Blinding Questions: John 9, Raymond Antrobus' poem "Miami Airport", and Spiritual Discernment (As your own poets have said . . .)

 

I love Raymond Antrobus’ poem “Miami Airport” (click on the title to read the poem). Raymond is a deaf, British poet with a Jamaican Father and an English mother, who explores the dark subject matter of racial inequality and ableism (discrimination in favor of able-bodied people) through the voice of a prejudicial TSA agent he encounters at the Miami Airport. The poem comes to life in a chaotic and uncomfortable way that grips you as if you’re listening while waiting in line, with your shoes off, about to go through the metal detector at the airport. When I first heard it, I truly felt the terror and vulnerability of it; the ominous marriage of power and prejudice in the form of thirty, manipulative questions. It’s poetic gold and one of the only poems in this series that after having heard it the first time immediately brought to mind a passage of Scripture – the Gospel of John, chapter 9. If one where to point to literary genius in the New Testament – John 9 should be top on the list. For it is in chapter 9 that the Apostle takes a historical account of a healing and turns it into a parable for all of us, a parable about truly seeing Jesus, Scripture, and others. I’d like to take us on that journey, like Raymond Antrobus, by considering the “blinding” questions (18 questions) and how they reflect spiritual blindness and how Jesus brings spiritual sight to help us discern and see God and others rightly. We’re going to see that blinding questions occur when you refuse to look at people and suffering, even while reading your Bible. Blinding questions occur when you proceed from a certitude that denies people’s lived experience. And finally, that people who can see are those who listen to Jesus, refuse to judge, speak humbly of their own experience, and can acknowledge what they don’t know.

1.    Blinding questions occur when you refuse to look at people and suffering, even while reading your Bible.

Curiously, being a disciple doesn’t automatically mean that you aren’t – blind. In fact, you should probably count on it or at least determine that all of us, Christian or not, are prone to macular degeneration. Don’t worry. It’s not your fault. It runs in the family. The first disciples struggled with it as well.

It’s the disciples who ask the first blinding question and it’s a question of Biblical blame: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” They are trying to understand what’s right in front of them, work with Scripture (always a critical element of discipleship) but forgot to look at the person. In Leviticus 21:18, for example, states that no priest can serve the LORD if he is blind. Deuteronomy 28:28 identifies “blindness” as a punishment for disobedience to God. The priest Eli (from the book of Samuel) is depicted as losing his sight because he has been disobedient to God, failing to rear his children rightly (1 Samuel 3:1-2). This is in the Bible – they are not spouting off without Scripture in hand, and Jesus won’t have it.

Don’t read Scripture without the Word of God (c.f. John 1:11, 5:36-40). Jesus will state such a position quite strongly: “³⁹ You study the scriptures thoroughly because you think in them you possess eternal life, and it is these same scriptures that testify about me, ⁴⁰ but you are not willing to come to me so that you may have life.” (John 5:39-40). It's meant to point to him, should be read like him and with him in mind. And Jesus always read the Bible with a focus on people’s wholeness, their inclusion, their embrace, the belief that every person, no matter how blind, is a site for the “works of God” (vs. 3). If your question is about some issue or doctrine in the abstract, without thinking critically about the teachings of Jesus and people’s lived experience, you will read the Bible blindly – I guarantee it. You will address people blindly. So read the Bible with Jesus glasses, which are tinted to help you see and love God and neighbor. That’s what we mean by stating as a church that we are first and foremost, “grounded in Jesus” – HE is the Word of God who reveals God - what God wants and what God does. It’s what we mean by stating that we are “freed by Scripture.” If your reading of the Bible, doesn’t free you to love God and others, you are reading it wrongly.

But it’s not just the disciples who suffer from a spiritual nearsightedness, the crowd also asks a question revealing their own myopia - that they never really saw the blind man or paid any attention to him. A 2018 poll showed that 67 percent of Americans find it “uncomfortable” to talk to a disabled person, who are 25 percent of the American population. I know we’re talking about first century Palestine and not twenty-first century America in our story but doesn’t it feel right that this same uncomfortability is at work. Think about it. Why doesn’t the crowd recognize him (vss. 8-9)? Why don’t they know his name but call him “man” (vs. 8)? They don’t because they always looked away rather than looked upon. This is why those who advocate for rights for the disabled point out that disability is a social construct. People are not disabled because of bodily differences but because of systemic barriers in a society that "looks away." And that social construct of fear and arrogance, or is it ignorance, make them truly the blind ones like our TSA agent who talks down to Raymond Antrobus and wants him to “prove” that he’s deaf.

If we return to John 9 notice that the only person who “saw a man” was Jesus, even though the disciples were present. It doesn’t say “they saw a man blind from birth” because they didn’t see a man – they saw an issue, they saw a Scripture passage, they saw an idea, but not a man. Funny enough, the only person in John 9 who sees Jesus in return (vs. 37) is the one who was blind. Get it?

Spiritual sight proceeds from a curiosity and ability to listen well to all truth and sources of wisdom. Jesus is the authority and source of wisdom, so is Scripture, and so is people’s own lived experience. If you don’t look to Jesus, read Scripture carefully as that which frees people, and can’t see real people and listen to them, you will be prone to many kinds of macular disorders that will leave you blind and asking the wrong questions. It’s recognizing that when Jesus says, “Humankind wasn’t made for the Sabbath but the Sabbath for humankind,” he was teaching us how to read Scripture and see.

2.    Blinding questions proceed from a cynical certitude that denies people’s lived experience.

The disciples and the crowd, we’ve seen, suffer from poor vision. The Pharisees, however, have a much worse problem. They are blind because they simply choose to cover their eyes.

The Pharisees asks invalidating questions, cynical questions, questions that shore up what they already believe to be true. The problem isn’t so much the questions they pose as the position of absolute certainty that they hold. They aren’t merely skeptical – willing to have a conversation and observe evidence with an open mind. They are cynical – refusing to change because of a closed mind. How do you know if you are blind like a Pharisee?

Well, here’s your eye exam in the form of four questions?

Do you make up your mind before you’ve heard all the facts? Do you ever change your mind?

¹⁹ “Is this your son?” they asked. “Is this the one you say was born blind? How is it that now he can see?”

²⁰ “We know he is our son,” the parents answered, “and we know he was born blind. ²¹ But how he can see now, or who opened his eyes, we don’t know. Ask him. He is of age; he will speak for himself.” ²² His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jewish leaders, who already had decided that anyone who acknowledged that Jesus was the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue.

John acknowledges that the parents know that the Pharisees have no interests in getting at the truth. They had “already decided.” Our TSA agents questions come from the same posture: “I know what English people, Deaf people, and teachers look like, and you don’t look like any of them. In fact, he’s so certain that he knows that Raymond must have drugs on him that he is utterly mystified by the fact that he doesn’t find them and still believes him to be guilty.

Do you cynically invalidate any experience that is not your own?

A second time they summoned the man who had been blind. “Give glory to God by telling the truth,” they said. “We know this man is a sinner.”

²⁵ He replied, “Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!”

When I was a young pastor I used to mercilessly mock Gospel tracts as theologically stunted, spiritually vacuous, and hopelessly ineffective. In one instance, I was seeking to impress a group of pastors with my wisdom and wit by lampooning such tracts only to be stopped by an older pastor who interjected and said, “O I wasn’t aware of this. Perhaps it was a mistake that I came to faith by reading a gospel tract that was on the floor of my jailhouse cell.” The irony and deception is the same. I knew the truth with certainty, had great reasons why these things didn’t work, and told them to people often. Too bad, I couldn’t see because I was covering my own eyes.

I’m not saying that experience is always the final arbiter of truth-telling. I’m saying that a lack of experience can often make you blind because of what you haven’t seen.

Do you always presume to teach and refuse to be taught and when in doubt, badger people and use insults?

²⁶ Then they asked him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?”

²⁷ He answered, “I have told you already and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples too?”

²⁸ Then they hurled insults at him and said, “You are this fellow’s disciple! We are disciples of Moses! . . . . ³⁴ . . . how dare you lecture us!

Having been called out for their own blindness, the Pharisees resort to that typical practice when one finds oneself against the ropes. Insult the witness. He turns the tables on them and playfully asks if they want to hear it again so that they can become disciples of Jesus. They erupt at the thought that they need to be taught and instead resort to insults rather than admit they have something to learn.

When you hear something you don’t like, do you want to throw people out?

³⁴ To this they replied, “You were steeped in sin at birth; how dare you lecture us!” And they threw him out. ³⁵ Jesus heard that they had thrown him out . . .

There is currently a sort of anti-curiosity at work in the world. We see it in our political discourse on both sides of the aisle. We see it in our churches, erecting fences over secondary doctrines. We see it in our families, who we no longer visit because ideological conflicts. I recently read about an author I truly like, named Brad Jersak, who commented that on his most recent book tour, he was only cancelled twice. Once, by a group a far-right conservatives who thought that his talk on “loving enemies” reflected a liberal agenda and the second time, by a group of far-left liberals who thought his talk on “loving enemies” reflected a conservative agenda of agreeing to support oppressors. It’s interesting to me that Jesus doesn’t reappear in our story until the one who had been blind has been thrown out. We must learn to sit in the messy middle while we hammer out and discern all that is going on in our world. We will never be able to be the people God wants us to be if we consistently refuse to be for and with one another. If we choose to cling to ideas over people or against people, we will imagine the Pharisaical reality that throwing people out is the only way. Then we will become a community where people hide any and all differences and real experiences for fear of losing what we all care about the most – relationships.

I can sort of hear the Pharisees echoing ominous power of the TSA guard. You think you are healed? You think you are restored? What have you not heard? It moves beyond an inability to see and becomes a willingness to denounce and destroy.

3.    The one who can see is the formerly blind person who listens to Jesus, refuses to judge, tells the truth of his experience, and acknowledges what he doesn’t know. He’s humble and teachable.

We’ve seen that faithful theology must always hold space for unknowing. An unholy reading of Scripture develops when we say the Bible alone without a spiritual center focused on Jesus and a refusal to acknowledge our own lived reality.

Some Christians cynically operate under the premise that humanity is so thoroughly wicked and corrupt that we can’t trust anyone and that the only solution is to have an answer for everything and win every argument. The assumption is that anyone who ask real and honest questions is part of the devil’s plot to sabotage the church’s faithful witness and God’s truth. In opposition to that, Henri Nouwen describes a thoughtful Christian as a teachable person who practices “learned ignorance” (NOTE: the only seeing person in our whole story is the Blind guy who refuses to judge whether Jesus is a sinner and who confesses what he doesn’t know, vs. 25):

These “are not individuals who can tell you exactly who God is, where good and evil are and how to travel from this world to the next, but people whose articulate not-knowing makes them free to listen to the voice of God in the words of the people, in the events of the day and in the books containing the life experience of men and women from other places and other times. In short, learned ignorance makes one able to receive the word from others and the Other with great attention.”

So the invitation for you is to become a person who can see. But perhaps you should first determine which group you belong to? Are you a disciple who has blindly used Scripture in ways that blame and alienate? Are you the crowd who looked away from those in need, turned a blind eye to those who are suffering and need recognition? Are you like the Pharisees? You refuse to change, to entertain the possibility that you might be wrong and have something to learn? I invite all of us to come to Jesus with humility and hope and offer the prayer – Lord Jesus, help us see.