The Light of the World
Texts: John 9:1-41, Ephesians 5:8-14
Jesus said, “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”
Growing up, we spent two years living in Vinton, Iowa, where I attended third and fourth grades. Vinton is the location of the Iowa Braille and Sight Saving School, affectionately known as the school for the blind. It was made famous by the Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingall Wilder. There was a higher than average population of blind people in Vinton as a result. At the Christmas Eve service at church, we would worship by candlelight and a blind person would read the scriptures using braille, no special lighting needed. In fact, church is where I first encountered braille, as they had a row of binders in their library of the Bible printed in braille. One summer I was in a community theater production of The Velveteen Rabbit and we used the auditorium of the School for the Blind for our performances. It was the only auditorium my family had ever been in that wasn’t designed for sightlines but purely for sound. The seats were flat on the ground and there was even a slight raise in the middle of the seating. Backstage, where I spent a lot of time as a minor cast member, we watched The Care Bears Movie and The Land Before Time with additional audio describing the characters’ actions so a blind person could follow along.
The school for the blind itself was on the way to being phased out in the late 90’s when I lived in Vinton. Most children who were blind went to the same schools as everyone else and utilized the special services of the state agency for the blind and visually impaired. They no longer had to go live in dorms and attend a special school just for them. The school did still have residential students when I was there, mostly students who had multiple disabilities and needed more specialized support in skill development. The number of residential students continued to decline until 2011, when they stopped providing residential services and kept the school solely as the center for the state educational agency for the blind and visually impaired. In 2020, the school was sold to the city of Vinton and the state agency moved their headquarters to the other side of the state. The school is now simply a historical site and community center.
Over the years, our communities have learned how to adapt and integrate blind people into society. In fact, there is a great number of people who are technically blind, but thanks to advances in eyeglass technology, their blindness only makes a difference when the glasses are off. I wear glasses so I don’t squint all the time. My mother wears glasses because without them she cannot see. We use adaptive technology that has improved the lives of people with blindness so drastically that we forget that a great number of people are blind. Those that have very little or no sight are the people we think of, and even then our adaptive technologies and special educational programs have enabled them to be fully part of the community. The blind community is a great example of what disability rights advocates seek: a society where the tools that people need to access the world around them are easily accommodated and used without stigma.
Today, being blind is much less of an issue than it was in Jesus’ day, where there were little to no adaptive tools to help people. Blindness impacted every area of a person’s life. This man’s ability to access the world around him was severely limited because there weren’t tools available to help him. He was relegated to poverty, as the only means he had to provide for himself was begging for money. He was called a sinner because of his affliction. The commonly held assumption was that either his parents or he himself had some great sin that made him blind. His blindness was considered more than faulty eyes, it was considered to be an affliction from God. Jesus tells his disciples that this is not so. Neither this man nor his parents sinned. In fact, this man is called to be a disciple, to share the good news of God. While he remains unnamed, just like the woman Jesus encountered at the well, whom we learned about last week, his witness to God would deeply impact the community around him.
The Gospel writer John uses this story of the man born blind not just to highlight Jesus’ healing powers. The writer uses conversations about the healing of physical blindness to help us reflect upon spiritual blindness. What is Jesus bringing to light in the world that we have been unable to see? Where have we been unable to identify God’s work in the world?
It is like opening up a Johari window into our lives and our souls. The Johari window is a tool designed to help people understand their relationship to themselves and others, first utilized by psychologists in 1955. It is a simple four quadrant model, looking at what is known to the self and to others. What is known to the self and known to others is an open area. What is known to others but is not known to the self is a blind spot. What is known to the self and is not known to others is a hidden area. What is not known to the self or others is the unknown, or a mystery.
Throughout this whole Gospel reading, the healing of the blind man is used to show how what is known to God is unknown to the Jewish leaders. It is exposing their own blind spots, their assumptions and convictions that actually aren’t true. Their assumption that this blind man is a sinner and cannot possibly be healed by God is false. Their assumption that this blind man is lying and is trying to pull a fast one on them is false. Their assumption that Jesus is a sinner and therefore cannot heal someone is false. Their assumption that Jesus is not from God is false.
That’s what the Gospel lesson is highlighting. It’s not so much about physical healing, it’s about the need for the leaders of the community to see that God is at work in Jesus, that Jesus is indeed the savior they so desperately seek. The blind man has the insight. He knows. The leaders do not have the insight. They are in the blind spot of the Johari window. What is known to others is not known to them. They need to have their eyes opened so they may see the light of the world. Jesus is doing as much as he possibly can to show them who he is, and they refuse to see him.
All this should lead us to ponder: Where are the blind spots in our lives? What are others trying to show us that we simply don’t see? That’s where our reading from Ephesians this morning comes in. In Ephesians Paul uses the imagery of darkness and light to talk about opening ourselves up to the blind spots in our lives. They were once in darkness, in a blind spot where others knew something they didn’t, now they are in an open spot, where they know what others know. This is where the community is called to do the majority of their living, in that space where things are open and everyone knows what is going on. There is a need for privacy in certain matters, not everyone has to know everything, but privacy is different from harmful secrecy. There are things done in secrecy that if they were known would harm the entire community. Those are the unfruitful works of darkness. Rather than allowing those things to remain hidden, the community is called to bring those things into the open space, into the light for all to see and examine. Once things are brought into the light, Jesus, who is the light of the world, can heal and redeem the brokenness that those hidden things have caused. The truth needs to be revealed in order for things to be healed.
One of the truths revealed in our Gospel today was that disabilities are not caused by sin. The man who was born blind simply had faulty eyeballs. The problems he experienced weren’t due to his lack of eyesight, they were due to the assumptions his community held about him. Because there weren’t adaptive tools available to him to help him integrate into society, his physical limitation impacted every area of his life. He was a beggar. He wasn’t deemed trustworthy. Those in authority even went so far as to question his parents, implying that the community denied his intelligence, assuming that he had an intellectual disability as well as a physical one which made him unreliable. He didn't have an intellectual disability, but even if he did, that would not impact his trustworthiness. He was distrusted and dismissed, but he actually knew more truth than the people who led the synagogue. What truths do we dismiss today because the people who can help us see them have disabilities? What is unknown to the able bodied community but is well known to the disabled?
I have a friend who is nonbinary, neurodivergent, and who has physical disabilities that require the use of crutches and a wheelchair. They are well read in social activism and the fight for rights for people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and the disabled community. They once told me that they had come to see that accessibility is at the core of all of the equal rights movements. The ability to access spaces of power, to be able to have what they need to be fully integrated into society, to have people consider them as equals when crafting public gatherings or forming laws, this is at the heart of all these various movements. Everyone’s different needs are considered and seen as valid. Equal representation matters because without it, false assumptions get made and blind spots remain. The chant of the disability rights movement rings true for all the movements, “Nothing about us without us.”
Jesus is the light of the world. Jesus is able to break down the assumptions that keep us blind to the people right in front of us. Jesus is able to help us see each other for all of who we truly are, people with various needs, but equally beloved by God. Jesus is able to help us see him for who he is, the savior of the world, who loves and redeems all of us. Let us allow him today to break down the false things that we hold onto, the blind spots in our own hearts and lives. Let us allow him to open ourselves up to new possibilities and the insights of people unlike ourselves. May we always seek the light and search out the open spaces where we all have equal footing. Amen.
