John 9:1-41
SERMON The Lynching Tree
In the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, miracle stories are pretty short… encounter, magic, maybe a teaching. The authors of the Gospel traditionally attributed to John lean into the miracles, for the entire gospel is oriented around miraculous signs that Jesus is the messiah, is in fact divine. The whole show starts with Jesus as present in “the beginning” as the Word, the Logos in Biblical Greek, a term that suggested reason and order.
Today’s reading, the healing of the man born blind as recorded in John, is detailed and lengthy, involving many characters and encounters. Because we spend more time with the three Synoptic gospels, each with a year in the lectionary cycle, we sometimes read John through that lens, missing the point of John’s longer stories entirely.
That is the case here, this story that provides the line in the beloved hymn, “I once was blind, but now I see.” It is easy to interpret this as one more conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees over the sabbath, the choice between legalism and love. That is actually incidental to the story, mentioned only in passing. But let’s start at the beginning.
Jesus and his disciples encounter a man who has been blind since birth. It seems they already know the man, who is a beggar. The disciples ask Jesus who sinned to cause the man to be blind, the man or his parents. It is sort of a dumb question, unless the man was sinning in the womb. The obvious answer should be his parents.
Equally obvious to us in our age of genetic science is the fact that the question itself is nonsense, but they didn’t know about genetics in the First Century, and we have to accept the story in its own context. In that context, inexplicable catastrophe was often blamed on moral failure, whether it was a blind child, drought and locusts, or an invasion by a foreign army.
Still, even in that context of pre-Rabbinic theology, the question is problematic. If there was a moral cause for the man’s blindness, it should not have been due to parental sin. Though blessings and curses pass from generation to generation in some biblical texts, Jeremiah, one of the last prophets, rejects this idea, declaring that we are each only responsible for our own sins. He’s a little muddy on collective punishment, what with Babylon invading and all, but you can’t have everything.
We despise collective punishment, but children being punished for the sins of their parents is arguably worse, though it happens every single day.
It is equally problematic that Jesus does not reject outright the idea that God makes people blind to punish them or their parents. Having been present at Creation and preaching a loving God, you’d think he’d know better, but God is often a vindictive jerk in scripture.
Instead of rejecting this unjust idea of God, Jesus chooses Option C, neither of the above, neither the man nor his parents sinned. He declares that the man was born blind for exactly this moment, so he could be at the center of this sign of Christ’s divinity. So yeah, the guy has been blind all his life and reduced to begging and that’s fair how exactly?
And lest you miss the cultural subtext, it wasn’t just this question of blindness and sin. Under the purity code of ancient Judaism, the disabled were excluded from the ritual community. Like blemished lambs, they were useless, unfit for service before God. The man is an outsider.
We can try to parse the behavior of the Pharisees, of the man’s parents, of the man himself, but I’d like to think about the neighbors and others in the village, for again, this isn’t actually about legalism and sabbath-keeping,
Everyone believed that the man deserved to be blind. Full stop. Jesus, in healing him, undid what they understood as justice. It wouldn’t matter if the healing happened in the middle of the week. When Jesus healed another man, one who could not walk and was laying on the mat, Jesus said “Your sins are forgiven. Get up and walk.” His opponents are enraged that he proclaims sins forgiven, something only God can do. But the truth is still darker.
The man who “now can see” may have another encounter with Jesus, but the interrogations and accusations with the Pharisees, his neighbors, the community that did not embrace him when he was blind, when he was excluded from the ritual life they all shared, end with this:
“‘You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?’ And they drove him out.”
Jesus declared that the man was not born blind because of sin, as ridiculous as the reason he gives may be. Jesus restores the man to wholeness, sinless, clean. A quick dip in the ritual mikveh and he should be all set.
The good people refuses to accept this act of restoration. They refuse to accept the idea that the man is not fundamentally other. They need an other, someone to loathe and to pity. So they do what mobs do, another act of violence, for in a culture where family, clan, and tribe were everything, they drive him out.
His job was to be the outsider, the pitied and scorned, a sign to protect the self-righteousness of all the other sinners who were still on the inside, were still considered part of the community. For it is our way, defining ourselves by comparison to others, and it always feels good to have someone lower. Which is the opposite of the gospel, which calls us to go to the least among us, and become the servant of all.
Race was invented to justify slavery. It remains the most powerful lie in modern society despite a complete lack of any scientific basis. Racists invented the idea that those predominantly descended from Sub-Saharan peoples, individuals visually identified as “black,” were fundamentally different, were born different, deserved different treatment. In particular, Black men were believed to be natural born rapists, over-sexed, overly strong, ape-like, and peculiarly attracted to European-descended women. This myth led to the lynching tree again and again, the white couple holding hands and smiling in the photograph as Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith hang in Indiana in 1930. It is the dual othering that unfolds in Harper Lee’s classic “To Kill A Mockingbird,” Tom Robinson on trial, Boo Radley in the sahdows.
“They are fundamentally different” declared the rapist as he described those who crossed the southern border seeking economic opportunity and safety as rapists.
“They don’t want to work hard, are inherently criminal.” This is the real message in the obsessive and exaggerated political and media attention on a relatively minor scandal long addressed involving Somali immigrants in Minnesota.
The answer, of course, is to drive them out, to drive them all out, the lynching tree a chartered flight to an unsafe nation, to a Salvadoran gulag, or to some nation on a continent to which you have zero connection.
They are all terrorists, these people who want to live in the land their people possessed for over a thousand years, as genocide and ethnic cleansing unfold in Gaza, the West Bank, as Beirut is bombed. There is always a word for the enemy that makes them less than human, krauts and gooks.
And lest we grow smug, snug in the hubris that makes us think we are better than all that, that we are good liberal folks and morally clean, let us be honest. It is easy to convince ourselves that the other is not like us, that they probably brought misfortune on themselves. When we overly celebrate the individuals who break the multi-generational cycles of addiction, of poverty, we simply reinforce the idea that those who have not escaped must choose that life. Boot straps and all that, despite an economy that is rigged, the accelerating concentration of wealth, the collapsed working class and breaking middle class.
This othering, this pity and loathing, comes to us naturally, whether we are involved in a form of toxic charity which keeps the other walled off, non-human others not really part of the community, at least not part of our community, or we are considering the self-destructive behavior of Red Hats and antivaxxers.
Well, maybe you don’t. Maybe you are pure. But it is Lent, a season for repentance, for confession, and I have a hard time keeping an open heart sometimes.
When Trump ally Herman Cain died in the summer of 2020 after downplaying the risk of Covid-19 and attending a campaign rally without a mask, I admit that I felt no pity. I should have. Whether Cain caught the disease elsewhere, or whether that rally killed him, as White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is quoted as saying, he was still a person, still had a family.
Don’t get me wrong. This is a place filled with good people with good intentions. Othering, scapegoating, pitying… it is primal, almost genetic, this way we place boundaries on community. And it is not our best selves. It is not God consciousness.
That bipedal primate is a spark of life, a temporary consolidation of matter and energy and mystery, just like you, just like all the other primates, bipedal and differently evolved, every tree singing ancient songs into the soil, every seed helicoptering down from the trees, every baby sea turtle flip-flapping toward the waves, and even that mosquito you can’t wait to swat when summer finally unfolds.
No matter the condition of our eyes, and the Good Lord knows mine aren’t what they used to be, may we have hearts that can see and know the holy in all created things, in our sister and our brother, and may we fight, always, for communities of inclusions. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
Let us pray.
Divine Mystery in Word and Spirit,
scripture tells us to love our enemies,
but it is not always clear who our enemies are
or whether we should have enemies at all.
One thing we do know,
that the innocent always suffer,
the dead and displaced in Lebanon, Iran, and Gaza.
We pray for those who suffer
in zones of conflict
and when conflict destabilizes
already unjust systems.
We pray for the insane men
who believe they can kill their way to security,
or at least to profit.
We pray for a world
still wrapped in the primitive insanity
of race and sect and nation
as we destroy the very planet
on which we evolved.
We pray for ourselves,
that we might ask more questions,
move from certainty to wonder,
and from wonder to love,
for our Source,
and all that flows from you.
Those touched by Jesus
experienced wholeness,
so we pray as he taught us, saying:
Our Father…
COMMISSION AND BENEDICTION
There is the America others promote, a world others promote, ruled by the loudest and most violent, wounding one another with toxic posts on social media, with toxic waste in our soil, water, and air, with missiles and automatic weapons, our lives just subscriptions that can be cancelled at any time. Unlike all of the other subscriptions that seem impossible to cancel.
Then there is the kin-dom of God, where our neighbor is the Samaritan, the Syro-Phoenecian woman, the Ethiopian eunuch, the woman accused of adultery, where we see and make beauty in these brief and beautiful lives. May you do so in the name of all that is good and mysterious and yes. Amen.