"I Am Your God"

Today's Gospel story is extraordinary, for here we learn that each of us is literally a work in progress, both body and soul. Perhaps we were told that we attained maturity at, say, age twenty, and from there we began to disintegrate. But the opposite is true. Our whole life is an invitation to ascent. Jesus says that He intends for us to have abundant life (Jn 10:10), the end point of which is a mysterious, Divine completeness indistinguishable from Himself or the Father (Jn 17:22).

This morning, we meet with a man born without sight, who by that fact is not finished. We emphasize "body and soul" as the Greek word describing him is τυφλοσ / tuphlos, meaning physically blind or spiritually blind. Both are considered.

Jesus-as-Logos, or Creator, therefore, sets about completing him. John is intentional about Jesus being seen as the Creator here:

This act, unprecedented in the New Testament, specifically recalls the creation of mankind:

So Jesus is present among us, it turns out, as an active Creator — as the Logos Who created the world and Who continues to be active doing "the works of God" (as He says), which uniquely create and renew life. What else are the works of God?!

With this revelation we see that all things are possible. For in God's hands we might continue to develop in any direction.

There is another important theme running through this story, though. The "cartoon" version positions the Pharisees as being apoplectic that Jesus is working on the Sabbath(!). May I ask a question? Which is the most commonly broken commandment .... today or in any day? Is it not keeping the Sabbath? In Jesus time being excused for working on the Sabbath was as common as the accidents of life: "My cow is in a ditch!" "My son fell into a well!" "My wife is giving birth!" The accidents of life crowd in, and the Sabbath must step to one side. When Jesus says trenchantly, "The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath (Mk 2:27)," does He not have the last word? Certainly this saying marks the final verse in chapter two of St. Mark's Gospel. The rest is silence.

No, working on the Sabbath is not what this furor is all about. So what exactly is it about? The great issue before us is two different religions claiming to be the true religion, the "true Israel."

Is there not about among the Jews in our story. Is there not a division among them (Jn 9:16)? And are not the most questions being asked concerning God and God's ways?

No, to be sure, this no cartoon. You see only one religion can stand as the one religion. There can be no room for two.

On one side is the relatively recent innovation of Judah-ism, the religion of Judah — a re-fashioning of the ancient Hebrew religion carried out by King Josiah on the eve of the Babylonian Captivity. For political and economic reasons, the Hebrew religion was inconvenient. It was practiced locally all over the eastern Mediterranean region and beyond. Altars, pillars, sacred groves were scattered everywhere, some of which were erected by Abraham, Jacob, and the other Patriarchs. We saw the veneration displayed by St. Photine at "the well that our Father Jacob dug." The ancient Book of Genesis looms large as the primary text of this most ancient religion.

But how could Josiah profit from local religion practiced freely everywhere? So Josiah announced that another Hebrew Scripture had been discovered! If there is a stalemate between the Book of Genesis and the Book of Exodus, then let us bring in a third vote, another version of Exodus: Deuteronomy (which his scribes and priests had obviously written).

How exciting for the masses! A new Book of Moses has been found in the Temple .... never before found, but it is found today! Remember "Beatle mania"? It would be Moses now who will the man of the moment, not Abraham. A "Moses mania" was now under way. "Moses" was the name on everyone's lips. And this would give Josiah's administration an opportunity to stoke this popular fervor. Exodus would be promoted as the great story of Israel, to be valorized over Genesis.

Why would King Josiah do this? Because he needed two things: (1) a God who appeared in his Jerusalem Temple alone and (2) animal sacrifice as the uniquely acceptable approach to God, from which he would profit directly in the form of a new, de facto tax paid by everyone who wished to worship God: the purchase of sacrificial animals. This was an industry that would affect everyone! This new emphasis on animal sacrifice, hitherto playing no role in Hebrew religion, was also revised into the Hebrew Bible.

The other religion presented in our story this morning, of course, is the religion of God. It features our God roaming everywhere among His people — healing them, comforting them, even raising them from the dead. He is a Creator-God who stares down blood sacrifice which is to say death, offering, instead, His splendid gifts of life and renewal and eternal life. Is this not obvious?

This was the ancient religion given to Abraham: life set against the pall of death hanging over Abraham's home in Babylon, that foremost center of animal-sacrifice and stinking of death. What God offers Abraham is life, generations after generations of life, as brilliant as the stars in the Heavens! Life! Perhaps this deep memory is kept still in every Jewish person's soul, who lifts up his or her glass at every wedding and bar mitvah and declares as one in ancient Hebrew, "L'chaim" .... "to life!"

The world into which the God-man is sent is torn by religious-civil strife fought along these fault lines. The prophet Ezra would recast the Exile to Babylon as a "Second Exodus" claiming only the returnees and their descendants to be "the True Israel."

Standing opposed to this fiction is Jesus of Nazareth and His Eleven Disciples who were raised in the historical regions of the Hebrew tribes, professing Hebrew religion. An inconvenient fact for the Pharisees is that one of their number happens to be God, Who gave the Hebrews their religion.

This is the source of the division in our story this morning. If He is not, the Son of God, how could He be doing these things? But it is so hard to let go of the idol! Ask anyone who is about to enter religious life. So hard to let go of the idols of the world!

And He is practicing His inimitable act of life-creation right before their eyes. But the Pharisees do not back away from this challenge. Indeed, they make it the primary subject, casting all as a Moses-versus-Jesus event:

For them the "customs received from Moses" are everything. Did we not hear this when St. Stephen was martyred? That he spoke against the customs of Moses? This is the charge against him:

Meantime, who is the the great hero of St. Stephen's oration? The one whom he set out as offering the whole course of the Hebrew religion? It is Abraham.

Abraham appears repeatedly in the Pauline Correspondence as the great hero of the faith.

May I pause for a moment with this word? This was the key word in our Epistle reading this morning from Acts:

Believe! Believe that Jesus is Lord!

And this is how our Gospel story concludes:

.... the man says. Faith is the great issue here .... Which is the true faith?.

Of course, neither Stephen, nor the Twelve, spoke against Moses. Their critique was directed against King Josiah's invented Moses, not the Moses you will not find in the Midian wilderness, not the Moses to be found on the summit of Mt. Sinai, but the invented Moses olished and perfected during the Babylonian Exile. This Moses is the "Slaughter Master." He says, "Step right up and offer slaughter and blood to God!" This is the new Moses.

How interesting. We have vegetarians in the Sinai Wilderness do we not? God feeds them with manna (encris), the same honey cakes which John the Baptist would later eat. But the people cry out for blood and meat, and God replies, in essence, "Is it death they want?   Then death they shall have!"

By contrast, the manna which God has ordained has nothing of death about it: "and it did not stink, nor were there any worms in it" (Exod 16:24).

The objection is not Moses, but that Moses should be reinvented as a spokesman for the new religion promoting animal sacrifice, as the only acceptable form of communion with God. Hitherto, to be a Nazirite, a man consecrated to God, you had to stop cutting your hair and return to your natural state and not eat meat. You had to become a vegetarian as it was in the beginning, as it was in Eden. When God begins His Second Creation with Noah, what does He say? He imposes one covenant: do not eat blood (or meat with blood in it). Don't eat meat!

Let us recall the Council of Jerusalem (c. 50). What was the great requirement imposed on the Gentiles during St. Paul's mission to the Gentiles? Would the Gentiles be required to mark their bodies signifying that they belonged to God? No. They did not need to mark their bodies. Would they need to learn Hebrew? No. They would not be required to learn Hebrew. The imposing requirement asked of them is that they refrain from eating blood or meat with blood in it. They must not meat! It is madness to accept animal sacrifice to be the only means by which people might commune with God. This is what our Gospel story, and the whole backstory of the Gospels, is about.

How do we know this? Because many Judeans fled seeing Mesopotamian abominations being practiced in the Temple, like Jesus, Who riotously demonstrated against it. These Judeans fled and settled on the Egyptian island of Elephantine and there built a temple worshiping God after the fashion of Kings David and Solomon, as their forefathers had done in the First Temple, which the Mesopotamians ripped down directly after the reign of Josiah. When the Mesopotamian king, Darius, heard of it this Hebrew worship, he commanded that they offer animal sacrifice in their new temple. (See Margaret Barker, The Hidden Tradition of the Kingdom of God (2007), 34.)

As the Pharisees site Moses speaking with God as their authority, let us go back to the sixth chapter of Exodus and revisit this conversation.

It turns out that God is not a distant idol, silent and aloof, leaving behind only rules and commands. His is not merely about Law, much less idolatry, but rather relationship, the relationship of love. He is Himself a living relationship, and He offers to us relationship.

We could scarcely imagine a more transcendent scene, but the manner of its expression is more remarkable still:

This language is personal, even intimate. "I belong to you. You belong to me. Do not bring others into the sacred place of our intimacy and love." As the meaning of the word vain is emptiness, we understand the Third Commandment to mean, "When you speak of Me, speak of Me from your heart, with sincerity and affection, not vacantly or with your mind on something else. Don't page through a magazine or let your mind drift when we are talking."

The invitation from Mt. Sinai is a love relationship, even an exclusive love relationship. It describes love of the highest order — ever attentive, solicitous, tender, and exclusive. "Forsaking all others," we used to say in our marriage ceremonies.

Most certainly, this exchange is not a once-only thing, something to be etched in stone, hung on a wall, and then worshiped as an idol, and never remember your marriage day. Far from it! It is in invitation into a highest love, which has no end. For the Beloved is God, from everlasting unto everlasting. Indeed, He is life itself in Whom death and sad endings are but empty fantasies.

Approach this sacred love with dead animals and blood in order to foster intimacy?!     Please .... !

The sentences leading up this proceed from this same tender heart:

"I have heard your groanings .... I will bring you out .... I will redeem you with outstretched arms. And I will take you to Me as My people." How could this tenderness, this offer of intimate relationship, have devolved into idolatry, even an idolatry of sterile, unfeeling rules and statutes? Ironically, it is precisely these words of tender love, calling us into intimate relationship with God, which constitute the prohibition against idolatry(!) These words! The first three commandments.

What God has pledged is not something primeval, finished long ago, to be worshiped and idolized, but rather something new, alive with Divine power, and overbrimming with love, now and forever.

Above all else, our Gospel lesson this morning is about the living, breathing, ongoing, and, yes, loving creative work of God: What greater act of compassion than for God to descend right before us and create what is missing inside us?! How intimate!

Jesus, of course, could have healed this man by uttering a single word, as the faithful centurion points out: "But only speak a word, and my servant will be healed" (Mt 8:8). And Jesus does: "Let it be done!" (Mt 8:13). Jesus could have healed the man born blind by His mere presence as the Apostle Mark attests:

But here, beside the Pool of Siloam, He wishes to make a point: that "the works of God" are ongoing; that the Creation is not finished; that relationship with God is not a distant, much less ossified, thing; that the Kingdom of Heaven is a fluid situation, not fixed in one place, much less controlled by one king, one high priest, or one sect.

These kings commanded that the religion of Israel be destroyed tearing down the altars, pillars, even trees where the Patriarchs worshiped. Replacing this religion would be a new cult centralizing power and authority in the Zion Temple, whose construction, by the way, was underwritten and supervised by Mesopotamians.

Communion with God is not about centralized cultic control, no more than love is, but rather located in each and every human person. The hero of God's religion is Abraham, who fled Mesopotamia at God's command. The Patriarchs who spoke with God, wrestled with God until dawn, and who built altars and erected pillars and sought out sacred places to commune with God and to sanctify their lives and their land with sacred monuments — these are the exemplars of the ancient religion and of Christianity.

We begin to understand what is at stake here. We see that God sent His Son to gather the lost sheep of Israel, for their shepherds truly were wolves in sheep's clothing, highjacking the religion of God.

Today, we are presented with a story of men who closed their eyes to God.

Jesus might have replied in His flinty pithiness, "You have said so" (Lu 23:3). But He offers something more:

Saul of Tarsus also made the Law into an idol. He, too, missed the essential quality of God's gift on Sinai, which is tender, living love. But then in one brilliant moment,

You see, the works of God are creative. Each one of us is His beloved Creation. He is the Light of the world (Jn 9:5) — the Light which is Life (Jn 1:4). But night comes apace, says Jesus, and in this darkness, no one can work. In the darkness no longer will all things be possible, but rather ..... turned to stone. Do you see? The ones who have the Law an idol are already living in Hell. And the lively relationship with God, which surrounds us this very moment, will be lost to us. For eyes in the world of stone will be shut eyes, blind eyes .... forever. Only in life and in love can eyes be truly opened.

I knew a nun who traveled all over the world with a little, holy picture in her pocket: William Holman Hunt's "The Light of the World." In whatever dark place she found herself, places where others sought to console themselves with dark comforts, she chose always the light, even in the blasted and ruined garden of our fallen world, which Hunt depicts in his painting.

He is there still, knocking, knocking on the door of our hearts. And whoever opens that door to Him, this one will be a creature newly made. His eyes will be opened. His life will be made abundant. And with the man born blind he might say,

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.