IV Lent – April 3, 2011 – Year A
“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
It may well have been that question, posed by his disciples, that made Jesus decide to break the religious law and heal the blind man on the Sabbath.
It was probably that question.
I won’t go so far as to say that when Jesus heard the question, something snapped, but the answer they got back from him was swift and unequivocal: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. We must work the works of [the one] who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”
It’s quite possible that the disciples intended to make a casual inquiry about the blind man’s situation.
But Jesus took their question as a challenge.
Obviously, the notion that sin had caused this man’s blindness was repellent to him.
So he swung into action and caused a good deal of controversy in the process.
Needless to say, it wasn’t very long before the Pharisees got into the act.
They were called in essentially to find out how it was that a man who had been blind since his birth could now see.
If you think back on the story, you will remember that there are actually some pretty humorous moments in it, especially when the Pharisees ask the man for the second time how Jesus healed him and the man wonders whether they want to become Jesus’ disciples, too.
You can almost hear the Pharisees grinding their teeth.
Whatever it was that Jesus had done on the Sabbath was outrageous enough.
The notion that they might want to become Jesus’ disciples would have positively infuriated them.
Ironically enough, their fury made them blind, if you will, to the great wonder that had been wrought in their midst.
In several respects, today’s Gospel lesson, chronicling as it does Jesus’ challenging of the Law or, rather, his challenging of the religious leaders who often hid behind the letter of the Law—today’s Gospel lesson is especially fitting for the Fourth Sunday in Lent, which is sometimes called “Refreshment Sunday”.
Jesus’ challenging words: “We must work the works of the [the one] who sent me while it is day” are refreshing enough in themselves.
They shift what Jesus was about to do from the category of ordinary work to the category of divine creation.
Just as the Lord God stooped down and fashioned a human being out of the dust of the ground, so Jesus stoops down and applies mud from the dust of the ground to bring sight, where once there was none.
By healing the blind man, Jesus would finish God’s creation.
Finishing God’s creation was hardly ordinary work, but Jesus’ quarrel with the Pharisees went deeper than that, taking them to task for the narrowness of their overall view of things: Even ordinary, routine work could be seen as part of divine creation, if it accomplished good.
By opposing the healing of a blind man on the Sabbath the Pharisees put themselves in the position of unwittingly obstructing God’s continuing creation.
By insisting on the following the letter of the Law the Pharisees ended up denying life.
We usually use the term “religious leaders” to describe what the Pharisees were, but I think that Jesus’ main concern with them in this particular episode of his ministry was as teachers.
The Pharisees, after all, were highly visible examples of personal piety.
Unfortunately, whereas Jesus’ decision to break the strict Sabbath regulations was meant to bring wholeness and enhance life, the Pharisees’ stubborn insistence on the following the letter of the Law threatened to interfere with wholeness and stifle life.
Good teaching promotes growth and brings blessing.
Teaching that fails to promote growth can be a curse.
I am reminded of a cartoon I saw once in which a frowning classroom teacher addresses his charges in the following manner: “I expect you all to be independent, innovative, critical thinkers who do exactly as I say.”
Liturgy, which means “work of the people”, is also a way of teaching, and good liturgy, like good teaching, is supposed to promote growth—spiritual growth.
But the doing of liturgy can easily become a matter of rigid routine.
Slavish adherence to liturgical form can be as deadly as slavish observance of the Sabbath.
That’s why it helps to break our ceremonial patterns now and again to remind ourselves that our liturgy is only the means to an end and not an end in itself.
So after beginning the service for the last three Sundays with a silent procession into the church we began it this morning with a hymn.
And what a hymn!
“Now quit your care,” urges the hymn writer, Percy Dearmer, Anglican priest, poet, and musicologist active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with an abruptness that almost makes you wonder if Dearmer has something against Lent.
Well, he does, but it becomes clear, by the time we get to the hymn’s second stanza, that what he’s against is not Lent, but the abject observance of Lent.
Sackcloth and ashes and the grief they symbolize are not “Lent’s goal,” the poet insists.
Lent’s goal is “to be led to where God’s glory flashes”, to beauty, “where truth and light appear”.
After musing about the ideal fast that the prophet Isaiah proclaims: a call to feed the hungry, to banish oppression, to challenge injustice, to restore what has been laid waste, Dearmer goes on to identify the prize that such faithful striving will lead to: a paradise of Christian love…in this world.
A paradise on earth—the return, in a sense, to the pleasures of the Garden of Eden—is what historians Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, in Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire, believe the early Church sought to offer converts to the Christian faith—a paradise on earth.
For the first ten centuries of its existence, Professors Brock and Parker discovered in their research, the Church had no representations—no mosaics, no paintings, no statues—of the crucifixion, no images of Jesus hanging on the cross, and, with few exceptions, rather than a liturgy which emphasized Jesus’ death as an atoning sacrifice for the sins of the world, the Holy Eucharist was seen as a banquet—a love feast open to all—which emphasized Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection as the restoring of God’s people and of all creation to the realms of paradise.
(Apparently, these love feasts could get out of hand on occasion, at least as far as the apostle Paul was concerned; at one point in his letter to the Corinthian church he comes close to accusing some members of the congregation of turning the sacred liturgy into an orgy!)
Needless to say, discoveries of the magnitude made by Professors Brock and Parker cannot help but call the Church universal to reassess its very nature, not to mention its reason for being, not unlike the way Jesus obliged his audience to reassess the nature and purpose of the Sabbath, when he went ahead and healed the blind man in violation of the Law.
It is perhaps instructive that in several Christian denominations that are not as bound to a set liturgy as ours experimentation in the leading of worship based upon the discoveries of Professors Brock and Parker has already begun.
And I would be remiss if I did not report that our own cathedral was the setting this very weekend for a lecture/workshop by Professors Brock and Parker on how they came to write Saving Paradise or that the diocesan clergy conference I will be attending a week from tomorrow will be focusing on the implications of Brock’s and Parker’s research for the Church’s observance of Holy Week and Easter this year.
I might also add that hearing them speak the night before last and reading the first 100 pages of their book have made me decide to make a change in the order of our service this morning, a change that I will announce at the proper time and that I hope will prove, at least to a degree, reasonably refreshing.
For one thing, we will be using a shorter version of the Eucharistic prayer than we have been using these last few weeks; for another, this version places less emphasis on the atoning death of Jesus and more emphasis on his life, death, and resurrection.*
So perhaps our observance of Refreshment Sunday this year has served to remind us of a purpose of Lent that we can easily forget: Lent is not meant to dampen our spirits, but to revive them.
To paraphrase a helpful remark of a good friend and colleague: The purpose of Lent isn’t to take us up to Good Friday and to stop there; that would be a “dead end”. No, the purpose of Lent is to carry us all the way to the joys of Easter, grateful, forgiven, and refreshed.
*(Note: Rather than using Eucharistic Prayer I, BCP pp. 333-336, for the Great Thanksgiving during the Liturgy of the Table, Eucharistic Prayer II, BCP pp. 340-343, was used.)
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