Eastern Shore Chapel Episcopal Church
Virginia Beach VA
March 6, 2005
The Fourth Sunday in Lent

Who's To Blame?
The Rev. Canon William A. Kolb

Gospel:John 9: 1-38

In this reading from the Gospel of John, we hear, as we so often hear from John, a number of instances in which he tells us something bad about the Jews. Quoting from the reading, “The Jews did not believe the man had been blind…the people were afraid of the Jews…the Jews would put anyone out of the synagogue who confessed Jesus …”

What bothers me about that is that to a large degree, as a result of such writings in the New Testament, Jews have been treated over the last two thousand years as “other,” as Christ-killers, as heathens. Jews have been exiled from their homelands, tortured, murdered en masse, excluded socially and otherwise. I was reading the other day in a book about the 1950’s, that the pre-eminent nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the government Manhattan Project which perfected the atomic bomb in 1945, was doubtful at one point that he could teach at Cal Tech because the president of the school said there were already too many Jews on the faculty. I read Friday morning a news story about a man named Hale who has been accused of hate crimes; in the story I learned that Neo-Nazis in this country are spreading an anti-Jewish gospel which says that our federal government must be destroyed because it is run by Jews who make good “Aryans” live with Blacks and Jews.

This Gospel of John, which uses the phrase “the Jews” pejoratively more than seventy times, is, unlike the first three gospels, a book of poetry, which does not really purport to be historically accurate. Many Biblical scholars are of the opinion that most of the words and concepts in this Gospel are not from Jesus but from the early Church. At the time this Gospel was written, the new Christian faith had been on its own for about thirty years and was in fierce competition with its mother faith, Judaism, so they had reason to try to convince the people that Judaism was a lesser choice for those seeking a church home, so to speak.

The other thing that bothers me about this is that in the Gospels, in all of them, the Jews are actually a representative group rather than a uniquely guilty group; they represent all of us. The Jews of that day were the only group in the world who worshipped the God we know--the only people who knew enough about a monotheistic God to believe in Him. They were, therefore, the only ones who could possibly have cared, in religious terms, about the man Jesus and about what Jesus said. They were the only ones who could possibly have agreed or disagreed with his teachings.

And what was the response of the leaders to Jesus? Well, the average person in the streets of ancient Israel did not respond. It was mainly their leaders, referred to in scripture as the Pharisees and the Sadducees. The leaders had great power over the people, and like most powerful people in history, they wanted to keep it that way. So their reaction to Jesus was the same as it has been down through the ages when we are threatened by new teachings, especially those that ring of new truths: silence it; if you can’t do it one way, do whatever it takes. Jail him, spin his life or words in a way that people won’t listen, or, if necessary, do violence to him, up to and including murder.

We have seen lots of examples of this. In about the fifth century B.C. the philosopher Socrates was tried by a jury of about 500 fellow Greek male citizens and put to death, forced to drink a cup of hemlock. His crime? Asking questions. Challenging the status quo. Persistently insisting that Greek citizens think about their culture, and question their ways and their wars. He introduced the possibility of new truths and found disfavor with his society.

In the early 16th century, the sometime-astronomer Copernicus was ex-communicated by his Church for propounding the newly-discovered fact that the earth was round; his later teaching that the sun was the center of the universe, which contradicted traditional views on the subject and challenged the teachings of the Church, found little support and much rejection for more than a hundred years after his death.

In 1968 the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. paid with his life for the campaign in which he preached over and over the truth that in a democracy all must be free to pursue the constitutional goals of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” While the assassin may have been a lone killer, he represented the fear and anger of many whose vested interests stood to be diminished or destroyed should King succeed.

In 1977 Egyptian president Anwar Sadat issued a pioneering, courageous offer to go anywhere and talk to anyone in order to pursue peace with Israel. As a result he was invited to go to Jerusalem and gave an historic speech to the Knesset. His statesmanlike words and actions led eventually to the historic Camp David accords. They also led to his brutal murder in a reviewing stand in the year 1981. The possibility of peace with Israel proved to be too much for some and Sadat paid the ultimate price for having presented a new truth.

All of these “new truths” were significant teachings that threatened to change the world of those whose vested interests were being endangered. The powerful leaders of the Jews, the average “Greek-man-in-the-street” circa 496 B.C., the Roman Catholic Church in the 16th century, those of power among white southerners in the 1960’s, the anti-Israeli Egyptians in 1977 – all could have said in unison, “If we let this man continue to speak these things, our entire way of life will be changed forever – we cannot allow that to happen.”

But it was not just they who carried out these acts of suppression of new ideas. There is in each of us the potential (all-too-often realized), and at times the absolute determination, to maintain the status quo of our lives, of our society, even of our world, even when change is needed or new ideas are worth taking seriously. Change and challenge are not our favorite cup of tea. We all silenced Jesus; we all poisoned Socrates; we all ex-communicated Copernicus, and we all assassinated Dr. King and Anwar Sadat.

God’s Truth for our lives is not locked into and limited to scripture, as some teach. God’s eternal realties are not frozen in what has already been accepted by the majority. They are an evolving revelation that come to us in ever-growing realizations over the centuries, put into the minds of men and women who enlarge our understanding of what it is God wants us to know. To be truly faithful in our faith journey, we must be willing to go beyond our own comfort boundaries, even into the wilderness at times, and continually seek God’s truth no matter where it leads. Amen.

Copyright 2005 The Rev. Canon William A. Kolb

Gospel: John 9:1-41
As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" 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." When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man's eyes, saying to him, "Go, wash in the pool of Siloam" (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see. The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, "Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?" Some were saying, "It is he." Others were saying, "No, but it is someone like him." He kept saying, "I am the man." But they kept asking him, "Then how were your eyes opened?" He answered, "The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, 'Go to Siloam and wash.' Then I went and washed and received my sight." They said to him, "Where is he?" He said, "I do not know." They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. Now it was a sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. Then the Pharisees also began to ask him how he had received his sight. He said to them, "He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see." Some of the Pharisees said, "This man is not from God, for he does not observe the sabbath." But others said, "How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?" And they were divided. So they said again to the blind man, "What do you say about him? It was your eyes he opened." He said, "He is a prophet." The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they called the parents of the man who had received his sight and asked them, "Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?" His parents answered, "We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind; but we do not know how it is that now he sees, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is of age. He will speak for himself." His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews; for the Jews had already agreed that
anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue. Therefore his parents said, "He is of age; ask him." So for the second time they called the man who had been blind, and they said to him, "Give glory to God! We know that this man is a sinner." He answered, "I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see." They said to him, "What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?" He answered them, "I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?" Then they reviled him, saying, "You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know
where he comes from." The man answered, "Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing." They answered him, "You were born entirely in sins, and
are you trying to teach us?" And they drove him out. Jesus heard that they had driven him out, and when he found him, he said, "Do you believe in the Son of Man?" He answered, "And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him." Jesus said to him, "You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he." He said, "Lord, I believe." And he worshiped him. 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. New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

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