Stop Look Listen

At least half a dozen times in the Gospels, we hear of Jesus healing the blind, but this Sunday’s story of the man born blind is different from the other two. In most of the other stories, like those of Bartimaeus the blind beggar and of a group of blind men on the road to Jericho, the blind folk call out to Jesus. They express their need: “Lord, that I might see…” and he heals them. 

Here in today’s gospel though, the man blind from birth simply sits by the roadside. His life is on hold; he sits in paralyzing darkness. It is Jesus who recognizes him. Jesus stops and looks at him. Jesus sees his handicap, his need, his isolation. There is no forward motion for that man, little hope as he sits and begs. Jesus touches him, as God had once touched and given life to Adam’s clay. We can imagine that Jesus speaks to the man before he spits on the ground, smears the man’s eye with the clay he had made, and sends him to wash in the Pool of Siloam. Then Jesus continues on his way, returning to his work of announcing the kingdom of God. Jesus stopped, looked, and listened.

But Jesus is not the only one to stop, look and listen. The man born blind who had waited in the darkness, in isolation, is stopped by the people around him, fellow beggars and highfalutin’ Pharisees. He listens to their questions as he looks on their faces for the first time: Are you that same guy from the roadside? Who did this for you?  

And he replies. Harassed by authorities who were blinded by their fear and want to condemn Jesus for healing on the Sabbath, the man born blind gives witness, calls Jesus a prophet, and is promptly expelled from the Synagogue. He sees better than they do, and because of that he is an outcast anew. Yet Jesus returns to him again, looks for him, listens to him and asks him if he believes. Encountering Jesus anew, the man born blind man born stops, looks at him, and professes his faith in Jesus, the Son of Man, and worships Jesus. 

If your life is anything like mine, you know how hard it is to pause. To unplug. To listen and not to talk. To see and not to just to glance at things. Our moms taught us the most valuable life-saving lesson we ever got, and most of the time we blithely ignore it as we blunder into the traffic of life. Mom said: Stop, Look, Listen. Head down, we plow ahead, eyes fixed at our phones and not the human horizon in front of us. We don’t even use the phone to listen to people anymore. 

Perhaps the fasting we need in these last weeks of Lent is at least a little fasting from noise, from constant movement, from overlooking things and people rather than facing them in stillness. 

It take a lot of effort, and focus, not just to glance off the surface of life: to see the beauty of our faith and the beauty and needs of our families and friends; to see the haunted eyes of our neighbors who live in tents by the freeway or in refugee camps here and abroad; to see how much we ourselves need, and need to do to lead happy and meaningful lives.

On a bright day like this we can perhaps believe, if only for a moment, that light produces every kind of goodness and righteousness and truth. So stop and pause and see and listen. See and listen and let that seeing be your almsgiving today and this week: give yourself over to seeing and and listening and knowing how God’s grace has worked in your life, and how much grace we still need to live as Jesus teaches us to live. And as alms, give away some of that grace to others. Help them to see what you have seen, and hear what you have heard, the vision and the voice of the very one who gives the gift of sight.

Blessings,