Letting Light in the Window

Lent 4, Year A

Text: John 9.1-41

Life has a way of serving us eye-opening experiences when our guard is down. For me a turning point happened while I was a counselor for “Campformaion”, a confirmation/summer camp experience in Phoenix. While the campers were busy gifted pastors worked with counselors, and among the relational exercises was the so-called Johari window.

It’s a simple yet powerful relational tool, in which every participant chooses from a list of adjectives 5 or 6 that describe you, and just as many for the other participants. The you chart the responses on the window: Box 1 contains the adjectives agreed upon by you and your peers. Box 2 indicates what others know about you but are unknown to you. Box 3 holds what is known only to you, and Box 4 is the dark area known to nobody. While I can’t say I recall what was said about any particular person, I remember it was a very affirming exercise. But what really got me thinking were Boxes 2 and 4: Do I really want to know what others know about me, what I am blind to? And the dark area, what is lurking in there?

Our blind sides are often fear-ridden places of either denial or avoidance. And I wonder if our allergy to the blind side also fuels blindness of others; those unsettled feelings we project onto other people because we fear the same things for ourselves. We become blind to them: the homeless man ahead of us at Casey's, the AIDS patient in the hospital. No surprise, then, in our story of the “man born blind” that people who supposedly “knew” him, and “saw” him every day did not recognize him when his sight was miraculously restored. As he returns home you can hear the equivocation of his neighbors: “He sort of looks like him….but I’m not sure if it’s really him..” When he was a beggar they didn’t really see him, for the same reason we do not really see the injustices and the forces at play that keep people from living into the fullness of who they are as children of God. But Jesus does.

One of my favorite descriptions of Jesus in John’s gospel is in chapter 2 when Jesus does not entrust himself to anyone but he “knew what was in everyone”. Ponder that one for a moment. If Jesus was taking the Johari Window test there would be no blind side! Everything would be in the light. Your own potential, also your own shadow.

And when all is revealed of course there will be resistance. When the man is restored to sight, certain Pharisees, blinded by their false belief that there must be residual sin in his history or genealogy, do not care to see him restored and whole. Even his parents distance themselves from him. His neighbors likewise. No one wants to see him, except Jesus. For most of the story the man never saw Jesus, but Jesus sees him and seeks him and entrusts himself to him. And in so doing the healing is complete. As he acknowledges Jesus he also becomes a sheep in Jesus’ new fold.

Amazing things happen when we brave the blind side. It’s almost too easy, but of course I was reminded of the 2009 movie of that title (The Blind Side), in which Sandra Bullock plays  Leigh Anne Tuohy, a mother of 2 who takes Michael Oher, a homeless high-school student, into her house. 

Somehow she saw something in him that others were blind to. While the football coach had almost written him off as being too passive a player, she saw he had a protective instinct that could be used on the field. All he needed to do was to protect that ball the way he wants to protect the Tuohy family. And it worked! The rest is history: Oher played left tackle at Ole Miss, drafted into the Baltimore Ravens to play right and left tackle, and is now with the Tennessee Titans. Windows were opened because someone saw him. And acted on what she saw. 

I wonder how many other Michael Ohers there are out there. I don’t mean potential football stars, but how many kids, teens, adults, even older folks are written off because no one sees them? And I wonder if it's not the hard work of the church to see as Jesus sees. It’s appropriate that we have a baptism today for little Hayden, because this very reading is an ancient baptismal text: in the watery depths of baptism we die to the blindness of ourselves and of others and rise again to the insight of God’s love for every human being, seen or unseen by us. You are seen by God, precious, beloved, and Jesus seeks you!

And perhaps now with eyes opened, as we look on others with God's gaze they can begin to see themselves just as Jesus sees them.