The Hidden Light

1 Samuel 16. 1-13; Psalm 23; Ephesians 5. 8-14; John 9. 1-41 

I suppose a number of you have seen a shadow-play. The shadow-play takes place in the darkness. There’s this big screen with a fire lit behind it, and the audience watches as the puppeteers tell their story by casting silhouetted shadows on the screen. Because the characters are all in shadow, you can’t see their faces or the features of their dress, and there are no colours apart from black or white. Because of this, anyone who is watching must use their imaginations to fill in the gaps, to give form and emotional detail to the character’s faces as they make their journey’s through the highs and lows of the tale as it unfolds. Now, the story we read from John’s gospel just now works a bit like a shadow-play. The writer delivers his story not with colourful figures rich in detail, but with characters barely drawn, silhouettes in light and dark. And the reader, or the hearer in this case, is invited to read between the lines, to exercise discernment about the degree to which the story’s truth is visible for all to see, or secretly hidden in the shadows.

At first glance, what we have here is a simple miracle story about a Jewish man, born blind, whose sight is wondrously restored by Jesus on the Sabbath day and therefore cast out of the synagogue for his trouble. Eventually he becomes a Christian, a believer in Jesus. But look again. Is that all there is to this story?

Most commentators will tell you that the story is ‘really’ about faith, that faith is here represented as a seeing, with lack of faith as its opposite, represented here as a kind of spiritual blindness. Note that when Jesus finds the young man after he has been cast from the synagogue, he asks him a question: “Do you believe in the Son of Humanity?” The fellow replies, “And who is he, sir, tell me so that I may believe in him.” Jesus replies, “You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.” At that point, the young man cries out: “Lord, I believe” and worships him. This passage makes quite a solid link between seeing and believing. When the man ‘sees’ who Jesus is, suddenly he has faith in Jesus, the kind of faith which falls to its knees in worship. Seeing is firmly established as a metaphor for faith. And the case is apparently strengthened further in the commentary that follows, where Jesus says: “I came into the world for judgement so that those who do not see may see, and those who do not see may become blind”. In other words, Jesus comes to give faith to those without it, and to expose the lack of faith in those who pretend to have it. Faith is seeing, and lack of faith is blindness.

But hang on a minute. I’m not so sure that this traditionally correct approach is nuanced enough. Consider, if you will, the following questions. First, if faith is seeing, then why doesn’t John have the young man make his declaration of faith when first he is healed by Jesus? Why the long lag between seeing and believing? Second, and intimately related to this first question: if faith is seeing, then why does the young man not ‘see’ into the true identity of Jesus until right at the end of the story? When first asked who Jesus is by the Jews, the young man replies ‘He is a prophet,’ which is true, but only partly true. In the gospel of John, Jesus is pre-eminently not a only a prophet but the Christ, the Son of Humanity, the pre-existent Word of God made flesh. And later, when he is questioned more thoroughly, the young man declares that Jesus must have come from God, which is true, but again not true enough. In John’s gospel, Jesus not only comes from God, but is God: he has been as one with the Father from the beginning. And there is a further point which the traditional reading cannot account for. When the young man finally makes his confession of faith, it is not a ‘seeing’ which makes the difference, but a hearing. Jesus says to the man, “You have seen the Son of Humanity, I, the one speaking to you am he”. And it is then, and only then, that the man fall to his knees in worship. Did you catch that? The man had seen Jesus before, but it did not give him faith. Faith finally comes to him only in the wake of this self-revelatory speech of Jesus: “I am he”.

Now, why am I telling you all this? What does it matter if faith is a matter of seeing or a matter of hearing? What does it matter how faith comes, as long as it is faith? Well, it matters quite a lot actually. Because if faith comes by seeing, then it is not really faith. It is knowing. And knowing is the means by which we try to reduce God to our size and make of God some kind of idol that we can get our heads around. But a God we can get our heads around is not the Christian God, the God who made the heavens and the earth, the God of Jesus Christ. It is a God of our own making, a version of our dreams or fears, projected into the heavens and given the name ‘God’, a God we can control and domesticate. A tame God who never asks us to change.

The Gospel of John was actually written, in part, to combat that segment of church and society that had begun to associate sight, knowledge and faith in this idolatrous way. These people, who were later called Gnostics, believed that one could know God up close and personal, that one could have a personal hotline to Jesus and his power, that one could ascend to a direct knowledge of God through a secret path of wisdom which left behind the limitations and sufferings of the body and of ordinary life. To these beliefs and practices, John pronounced a resounding “NO!” No, he says, one may not escape the body and its sufferings, because even the divine one of God took on flesh and suffered like the rest of us. Indeed, John has the divinity or glory of God coming to light not in beatific visions or specialist knowledge, but in the disfiguration of a crucified man, raised above the earth. Jesus is indeed the light of the world for John, but this light lies hidden in the enigma of suffering and of signs that are difficult to interpret. So faith is certainly not about seeing and knowing. On the contrary, as Jesus says to the disciple Thomas, “Blessed are those who do not see, and yet come to believe” (20. 29).

If only these Gnostic ideas had died out with the Gnostics. But they have not. They are alive and well and living in your local branch of Christian fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is dangerous to genuine faith because it has no humility. It believes not only in right doctrine, and the ability to know without any form of doubt what right doctrine is. It believes in wrong doctrine, and the ability to locate it in others. It believes that there is a war going on between believers and unbelievers, and that it can calmly discern the difference between the two. And it believes, finally, that God is on its own side, but not on theirs. Fundamentalism is based on a faith which can see and know, rather than on a faith which believes and trusts in a God who withdraws from our eyes in the figure of the suffering one.

Note this too, that fundamentalism is alive and well not only within the churches, but also beyond the church in the general community. It surfaces, for example, in the certainty of people who approach the church for a ritual service, in baptisms, weddings and funerals. Many of these folk get quite upset when the church will not order these services according to the customer’s already-determined demands and purposes. Why? Because, in many cases, the “customer” is a fundamentalist of the neo-pagan variety, who cannot accept that the church has a calling and a duty to resist this new kind of cultural orthodoxy in the name of Christ.

To these modern Gnostics, who ask as the Pharisees did, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” Jesus replies, “If you were blind you would not have sin, but now that you say ‘We see,’ your sin remains.” You see, for Christians the point is not to be able to see, but to believe that God sees us, not to claim a certain, unassailable, knowledge or experience of God, but to trust that God knows us. The interesting thing about light, as the writer to the Ephesians notes, is that it exposes and makes visible everything in the world but itself. So if Christ is the light of the world, we can trust him to make visible our own paths through life, including the sin that so easily entangles. But we should not expect to see or experience Christ with any sense of certainty until that day when he is revealed in all his fullness. To stare into the sun is to be blinded. But blindness, for Christians, is not such a big deal. “Faith is the intimation of things not seen,” says the writer to the Hebrews (11.1). And Paul says something similar: “We walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor 5.7).

The life of faith turns out to be, then, not a full-colour motion picture for those who can see clearly, but a shadow play in which the fully sighted have no significant advantage over those who see not so well. The things of God are hidden in the enigmas of the world, in parables and signs which are difficult to interpret; and pre-eminently in the sufferings of Christ and those who suffer with him and for him by their baptism into his passion. Remember that the ‘healing’ our young man received was soon transmuted into persecution by those who refused to share his growing sense of faith.

So it is for all who are baptised into Christ’s ways. For that is the way of things in a world that prefers the light of the Television and the enlightenment of three-minute-interviews to the dark light of faith, hidden in the career of a suffering God. It is the world in which ministers of the gospel, no matter how hard we try to make ourselves understood, will only rarely be understood—because the people whom we address are blind to the God and gospel to which he is bearing witness. It is a world in which, as for the Jewish leaders in our story, the message of the gospel falls upon deaf ears because of this all-pervasive belief that God and the ways of faith are ours to possess and manipulate for the sake of our own consumer ends. In a world such as this, Christians are called not to know, but to be known, not to see, but to be seen by God, who gazes upon us with a love so wide and long and deep that it surpasses all our imaginings.

We lived in deeply uncertain times. The COVID-19 is only just beginning to bite, but it is being transmitted at an exponential rate consistent with a scenario in which our capacity to respond to all who are sick or dying will be quickly overwhelmed. What we ‘see’ and ‘know’ in this scenario is not at all comforting! Now is the time to actually activate our faith in a God who loves us. To look to Christ for a word of healing. For Christ has indeed promised to heal us, but not in the way a doctor might. The salve Christ offers is far more profound. Indeed, it is salv-ation. Salvation. A medicine that can revive and remake us even if we die. So do not fear. Do not fear even death. For the last enemy is death, and it has been overcome by Christ in his resurrection. Cling to him and you will be saved. Believe in him, and you will share his glory.

All glory be to God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—as in the beginning, so now, and forevermore.

Prepared for Lent 4 2020 on the First Sunday of the COVID-19 lockdown

I should be glad of another death

Texts:  Isaiah 60.1-6; Psalm 72. 1-7; Ephesians 3.1-12; Matthew 2. 1-12

 . . .  were we led all that way for
Birth or Death?  There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt.  I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

from T.S. Eliot, ‘The journey of the Magi’ (1927)

I have seen something.  Something which is difficult to recall with accuracy, and almost impossible to speak about.  Something wonderful, and terrifying, and intoxicating, and utterly strange.  What I have seen, I saw not with my eyes, nor even with my soul (whatever that is).  It was, rather, a feeling that I had, myself, been seen by another.  Seen transparently and utterly, as under a field of ultra-violet light, so that nothing of who I am or will become now remains hidden.  Seen in such a way as to transform my entire sense of who is the observer and who the observed.  So that the whole manner of my observation¬, whether of self or society, has been irrevocably changed.  What I see now is no longer what I saw before, even though I’m looking out on the same scenes, the same people.  It’s as if my seeing is charged, now, with the consciousness of that other, so that my seeing is always already what this other sees as well.  It was not so before I saw.

When the Magi set out on their journey, it was because they, too, saw something.  But what they saw is also difficult to name.  When Matthew says that it was a star that they saw, the star clearly evokes a peculiar and particular fact:  the birth of a king for the Jews.  The star rises in the east, a permanent sign and symbol for the rising of new hopes and expectations for the downtrodden people of Judea, hopes that are coming to birth in the babe of Bethlehem.  That is what Matthew, I think, intends to say about the meaning of the star.  And yet there is a logic in his story which works against all that.  For it is not the babe’s own people who see the star, or recognise it’s significance.  It is not Herod, the king of the Jews, or his counselors who journey to pay homage to the newly born Messiah.  Rather, it is Magi from the East who accomplish all this.  Gentiles.  Natives of a foreign land.  Infidels.  So what did they see?  What did they see that could possibly move them to become interested in the significance of a minor principality, a tiny outpost of the great Roman Empire?  What moved them to leave where they were, to say goodbye to all that was solid and familiar, to put aside responsibilities and livelihoods?  What moved them to put relationships on hold, to put plans on hold, to change direction altogether and journey into a difficult and dangerous land?  What could they possibly have seen to make things so?

Perhaps they saw what I have seen.  Perhaps they saw something that is difficult to name.  Perhaps they were grasped by an experience of having, themselves, been seen by some other.  An Other whose irrefutable presence imbues one’s own seeing with a vision ‘far more deeply interfused’, so that the ordinary shines with beatific glory, and former gods, former objects of desire, are rendered as lifeless and void as plastic.  Perhaps they saw, therefore, that the baby of Bethlehem was both far more and far less that a Messianic pretender for a provincial people.  Perhaps they saw here something of rather more cosmic significance, the arrival of something the world had never seen before, and yet had yearned for since its first creature drew breath.  Perhaps they saw in the child the possibility of that which seemed so very impossible.  Perhaps they were surprised by . . .  by JOY.

When one considers the state of things, it is indeed difficult, I think, to believe that joy is possible.  Most of the world’s people live in poverty.  And they live in poverty because of the excessive greed of the rest of the world, the greed of those of us who belong to the so-called ‘developed economies’.  Because the economic elites require endless consumer choice at the lowest possible price, the poor are condemned to short lives of hard labour and ill health.  And this is not simply a 1st World/ 3rd World phenomenon either.  Even within the 1st World economies, there are those who must work themselves to death so that the elites may continue to enjoy their consumer freedom.  That is why we have sweat-shops.  That is why the large franchises employ ‘casual’ work forces (=low wages, few rights).  That is why we have a huge ‘informal’ work force which receives almost nothing in return for its economic contribution.  

And here is the most joyless bit of all.  Whether you are rich or poor, a hard worker or a hard drinker, whether you’re the CEO of Telstra or a technician who’s just been made ‘redundant’, our joy is being stolen away by advertising.  Because advertising wants to sell us something, something we don’t really need.  And when we get that something, whether by the divine right of the rich or by sheer hard work and ingenuity, we know straight away that we didn’t really need it at all.  Because we still feel empty.  Beneath the shiny happy exterior we put on for our friends, beneath the happy-go-lucky persona of the working-classes or the cool and confident aire of the middle-to-rich, we are still empty.  The pages of New Idea and Cosmopolitan are full of people who still haven’t found what they’re looking for.

In T.S. Eliot’s extraordinary poem, he imagines himself to be one of the Magi turning up at the birth of Jesus.  The journey has been hard, and long, in a thoroughly twentieth-century way.  Its been too hot and too cold, and the transport has not been at all comfortable.  Not like home.  Their porters and servants were only interested in booze and women, and each town seemed either too expensive or too hostile or too alien.  And, of course, the stumbling attempt to walk against the grain of all that is consumable and fashionable seemed, for much of the time, to be nothing but sheer foolishness.  But when they arrived, when they actually found that which came to find, they were utterly and completely unprepared.  For while they were witnesses to a birth, a birth much like all the other births they have ever seen, this was a birth which induced a kind of death in all touched by its power.  So much so, that when the Magi returned to their own lands and their own lives, they found that their old obsessions, their old desires and plans have disappeared.  That the people and pastimes they had once admired seemed now to possess no more substance than that of shadows, clutching at worthless gods.

When people of faith see something, or rather, when they become aware of a gracious presence whose vision suffuses and possesses their own, the world is utterly changed.  Black and white suddenly appears colourful.  The hopeless situation becomes pregnant with possibility.  The brick wall which impedes all progress becomes an opportunity to learn rock-climbing.  Not, I must stress, in psychologically disturbed ways, which seek to deny and sublimate the very real pain and darkness of life.  No.  The new way of seeing is about depth and complexity.  And about double-vision.  While acknowledging the painful realities, the changed vision I’ve been describing does not allow those realities to become totalized, to take over the world and rule there without rival.  The vision granted by faith is about discerning, even in the midst of the very worst that life can dish out, the real but hidden properties of light, hope, love, joy.  Seeing those things which are ordinarily hidden, naming them, and so bringing them into the light.

According to Eliot, the Magi suffered a death in order to become mystics, mystics who could see that the birth of a provincial messiah was also the possibility of their own rebirth in the cosmic plan of God.  So too, I would encourage all gathered here this morning to continue on that same journey.  The journey where despair and darkness is refused its ultimate power.  Where the advertisers are exposed as charlatans.  Where the all-pervasive wrongs of the world are no longer allowed to be all-pervasive.  Where the seemingly pointless birth of a provincial king in the ancient world of Rome is no longer regarded as pointless.  Where love and joy and peace are discerned and named and allowed to flourish.  And that which seemed impossible becomes a possibility once more.

This homily was first preached at South Yarra Baptist Church on the Feast of the Epiphany 2003.