Dear Friends,
Lent is a challenging season for Christians. For forty days, we deliberately and intentionally examine ourselves, looking not at the best of who we are but instead at our shortcomings, our oversights, our misdeeds, our sin. Lent has no pretentions; it requires humility and genuine humbleness. It requires that we struggle to discern and understand the least desirable aspects of our lives so that we may acknowledge them, and more crucially, so that we may confess them to God. We hope that in doing so, the negative parts of our humanity will cease to dominate our lives and enable us to open ourselves to God’s abiding grace, a grace that we pray will be manifested through us into our wider faith community and beyond, to all of God’s children. Therein lies the seeds of the beloved community of God, one that has no boundaries or borders.
Lent is especially hard in these times. We’re grappling with a global crisis that needs something other than humble self-assessment. We need cooperation, compassion, and the sharing of resources and discoveries. Instead, we’ve cut ourselves off from each other. That might work with regard to spreading the virus, but our overwhelming global reality is chaos, denial, and self-defeating competition. It’s grounded in fear that finds its voice in malignant distrust and vilification of the stranger. It seems that for many, seeking the broader community of God isn’t an imperative right now. Some have retreated into self-righteous smugness; others into despair; others blame God; others fear God has abandoned us.
The discipline of Lent is already a struggle. How do we focus on our individual shortcomings when collectively, we must focus on a new, nearly unimaginable virus and its cruel effects on our global society? How does this twist in our Lenten pathway lead us to God’s beloved community?
Our gospel reading for this middle Sunday of Lent is the ninth chapter of John. Please take a moment and read all 41 verses about how Jesus restored the sight of a man born blind.
Did you notice that the story of Jesus’s restoration of the blind man’s sight took only two verses (6 and 7), while the controversy about the cure took 39 verses? Many Biblical scholars think this chapter marks the beginning of division between the Pharisees and the newly-emerging group of Jesus’s followers. Here we see the sowing of the tragic, insidious seed of antisemitism that has shaken the foundations of the first two Abrahamic faiths ever since.
This division between two kindred religious groups exemplifies our own blindness. When we retreat like the Pharisees into dogma and insist that our way is the only way, we cannot open ourselves to cooperation with other people of good will. Our self-righteousness renders us blind to our shared humanity and our shared love of God. Biblical examples of antisemitic attitudes are warnings, not affirmations, from God.
The Gospel of John is heralded as the gospel of love. When we commandeer God’s love, we retreat into blindness and self-righteousness, which is self-serving, not God-serving. Now, in Lent and in the grip of a malign virus, we must turn with humility instead to God’s grace. There we find God’s love. By sharing God’s love, by seeking to heal the widening divisions of our threatened world, our sight and our understanding will be restored.
As we try to fathom our global crisis, now is not the time to seek to assign blame or point fingers. During these challenging days of Lent, as we humbly examine our shortcomings and try to find our place in a suffering world, we seek to open ourselves to receive God’s grace and love. With genuinely humble and penitent hearts, and certainly without self-righteousness, we will then be able to share God’s love
Studying this chapter led John Newton, a former slave-trader and then pastor in the village of Olney, England, to write Amazing Grace. “I once was blind,” he wrote, “but now I see.” As he gained sight from the light of Jesus, may the divine light heal our blindness, and may we understand our blindness even as we open our hearts and eyes to the grace of God, shed without exception on all our sisters and brothers. Thanks be to God!
May our prayer for today comfort and enlighten you on this Lenten Sunday:
Holy God, why is it that we look, but do not see? Bring us again and again into your light until your ways become visible to us and bear fruit in us. Touch us so that we are utterly changed, a “before” and “after,” a “now” and “then”; that we may also say, “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” Lord, even as we believe, help our unbelief. In Christ’s light, we pray. Amen.