Jesus answered, “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 him 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.” John 9:3-5

This morning we continue our exploration of six different spiritual traditions within Christianity, and today we look at the Social Justice tradition. As we are discovering in our Lenten Study Series, to have a healthy spiritual life means to have well-balanced roots in each of these spiritual traditions. And our Gospel lesson presents us with an interesting lens through which to consider this tradition when we see Jesus exercising his gift of healing in the story of the blind man whose sight was restored. Although this story on its face seems to be about the restoration of the gift of EYESIGHT to the blind man, I want to suggest to you that the deeper meaning is in uncovering the sin of spiritual blindness that plagued the Pharisees and, all too often, plagues us as well.

Now, to understand what the author is trying to convey in this morning’s Gospel, we need to take a moment first to understand how the notion of “sin” is used in the Fourth Gospel. When the Pharisees ask whose sin caused the son’s blindness, they are simply verbalizing a widespread belief of the time that human suffering was the result of God’s exacting payment for a life of sin. Indeed, we have witnessed among some of our modern Christian leaders similar beliefs – for example, that the Tsunami in Southeast Asia or the hurricane on the Gulf Coast were God’s retribution for sin. For John, a discussion of “sin” is not so much a study of moral behavior as it is a theological reflection on whether, and how, one responds to the revelation of God in the person of Jesus Christ. So while this story, at least at the beginning, appears to be about the besetting sin of the blind man or his parents, it is really about how those of us who have known the love and mercy of Christ respond to that love in our own lives. When Jesus says that the man “was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him,” the “need” being expressed is NOT the man’s need for a return of his sight – Jesus is talking about the need for the disciples to let everybody else know about God’s healing mercy.

And this is what the social justice tradition in Christianity is all about. That tradition – of applying Gospel principles to the political, social and economic parts of our lives – goes back at least as far as the Franciscan and Poor Clare orders in the latter part of the 12th century. St. Francis and his followers gave up their privileged lives and all of their belongings in order to care for the poor, the sick, and the marginalized in the society of their time. And in their lives, they actually witnessed to two different aspects of God’s work:

• On the one hand, they witnessed to God’s love and mercy in the way that Jesus did, by caring for the sick, the poor, the needy, the imprisoned – those shunned by the privileged of society.
• At the same time, they witnessed to the injustice of the social, political and economic systems of their times by leading simple, humble lives focused only on those who were the victims of those systems.

In the Middle Ages, there was a tendency to twist this social justice understanding of the Gospel into a doctrine that became known as “works righteousness.” Now, I’ve said this before but it always bears repeating: Faithful Christians do NOT respond to Christ’s love IN ORDER THAT WE CAN BE SAVED. We don’t do good deeds in order to rack up a bigger point total on God’s celestial scoreboard! We DO respond to Christ’s love BECAUSE WE KNOW WE ARE SAVED and WE ARE RESPONDING TO CHRIST’S LOVE AND THE EXAMPLE HE GAVE. In fact, it is because GOD first loved US that we have an even GREATER responsibility to bear witness to it in our own acts of kindness, and by standing up to injustices that tear people down instead of building them up in the image of God.

Jesus manifested both love and justice in his own life. He healed and cared for the sick, he showed compassion on the widowed and the small child, he showed mercy in forgiving sins and he broke bread with those whom polite society abhorred, such as tax collectors and overly-hospitable women. And while Jesus’ acts of mercy and kindness were sometimes appalling to his more orthodox contemporaries, they were absolutely consistent with the teachings of the Old Testament. Psalm 82:3 teaches us that it is God’s desire that we “give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute.” And probably no other passage of Scripture – old or new Testaments – sets the foundation for the Social Justice tradition as firmly as that from the prophet Micah:

He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
       and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
       and to walk humbly with your God? Micah 6:8

Our neighbors down the street and partners in the Senior Center, the Salvation Army, may exemplify this tradition as well as any organization in our society. Our own Episcopal Relief and Development serves God’s children across our nation and throughout the world, irrespective of race, nationality or religion – also in response to Christ’s compassion and desire for justice. In our own congregation, we touch an enormous number of lives throughout our region and beyond in our various outreach ministries, and our Trinity Advocates raise up before us the many injustices still prevalent in our society.

If we as disciples of Christ are to make known his desire for justice and mercy in the world, there are at least three ways that we ought to be doing it:

1) By providing immediate assistance, in the form of cash assistance, medical assistance, housing assistance, pastoral support, help in resettlement for those fleeing from injustice in other countries, and encouragement to the struggling – all to address immediate needs. Until a person, especially a parent of a child, knows they will be safe and secure and nourished, they can’t pay a whole lot of attention to anything else, nor do they have a whole lot of energy to do anything else. When criticized for her humanitarian work in India, missionary Amy Carmichael responded, “One cannot save and then pitchfork souls into heaven...Souls are more or less securely fastened to bodies...and as you cannot get the souls out and deal with them separately, you have to take them both together.” (Quoted in: Ruth A. Tucker, Guardians of the Great Commission.) This is the heart of the Christian social Gospel – that much as Jesus was both divine and human, so every child of God has in essence both human and spiritual – and both need to be attended to.

2) Provide educational and training opportunities and other programs of support to enable people requiring assistance ultimately to make it on their own. The old proverb holds true in the Christian faith: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to fish and you have fed him for a lifetime.” Part of our Christian mission is to help every human being to become the person that God desires for them to become. To cop a slogan from the US Army, “Be all that you can be in Christ.”

3) And thirdly, it is up to us to confront social, economic, political and other institutional injustice whenever and wherever we see it. That is what Micah means when he says we must DO JUSTICE. Many of us are comfortable offering kindness, but get a little nervous when it comes time to rock the boat and oppose injustice. I have shared with you various occasions in my life when I was embarrassed for my failure to first identify and then confront injustice, and it is probably true for many of us that confronting injustice can make us a little uncomfortable. But for Jesus, as for Micah, it is not an EITHER/OR proposition: To fulfill the great commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves, the Social Justice tradition requires us to love and to do BOTH justice and kindness. And so it part of the social Gospel to oppose those structures in our societies that either perpetuate injustice OR prevent people from achieving the freedom that Jesus promises.

I said at the beginning of my remarks that the story of the blind man begins with a discussion of sin and physical blindness. And while the thrust of the story is indeed not about actual blindness but about witnessing to the transformative power of the Good News, there is an important lesson to learn about sin in this story. Go to the end of the passage, where Jesus again returns to the narrative when he meets up with the now-formerly-blind man. The man has just been driven out of the temple by the Pharisees, he has met up with Jesus, he has professed belief in him as the Son of Man and he worships Jesus. The passage then continues:

Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.” John 9:35-41

This exchange is a little confusing until we realize that Jesus is talking about two types of blindness: physical blindness and spiritual blindness. The tremendous irony in this story is that the blind man starts out physically blind, but through Jesus’ mercy achieves spiritual sight. The Pharisees, on the other hand, possess physical sight, but they don’t recognize who Jesus is, and so they continue in spiritual blindness. The Pharisees expect to be told that they are physically blind. But on the contrary, Jesus tells them that physical blindness would be an excuse. It is their claim to sight – their claim to understanding – that is their condemnation, and so their sin stands.

In a sermon on this passage, Bp. William Temple notes that Jesus’ response “is a crushing, overwhelming retort.” And he asked his congregation, as we should ask ourselves, “Can we escape its impact? Only in one of two ways. Either we must confess our blindness and seek the opening of our eyes; or else we must accept the light and walk by it. What we may not do, yet all strive to do, is to keep our eyes half-open and live by half the light. That kind of sight holds us to our sin and our sin to us. But the only way of avoiding it is to look with eyes wide open upon ourselves and the world as the full light reveals it; but this is the surrender of faith, and pride resists it.”

On this Fourth Sunday in Lent, I hope we will all examine those dark spots in our lives, and particularly today, those gaps in our lives when we have failed to care for people, failed to offer needed assistance, failed to support community service projects, or failed to confront injustices that we encounter, especially those injustices from which we ourselves benefit, or worse yet, contribute to. Jesus is reminding us that if our eyes are closed or only half open, it is time for us to open them wide, and not only to see the light, but to live IN the light, and to let that light shine through us to the world about us. AMEN.

© Copyright 2008 by the Reverend Donald L. Hamer