Three Healings of the Blind: Meaning for Today

…the doctrine of original sin exactly expresses the view of all the New Testament writers: that all human beings, though capable of union with God, are born out of communion with him. It might be better to call it ‘original alienation’, since sin is now generally taken to refer to sins we commit (‘actual’ sins as opposed to ‘original’ in the old vocabulary).

There is no need to take this estranged state to be the result of a historical ‘Fall’, still less to suppose that the faithless or unbaptised are automatically damned; but the fundamental meaning of ‘original sin’ still feels like a true diagnosis of our human condition. We feel alone and exiled in a strange, unimaginably vast and otherwise apparently empty universe whose meaning and purpose are not clear to us. The prospect of our own death and the death of those we love seems to make it even more meaningless. The fact of sickness and suffering can sometimes make it feel actively hostile. The power of sin and selfishness…oppresses us. Yet at the same time we have intimations that there is a meaning to our existence that transcends the physical world. We find it hard to accept that our highest values and experiences of love or beauty are simply reducible to chemical configurations in the brain. Most of us still have an instinct to believe in God…but…we cannot be certain that God isn’t just a projection of our own needs and longings, a way of keeping going when it might otherwise all seem pointless…

This self-enclosure, the existential unrelatedness  is the spiritual blindness and deafness of  which Scripture speaks, and it takes the miracle of God’s intervention to pierce through it. That is not to say that God had ever left the world completely in the dark. To differing degrees, in every age and every culture people have seen something of his light and reality. But in Christ the fullness of God’s light broke into the darkened world…

The gospel is above all a gospel of restored relationship…the first restoration of that relationship is very appropriately described as moving from darkness to light, the first opening of our spiritual eyes to the light of God’s reality and presence with us. The conversion of Saul on the Damascus road was said to be accompanied by a dazzling light which blinded him until he was baptised into Christ, when the ‘scales fell from his eyes’ and he became able to see again. In baptism the imparting of that new light of spiritual vision is symbolised by the giving of a lighted candle, with the command to ‘shine as a light in the world, to the glory of God the Father’…But it is important to see, as Mark’s miracle at Bethsaida and John’s story of the man born blind both remind us, that enlightenment and conversion are always partial and gradual…still in this world we walk by faith not sight (2 Corinthians 5.7).

We also have to face the disturbing fact that, as individuals or as a church, we can lose the light of faith or mistake it altogether. In the book of Revelation, St John writes to the church in Laodicea – the rich, complacent, lukewarm church that still thinks it sees, but in reality seems to have turned its gaze on itself…

Such a church, or such a Christian, desperately needs new vision and may frequently pray for new vision – but in fact does not want new vision at all, but only more energy to carry on doing the same old things in the same old way. Real new vision, God’s new vision, always brings challenge and change. But if we rule change out beforehand, it negates the prayer. The greatest danger…is the kind of blindness exemplified by the Pharisees. This is the mechanism of the will…which enables us determinedly not to see the truth when it is unmistakeably presented to our eyes. …And we must note carefully: this is the special sin of religious people, when we get so bound up in our own interpretation of Scripture and tradition, or in preserving our religious institutions and the status quo, that in order to protect them we will be prepared to turn truth, reason, love and justice upside down – all in the name of God himself. It is the syndrome that down the centuries has led so many Christians to suppress their best human instincts in order to …oppress those whose vision differed from theirs, and to claim Christ’s sanction for it….The sin of the Pharisees drove them to crucify Jesus, and it remains the deadliest sin to which the religious are prone.

This extract is taken from ‘The Meaning in the Miracles’ by the Very Revd Jeffrey John. (pages 136-140)