“Jesus Freak”
John 9:1-41
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
11/16/14
The story of the man born blind returns me to yet another
of my favorite authors, fellow Georgian Flannery O’Connor. Flannery O’Connor
had an acute sense of the bizarre and grotesque, and many of her characters are,
like the man born blind, possessed of some deep defect. In an essay published
in the 1950’s, O’Connor, a devout Catholic who often seems to have used paint
thinner for ink, made this straightforward observation regarding “freaks” (her
word), religion, and the art of literature:
“Whenever
I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is
because we are still able to
recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in
the South the general conception of man
is still, in the main, theological. That is a…dangerous
[statement]…for almost anything you say about Southern
belief can be denied in the next breath with equal propriety. But…I think it is safe to say that while the South is
hardly Christ-centered, it is most
certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner,
who isn't convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God…it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure
for our essential displacement
that he attains some depth in literature.”1
Forty
years later, North Carolina author Susan Ketchin published a book inspired by Flannery
O’Connor’s work. She entitled it The Christ-Haunted Landscape. In her
book, Ketchin compiles samplings of writings by and interviews with twelve
southern writers in whose work religious themes surface constantly.
(Bear with me. I’ll connect all this.)
Most of
the writers Ketchin features grew up in the Church and know the Bible quite
well. However, with only two or three exceptions, all of these wonderfully
creative people have disassociated themselves with the Church, and most of them
for the same tediously uncreative reason: The Church is full of hypocrites. One
of the writers has something more thoughtful to say, though. Randall Kenan
says, “I was having a lot of trouble in college about faith and what not. My
doubt arose when I realized that my religion came from a cultural happenstance,
when, where, and to whom I was born. Most of us inherit our religion,” he says.
“That really bothered me.”2
Kenan
says that religion happened to him. It
was a natural consequence of his heritage. He’s right, too. But that’s the
nature of an inheritance. Be it the gift of a magnificent estate or the curse
of a congenital disease, it is there for you as a result of who you are – whether
you like it or not. And while you might deny or be denied an inheritance of
land, you cannot deny a physical or psychological trait born into you. It will
likely create some dis-ease to say this, but an inherited faith may have more
in common with an inherited malady than with an inheritance of property or
money.
Jesus
and his disciples notice a blind beggar on the street. Now, the disciples are
like most other Jews of their time. They are also like a lot of Flannery
O’Connor’s southerners. They have some sense of the whole person, and they have
inherited a religious tradition based on retributive justice. Naturally, then,
the disciples assume that the man’s blindness is a punishment for someone’s sin. So, one of them asks the
question that is really a statement of judgment: “Who’s to blame for this freak?”
Having
an even greater sense of the whole
person, Jesus will have none of this spiritual blindness. So, without asking for
permission, without demanding any kind of religious warrant, Jesus spits on the
ground and makes a couple of mud pies. He rubs them on the man’s eyes and tells
him to go wash in the pool of Siloam. The man does as Jesus says, and for the
first time in his life, he sees.
The man
becomes the talk of the town, but there’s a problem. Jesus heals the blind man
on the Sabbath. Furious that someone would do something as impious and illegal
as heal on the Lord’s Day, the Pharisees approach the man and demand to know
who healed him, and where did he go?
“I
don’t know,” the man answers. And he doesn’t. His eyes may work now, but he
never saw Jesus.
As the
Pharisees continue their inquisition, the man’s responses move from oblivious wonder
to faith. At first it is simply, “Jesus put mud on my eyes and told me to wash.
I did, and now I can see.” Next comes the affirmation: “He is a prophet.” Then
he dares to challenge the Pharisees. “Listen to you!” he says. “You don’t know
who he is, but he opened my eyes. Everybody knows that God won’t work like this
through people who are sinful, but only through the truly faithful.”
Finally,
when his enlightened eyes see Jesus for the first time, the man says, “Lord, I
believe.”
Jesus
approaches the man out of the blue. Like an inheritance, like the man’s
blindness itself, Jesus happens.
God does
not demand faith from us in order to love us and to work through us. God’s
grace is often intrusive, something that happens
to us. The word predestination has become a kind of birthmark that we Presbyterians
often try to cover with makeup and turtlenecks. But predestination has nothing
to do with an arrogant fatalism. It has nothing to do with owning some unique
reward or spiritual license. Predestination has to do with inheriting the
responsibility for and of a story. It’s about entering and inviting others into
intimate communion with God here and now. That communion is a family trait.
Yet,
like ones born blind and then having sight thrust upon us, those among us who were
raised in the Church may find ourselves doubtful of what and why we believe. Maybe
the heritage of dysfunction and hypocrisy in the Church does repel us. Maybe we
have yet to make the faith our own. Maybe we pull away because of unresolvable
questions about the arbitrary horror of suffering. Or maybe like Randall Kenan,
we cannot make peace with what appears to be our arbitrary inclusion in the
Church.
These
are all good and healthful questions. They are part of the process of claiming
a faith that many of us often feel has been forced upon us like a hereditary
disease. So please, ask your questions. If you can’t ask them here, where can
you ask them?
All of
this turns us toward our children and youth. Many of them have been or will be
baptized into the covenant of God’s intrusive grace. They come because someone
in their family brings them. When they’re old enough to think for themselves
and to ask their own questions, what will happen? Will they decide that the
rich and mysterious tradition of their inherited faith is something to distrust
or even resent? Will we watch them, one by one, march out of here in search of
a cure?
Let’s
be honest: Some Christian traditions regard youth the way they regard other
strangers – as dangerous freaks who
must be “saved” and forced into tiny boxes where they learn to regurgitate
religious words and phrases, and to give at least the appearance of following a
set of outward moral principles rather than a law-bending freak named Jesus.
Or will
we model for young folks a place where, like that same Jesus, people see and
celebrate the whole person, even when the whole person has yet to emerge?
Will
they look back and see how their lives have been permanently and positively
shaped by the stories we told them and the Love, the intrusive grace, we stubbornly refused to withhold from them?
Will
they treasure their faith as a birthright, something to celebrate and share
throughout their lives and to pass on to the next generation? Or will they just be, so to speak, freaked out by religion?
What will our kids inherit? What have you
inherited?
Blindness
or sight?
1Flannery
O”Connor, Mystery and Manners, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Inc. NY,
1961, pp. 44-45.
2Susan
Ketchin, The Christ-Haunted Landscape: Faith and Doubt in Souther Fiction,
University Press of Mississippi, 1994, p 297.
No comments:
Post a Comment