I once was blind

Readings: 1 Samuel 16:1-13, Psalm 23, Ephesians 5:8-14, John 9:1-41

We human beings have not infrequently been certain that we’ve got it all figured out. We find ourselves defining the inscrutable: categorizing things as good and bad, desirable or not, praiseworthy or contemptible. Certain qualities of each are outlined. We stick to those with remarkable alacrity—at least, until we decide to redefine them.


As common as false understandings of our reality are counter stories which contest them. In the seventies, one manifestation was Marlo Thomas’s “Free to Be You and Me” project, which sought to counter dualisms which placed man above woman, rich above poor, et cetera. Against popularly propagated fairy tales which suggested that one’s highest aspirations should be to find a prince and settle down, Thomas offered figures like Atalanta, a princess who wanted to be a scholar, a woman who wanted to be independent. The overarching message of “Free to Be You and Me” was that good is a more complex concept than we have traditionally allowed it to be.

Marlo Thomas’s project was stunning and important. It was conceptually also less than new. Where troublesome dualisms exist, counter-stories crop up to combat them. Examples of this are ancient: while some will always be content to view the world from an either/or perspective, others, perhaps even particularly among the religious, know that reality, like the God behind it, is more complex.

God is great; and yet to say that God is great imposes any number of connotations. By declaring God great, we imbue God with certain expectations, and burden God’s creation similarly. The same is true with much that we uphold as virtuous and desirable; we think we know what to expect of that which we align with grandeur. But as our chapters this week remind us: all things great defy our expectations and have the potential to surprise us in their full revelation, and this is especially true of what is God’s.

1 Samuel deals with kingship. More specifically, it deals with the throne in Judah, with the king in Jerusalem, with the anointed one, or messiah, on Israel’s throne. It recounts the story of the selection of the second king, one often thought of as Israel’s greatest: David himself. But what is interesting about 1 Samuel is that it introduces a David who predates the marvels and highs of his years as the monarch. We do not meet a man of great stature, an imposing or particularly impressive figure; he is not a prince decked out in princely attire. Rather, the David we meet is a mere shepherd. He’s so far from threatening that Saul doesn’t even enter the tale to express concern over maintaining the throne against him.

1 Samuel reduces messianic expectations to their barest form. Israel would later anticipate a great ruler of the late David variety: powerful, of great military prowess, visibly capable of protecting and upholding the nation. But in 1 Samuel God warns that such qualities are, at best, peripheral: “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the LORD does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). However opulent David’s kingship became, however innumerable his kingly victories, we sense that his importance was never tied into his impressive position in the world; it was rather something central to his being, some inner inclination, some interior depth only he and God could comprehend. His “successes” as a monarch become almost secondary.

Who was the David who God selected to be anointed? Less the trickster who bested Uriah; less the weapon savvy boy who defeated Goliath. The David God loved did these things, of course; but the David God loved was first and foremost a tender of sheep, a “ruddy [boy], [who] had beautiful eyes, and was handsome” (1 Samuel 16:12). He was simple, good, and unexpected.

If 1 Samuel reminds us not to seek great world figures out in expected places, it also reminds us that those who enjoy blessings in life do not necessarily do so as a reward for implicit virtues. Assuming that happiness and comfort are deserved, and tribulations likewise, has been another misstep in religion. From biblical times through the dissemination of the “Protestant work ethic,” the myth that we reap the rewards and just desserts of our deeds in this life has been a sometimes failing within Christian life.

In John, we find the gospel writer indicting some Pharisees for such mistaken beliefs. Are the blind born blind because they are sinners, and those with sight given sight because they are good? Of course not, Jesus rebuffs. Not only God, but humanity, is more complex than that reduction.

Jesus, on the Sabbath, encounters a man who has been blind all of his life. His neighbors have further afflicted him with suspicion: his blindness is understood as a punishment, either for his own sins or because of his parents’. But Jesus says that his condition cannot be so easily understood: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him” (John 9:3). Just as we feel inclined to declare his blindness proof of either God’s inscrutability or injustice—what benevolence is implied by a God who does such a thing to an innocent man just to prove a point?—Jesus spits in the dirt, forms mud, rubs it on the man’s eyes and cures him.

Jesus calls himself the light of the world; he is certainly this man’s light (John 9:5). The man goes from being scorned as a certain sinner, to being in perfect control of his senses, and perfectly able to testify on Jesus’s behalf; he becomes, automatically, a figure of importance in his community. “Here is an astonishing thing!” he says, “Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing” (John (9:31-32).

Jesus gives him new life; more than this, because of what he had suffered, the formerly blind man is able to appreciate life and its gifts in a way those around him cannot.

And what of those who could see all along? Jesus reveals that it is they, because they take their blessing for granted, who have actually always been blind. He uses certain Pharisees as an example. They cannot understand why he has healed a man on the Sabbath. They cannot understand why he appears to reject God’s rules. But Jesus says: “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind” (John 9:39).

He says this to those who think that the injunction against Sabbath work outweighs the good of healing the afflicted; they ask, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” (John 9:40) But Jesus finds their discomfort with his act proof enough that they are: “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘we see,’ your sin remains.” You can see and be sightless; you can blind yourself to God by presuming to claim you’ve comprehended God’s ways. To have power is not proof of God’s favor; to be afflicted and yet trust in God—to maintain that ability to trust in God beyond reason—may be.

These are stories of reversals and divine surprises, and they may well serve as a reminder to us not to get complacent when it comes to understanding God and God’s ways. We should take care to avoid absolutes, to praise what is outwardly impressive as proof of God’s favor, to condemn that which seems different as necessarily bad.

If those who God anoints were found among shepherds and stone smiths, as each of this week’s messianic characters respectively were, than looking for God’s guidance from those who sit on thrones and live in high houses alone must certainly suspect. We must turn our eyes to all. We must believe that God’s beauty does not exclusively shine out from those who have had an easy life. God comes via the humble; God’s voice is on the lips of the meek. When whole communities are condemned as bad or sinful because they have not had it easy, we must understand that participating in that condemnation is not God’s work; refuting it is.

We have to also avoid discourse which equates creature comforts alone with blessings. If when we say our evening prayers, we find ourselves listing material things most among our praises or wants, there may be some convolution at work. Those who Jesus called blind in John had things; what they lacked was the ability to see beyond them to God. The greatest imaginable blessing, it seems, is standing in God’s light. To live life with ease is not proof of God’s love; to face difficulties is not proof of his rejection.

There are those among us who say that God hates some people, or another. We should read their injunctions alongside John, and see what happens when we compare them to those who are willfully blind. We should stand those called “hated” up alongside Jesus, who “breaks rules” by healing on the Sabbath: is the good of his mercy not similar to the good of their love? Aren’t love and mercy at the heart of all “rules”?

There are those who claim that natural disasters are acts of divine judgment. We should similarly read those claims against the ridicule coming from the blind man’s neighbors: was he blind because he sinned? Because his parents did? Can we not assume that greater burdens, then, are as disassociated from our deeds?

Our world is much more inscrutable than we’d like to believe. The Bible underscores this, though there are some among us who would claim that its worldview is simple, and attached to either/ors. Yet so much is still a mystery, and we risk blinding ourselves to the enigmatic divine by reducing all of it to so very little.

The greater task, and the more worthwhile one, is to dare to struggle to see: to locate God in humble places; the observe God’s grace at work where we have not always thought to look for it. Faith, in this way, is not a resting place but a constant search; we need only to adjust our eyes to the road.

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Hope does not Disappoint

Readings: Exodus 17:1-7, Psalm 95, Romans 5:1-11, John 4:5-42

Texts like these, which place a high premium on faith, can be dangerous. I submit that we’re meant to read them as didactic, but not in a prescriptive way: God does not intend for us to doggedly wait at the edge of dehydration for water to be drawn forth from a rock; nor are we meant to rely on Jesus as our only source of refreshing draughts.


God “has our backs,” so to speak, but only insofar as we have enough faith in heaven to do what is requisite and bring our own health about. The stories of Moses and Jesus are successful because their miracles work: Moses offers drink to all in the exodus community; Jesus convinces a Samaritan woman that he is the Jewish messiah and the one true source of “living water.” But it seems certain that these pursuits are successful because of the trust, in God, of those who invoke them.

When Moses dies, Exodus says of him that none have arisen like him, before or after. He who God rescued from death. He who was called upon to incite plagues and free Israel from bondage. He who sat with God on Mt. Moriah and received the law. He who parted the sea. He who drew water forth from a rock.

Moses’s biography is rife with miracles. Certainly Exodus still understands that his grandeur is contingent upon the favor and interaction of God; praising him always involves praising the God behind him. Moses was no magician. He was an Israelite who listened to God, and who fulfilled God’s requests; because he listened, great things happened for all of Israel.

There is a midrash which treats the parting of the Sea of Reeds as a miracle of faith. This retelling says that Moses struck his staff upon the waters as God had commanded, but that nothing happened. As Egypt was fast on Israel’s heels, Moses struck the water again, but again to no avail. The midrash says that it was not until an ordinary Israelite, staffless and noncommissioned as a prophet, waded into the sea trusting God’s promise that the miracle was effected. This Israelite was incautious; no dipping of toes or testing of waters marked his act, but simply a push ahead, until the water covered him, until at last God relented and let the people through. The moral? Have faith without signs. Know without seeing. Do, knowing that it will matter.

Moses’s staff, which was stripped of authority in that midrash, appears in Exodus 17 lauded as the staff that split the sea; it is herein used to bring water forth from a rock. Again, this act’s efficacy relies on the faith of one Israelite, herein Moses. Logic defies any declaration that such behavior works for sating thirst. The people have no reasonable reason to trust it, except insofar as God has said that this is how they’ll find their nourishment.

All of Israel was adrift in the desert, and with nothing to drink (Exodus 17:1). Its people despaired of their situation: out of slavery into certain, anguished death in the desert!, they complained (Exodus 17:3). Moses carried their complaints to God. God promised to stand before the rock at Horeb and, upon Moses’s striking it with the staff, draw enough water forth from it to quench the thirst of all the people.

So Moses does; so it is (Exodus 17:7). Living water flows forth at the will of this invisible, present, active God. The people are “saved.”

The Gospel of John also engages the notion of thirst and spiritual quenching. The miracle in exodus was rendered in literal terms: the bodies of the Israelites needed to be sustained, and this is what the miracle accomplishes, moreso than feeding faith. John is reticent to make such commitments: his chapter speaks both of bodily thirst, as Jesus beseeches the Samaritan woman to address his at the well, and spiritual thirst, which is more metaphorical and to which, the Gospel suggests, faith in Jesus is the answer (John 4:7, 14).

The Jesus in John almost disregards bodily thirst as ultimately important, seeking instead to establish that Jesus himself is the response to all true human need: “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again,” he says of the well water, “but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life" (John 4:13-14). Jesus nearly mocks the notion that the water he’s requested of the Samaritan woman can sustain in the way his own “living water” does: he, the messiah, alone can inspire the spirit and truth amongst a worshipful crowd; he, alone, can proclaim all truth (John 4:23, 25).

Such different insights! Read in tandem, these texts could be made to inform improper understandings of one another. In Exodus, the water Moses called forth strengthens the people bodily, and enables them to continue along their journey to promised Israel. In John, the Jesus who gives water via his spirit is less concerned with sustaining the body than he is in maintaining a direct line to God. Miracles feed the body; the messiah feeds the soul. The non-miraculous figures in both chapters benefit from the faith which draws spiritual and bodily satiation forth. God provides. God is trusted to.

I think it is best to defy reading these texts as if they belong to a contiguous narrative meant to validate the person of Jesus as the Christ. Exodus teaches us that, even when we’re in dire straits, God stands before us and answers our needs. John seems to imply that God accomplishes this most in the person of Jesus, who is aware not only of the thirsts of the body, but of those of the soul.  Both belong to a story about what God has bestowed upon the world. Christians locate the greatest manifestation of this in Jesus, but how unfortunate it would be to allow our fervor over him to diminish our awe over other miracles.

“Trust.” “Faith.” What simple values are drawn forth from these miracle stories, these tales of theological clarification. And yet inspiring both virtues seems to be at the heart of each of the stories, so that adding Romans to their midst produces this insight: “we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Romans 5:3-5). Our greatest needs are to be embraced as opportunities for God to act in our lives.

We are not meant to stand at the edge of the Sea of Reeds, waiting; we are asked to dive in and trust that God will save. We would be misguided to stand at the well and shrug off Jesus’s assertions that he is a messiah simply because the messianic hopes have not been realized; we are asked to believe, and to share our belief. We are not meant to bemoan the needs of our bodies; we are meant to relinquish those needs to God, trusting that none are so great that Heaven cannot, or would not, respond to them.

Water does not always flow at Horeb. The messiah does not always sit at our wells, offering proofs that he is so. The spaces where we need sometimes do not seem to fill in. And yet, we wait. And we trust. And in the meantime, we do. We ackowledge that God saw fit to put water at places other than just Horeb, and we seek it out. We hope that God wrote divine truth on our hearts so that we can trust ourselves to know without hearing. We believe that no need is so great that it cannot be met. We use our faculties, ackowledging them as gifts.

We trust. We do. And God will.


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You Can't Always Get What You Want

Readings:  Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7, Psalm 32, Romans 5:12-19, Matthew 4:1-11

A column appeared in the New York Times this week from a professor in Oman, a country which, like many Middle Eastern nations, is experiencing citizen unrest. Yet it was unlike accounts from neighboring nations, where the resistance of despots and tyrants led to rejoicing; rather, the writer suggested that his neighbors were out of touch, and were demanding of their leadership petty conveniences which they did not legitimately require.


“We have love for our Sultan,” the writer said, “who brought us out of darkness and honored our rights.” In the streets, the citizens have nonetheless demanded capriciously more; and though their requests seemed to have arisen not out of need, and increasingly were voiced without dignity, the Sultan appeased them. The author of this article was left incensed and embarrassed. Why protest a rule that lacks injustice?

The concept of wanting more than what we have, even in periods of plenty and grace, is familiar to our readings, and to the season of Lent itself. This is a time in which we’re supposed to be especially attuned to the nature of obedience to God; we’re meant to cultivate gratitude and to fast from what is superfluous. To obey, and self-deny, all in order to move closer to the divine.

The concept of obedience lacks obvious appeal. Rules have the dual effect of rendering what they’re built around both forbidden and tantalizing. The truism that we want what we cannot have can be amply backed: we see narratives proving it in the Bible; we’re all too familiar with instances of craving what’s unavailable in our lives, and in the lives of others around us.

Disobedience is a tricky vice, because it is both seductive and stunting. The impulse toward it grows in the spaces which keep us isolated in our humanity, which prevent us from reaching our divine potential. The story of Adam’s disobedience in the garden is as much our story. It bespeaks one human constant. Desire then, as now, seems to sprout with the introduction of a “no.”

It would be too easy to valorize obedience simply by saying that rules exist “for our own good.” That has not always been the case in human history, and we certainly find the biblical rule maker frequently inscrutable. The Hebrew Bible contains 613 mitzvoth, commandments, and while some of them seem to ensure our betterment, the “why?” behind many is not self-evident. The scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel is among many who have asserted that the why is not the point; understanding follows obedience, rather than being its cause.

Our two primordial figures in Eden were placed in a garden replete with sources of sustenance—life was theirs beyond their asking, given without even reference to the worth of the recipients. Eden was unearned; it was a gift. All that was required of them was that they avoid feeding of one tree: “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die” (Genesis 2:16-17). God does not justify this rule, but simply assures that severe consequences would follow the breaking of it.

The “no” appealed to Adam and Eve as persuasively as the serpent. Their desire did not arise out of need; it was born out of curiosity. What might the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil be like? Would the taste of it thrill? What experiences could it impart? Could it make of them gods?

Curiosity was too much for them. They fell quickly from innocence to guilt. And as much as we empathize when we recall the thud, their story is also an appropriate cautionary one for our entrance into Lent. Obedience prepares and strengthens us; it’s the antidote to unnecessary shame and confusion. Obscuring God by following impulses can cause only discord and separation.

What do we want that does not correspond to need? What obscures our views? Man’s rules are not the same as God’s, and we cannot escape the reality that, by maintaining only the imperative to love, our theologies transform obedience into a murky concept.

By helping our neighbors, we obey God; by living in accordance with concern for others, and for ourselves as the recipients of Jesus’s message. Great care seems to indicate obedience. Perhaps when unjust structures are toppled, we reclaim some of our innocence; perhaps we honor it with kind words.

If our first lesson for Lent is to try to obey, our second, heralded by the gospel reading, is to resist grand temptations. Our forty day fast in preparation for Easter recalls Jesus’s temptation in the desert; we effectually stand with him by way of our own ritual self-denials. And yet our temptations are not precisely the same: no one encourages us to make bread of stones, or jump from high places expecting to remain intact, or offers us kingdoms (Matthew 4:3, 6, 9). We have to more carefully discern what is to be resisted.

Jesus resisted the temptations presented to him by recalling the surpassing grandeur of God’s promises: God’s word sustains more than magical bread; God’s love is innate, and is not to be tested; and love of God has preeminence over love of the worldly (Matthew 4:5, 7, 11). The measure by which all temptations are to be measured is obedience alone, simple obedience made easy by confidence in God’s word. We must not overstate our needs; God provides. We must not attempt to beg miracles out of the Divine; they prove nothing which is not already assured. God is great. We stand in amazement at how much we do not need.

Now is a more than appropriate time to reconsider the source of our wants and needs. Streets of gold and unremittent decadence are not Lenten preoccupations; rather, simplicity characterizes these days, a stripping away of all deemed distractionary, all which inhibits our pursuit of godly ways. When life is good, it warrants upward praise; and, in light of God’s love, so much of life is better than we’re willing to see.

Love of others is a primary obedient act. It is as important that we direct our lives in consideration of this with renewed eagerness in coming days. It’s equally important that we avoid distracting ourselves with temptations which, for all their glitter, cannot hope to equal love and its greater implications. When the Sultan is good to his people, it makes little sense to defy him; monarchical language is often applied to God in the Bible, and we have no doubt that God is good. Our lives, then, should be more properly directed by gratitude for what has been given—not only in the gift of God’s son, but in every moment filled with graces untroubled.





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Burdened and Blessed

Readings: Exodus 24:12-18, Psalm 2, Psalm 99, 2 Peter 1:16-21 and Matthew 17:1-9

What does it mean to be chosen by God?


This is the last week before the return of the Lenten season. For forty days, we’ll be asked to dwell with this question in particular connection to the Trinity’s Son. Our focus shifts: from incarnation to atonement. The great gift of God’s love culminates in God’s self-sacrifice.

In our readings this week, multiple mysteries are chronicled and, to some degree, are left without solutions. God causes a column of fire to appear on Sinai, calling Moses forth; Moses enters a cloud and does not emerge for forty days (Exodus 24:18).

As with Jesus’s time in the desert, Moses’s forty days before God remain largely a mystery. We are told that, in this period, he received the law. We assume that much more than this occurred, but it remains concealed.

We know only that the strain and wonder of sitting so intimately with God for so long initiated a lasting transformation in Moses. From the time he left the cloud, and for the remainder of his life, he had to be veiled; the sight of him, of a man burdened, or blessed, with residual holiness, was deemed too much for the people of Israel.

Or maybe it was simply too difficult for Moses to bear. He was never a fan of the ostentatious; he begged that God choose someone else to fulfill his prophetic duties. Heavy of mouth, heavy of tongue, he claimed: I’m not the one you want for this. But the burden and the blessing were his. Whether he’d desired it or not, Moses’s transformation on Sinai was bestowed upon him, and it eternally set him apart.

A burden, and a blessing. If Moses had not been chosen to go before God, to endure and emerge from those forty days bearing revelatory gifts, we would not have the law. Our understanding of God’s relationship to humanity would be incomplete. Israel could not have wholly understood itself. And yet for Moses, these blessings have great costs: never again would he be in perfect company with mankind.

Those who have stood before God are changed. Those who have heard God’s voice are different. We receive their news with spiritual hunger, take it in out of a desire to know God, but if we ask ourselves the question of whether we need to stand with Divinity as the prophets have done in this life, our answers may unsettle us. Do we want to know so much that we crave, with knowledge, the irruption it brings?

Jesus redoubles the enigma of humans-before-God. Not only one chosen to stand in God’s presence, Jesus is said to himself be God enfleshed. The Gospel of John renders him as the Word which was with God, always, which had a hand in creation, which is the hope of the world. With the exception of the Transfiguration, this being man-and-God instead of man before God had the effect of normalizing Jesus’s outward humanity; but what was inward, what was divine, remained undetectable to curious human eyes.

Jesus knew God always. The strain of having to face Heaven, in a variety of situations, did not force him to begin his human life again. He was formed differently; what mere men could not endure without being visibly taxed, Jesus was formed to endure.

And because the outward sign of divine contact was something that Jesus could choose to assume, rather than something he was forced to bear: Jesus, unlike the prophets, could choose where, and how, his connection to Heaven became outwardly manifest; he could selectively determine who it was that witnessed it.

In our Gospel reading for the week: his viewership is sparse. Three alone watch as, upon a mountain, Jesus’s whole countenance transforms: all he wears turns white, and light emanates forth from him (Matthew 17:2). Even more so than the miracles, this is an outward sign of his inward divinity. It’s a moment in which they’re forced to confront, beyond doubt and equivocation, the reality that Jesus was something entirely different from who, and what, they were.

Jesus’s Transfiguration was amplified by the moments-later appearance of Moses and Elijah. He now stood before three of his disciples with the greatest prophets of earlier ages. They knew that he was different; their familiarity with what differentiation cost Moses and Elijah afforded them greater clarity regarding what may have been next for Jesus.

If he was a prophet, much would be asked of him; much would be given through him; and, most troublingly, there would be no comfortable place for him in common society.

Perhaps out of pity, or out of fear for Jesus, Peter offered to build Jesus and the other prophets dwelling places on the mountain (Matthew 17:4). Presumably, they could use such spaces either as havens for the receipt of prophecy, or as a home apart, or as both; Peter offered a form of protection for these blessed, chosen figures.

Before that offer could be confronted, more mysteries were revealed. Jesus was different; his difference was akin to that of the prophets; but he was not a prophet alone.

The witnesses to the transfiguration, having accepted that the light of Heaven was in Jesus, having seen the great prophets of old standing beside him, were now triply challenged with the emergence of a voice from the skies, one which demanded that they acquiesce to one last divine mystery: that Jesus was God’s only child (Matthew 17:5). They’re asked to stand witness to this revelation, but also to keep it secret until “after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead” (Matthew 17:9).

The greatest mysteries remained to be revealed: the man they now knew as the Child of God had yet to retreat to the desert and be tested, to ride into Jerusalem, and to face a tribunal and an execution. They had no sense of any this yet. They knew only that God was with them, and that the implications would be vast. Great blessings were on the horizon; but for the prophet and Son who had been revealed, great burdens were similarly inevitable.

We are not asked to meditate too thoroughly upon our own self-worth in connection to coming atonement. That flesh is weak and beyond perfection is a given; if we could magically make ourselves worthy of God, there would be no need of prophets, and no endless sin to atone for. Moses is given over to God, and what he delivers is a grace to us; so too is Jesus. We have much to be grateful for.

And still: it does not hurt to take time to reflect, and to stand in gracious deference to the considerable sacrifices human beings, and beings both divine and human, have made in order to offer us a glimpse of God’s love. Without them, what would we know? And to be them: how great a tribulation?

God’s ways remain a mystery. We are assured that Heaven’s love for us is great. We have only to accept the burden of proof with gratitude.

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