out or accident. People are interviewed as they wait to hear terrible news. Then we get tired of seeing people being frightened or in pain. So on Day Two we’re told that questions are already being asked about how it was that the boat sank or the crazy man got hold of a gun or the security curtain was breached. And on Day Three the inquisition is in full swing and somebody’s already under pressure to resign. ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, this man or the government, this man or the multinational corporations, that this man was born blind?’ Somebody must be to blame. Stuff doesn’t just happen.
The two answers that the disciples offer Jesus represent the two conventional ways of doing politics. The first answer is, this man sinned himself, and became blind as a result. This is the theory of personal responsibility. (We’re told in the very first sentence of this story that the man had been blind from birth. So it’s not clear what kind of sin the man could have committed in the womb to deserve being made blind.) It’s obviously a limited theory, but that has never affected its popularity. If people are in trouble, tell them it’s because they’re lazy, tell them it’s because they’re racially inferior, tell them to go figure, tell them it’s because they made bad choices. Personal responsibility is what the politics of the right has always been essentially about.
But the disciples offer a second option to Jesus: the man’s parents sinned. It wasn’t his fault; it was someone else’s. He was an innocent victim of other people’s misdeeds. This is the conventional politics of the left. It’s wrapped up in the jargon of structural evil, and the hissing noises that say the problem is the system. Just as the right seems to evacuate the stage of all other characters (the disciples, the parents, the neighbors and the Pharisees disappear out of the story leaving just the man and God), so the left crowds the stage with all these characters and more, meticulously and suspiciously plotting the economic dependence of one group on another, the vested interests of a third, the damaging effects of the Jerusalem sewage system that leads to infant blindness and the culpable neglect of the beggar’s needs for dignity, opportunity and decent health care.
It’s important for Christians to recognize that behind each of these two conventional political arguments is a rival theology, expressed in a rival view of sin. The first view tends to say the problem is humanity’s fall. We were created free and in that freedom we always freely chose what was good. But when humanity fell we lost that ability. We retained the gift of freedom, the ability to choose, but we lost the gift of goodness, the ability to choose well. The solution is to ask Christ to direct one’s life and the Holy Spirit to empower one’s will, so in St. Paul’s words, it’s no longer I who live, it’s Christ who lives in me. Baptism marks the focal point of that transition from freedom to responsibility.
The second view by contrast is not so much interested in the fall. It tends to see humanity less as a sinner than as a child. For the left there isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with the world, it’s just that we need to do more research, offer more love, work out a better system, and agree on better rules to make sure everyone’s innate goodness comes to the surface. We’re all on a slow journey from ignorance to wisdom, and Jesus offers not so much a syringe to suck out our poison as a key to unlock our prison. Whereas the soft-focus movies of the right are about gang leaders turning to Jesus and becoming champions of troubled youth, or orphans pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and becoming global entrepreneurs, the poster children of the left are the teacher who loved a delinquent boy enough to see him go to college or the attorney who challenged the law that discriminated against the immigrant girl.
The irony is that the left believes, sometimes despite overwhelming evidence, in innate human goodness, but is associated with meddling taxation and legislation; meanwhile the right believes, just as surely, in sheer human sin, but is associated with leaving people alone in their wealth or poverty.
This story of the blind man at the beginning of John 9, shows not only that our conventional political answers are elaborate responses to the problem of human suffering, but that it has always been so. Politics has always been theology. Behind every church policy, behind every relief program, behind every educational outreach ministry, behind every budget discussion, behind every search for a new pastor, lies this same set of questions and possible answers: why are things wrong, and how do we make them better?
And this is the point where Jesus responds to his disciples’ question. He starts with the unforgettable words: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” Human suffering and disadvantage are fundamentally opportunities to discover the glory of God. We begin not with blame or with strategy but with worship. This is the first lesson of the politics of Jesus: there can be no justice and no righteousness unless there is right worship. Every time we go into a place of hardship or distress, whether our own or someone else’s, we go expecting to be overcome with wonder at the glory of God.
It’s sometimes said that politics shouldn’t be about people, it should be about issues. But issues are simply generalizations about people. And there are three types of people surrounding Jesus in this story: At the beginning, Jesus is with his disciples. The politics of Jesus is about accountable communities who seek to imitate Jesus’ pattern of life. They stay close to his incarnation, so they know the divine is revealed through the very human and the truly human is known only through the divine. They stay close to his ministry, so they know who he spends time with and who is closest to his heart. They stay close to his cross, or at least they should do, so they know the cost of his witness is terrifying. And they stay close to his resurrection, so they know that forgiveness is the way he unlocks the treasure store of the past and eternal life is the way he unlocks the limitless promise of the future.
Then most obviously Jesus is with the man born blind. The first sentence of the story doesn’t include the word ‘a.’ It just says, Jesus saw “man, blind from birth.” In other words, Jesus saw humanity, humankind, the human condition. Jesus sees us but we can’t see Jesus. That’s the way the story begins. And Jesus mixes clay, just the way God formed Adam from the dust of the earth. God recreates humanity through Jesus. That’s what this miracle is telling us. And Jesus puts the clay on the blind man’s eyes. In Jesus, God touches our lives. That’s what the story is saying. And Jesus tells the man to wash, or we may say be baptized. Jesus turns this man from a beggar into a missionary. That’s what we see in this story. And then suddenly there’s a commotion and everyone wants to know who and what and how and why. And the man simply says two words, “I am” – in Greek, ego eimi. The first words of all Jesus’ famous sayings, and the very words God uses in Exodus 3 when Moses asks “What is your name?” I am. In other words, at the start of the story I was called humanity, but the only word for what has happened since is … God.
So the politics of Jesus is with humanity, with the human condition, with the poor, with the beggar, with the person whose disability dominates his life, and the politics of Jesus is about new creation, touching the outcast and empowering for ministry, letting loose the energy pent up by despair, disadvantage and derision.
And then thirdly Jesus seems to find himself in the company of the Pharisees. And sometimes you know when you’re getting something right, because the people that run things locally want to meet you and find out more about you and see if you can be domesticated into their way of seeing and doing things. And if you can’t or won’t they’ll doubtless make life difficult for you. So the politics of Jesus in this story is making people uncomfortable, people who believe God and society and health and propriety are theirs to judge and order and dictate.
And the irony of this story is that the person we thought we were going to pity and to patronize, the man born blind, turns out to be a better disciple than the disciples and a disarmingly disingenuous witness in the face of the powers. Don’t miss the humor when the man says to the Pharisees, “Do you want to be his disciples, too?” He’s making the disciples face up to their own timidity and the Pharisees face up to their own refusal to see. This isn’t a hierarchical story in which the disciples come out best, the poor next, and the self-righteous nowhere. The disciples are embarrassed like the Pharisees. We’re not supposed to see ourselves as the perceptive ones in this story. We’re supposed to identify with “humanity”, collectively personified in the man born blind. And the way to make sure we’re not blind at the end of the story is to admit that we were blind at the beginning.
