(The Nationalist, 25 February 2005)
One of the strange twists in the life of Jesus is that his greatest difficulties came from the religious authorities of his time. We might have expected that they would have received him warmly, listened to his message, and taken it to heart. But it wasn’t so. ‘He came to his own, and his own received him not’. (John 1.11)
One of the reasons for this was that the religious professionals claimed to have answers, when in fact, they were ignorant. And they had become arrogant in their ignorance – the two often go together, propping each other up. For instance, they made simplistic judgments about people, when it would have been better to have suspended judgment and keep silence. This was partly because they had turned God’s revelation into a system of man-made regulations which they identified with God’s will. Unwittingly, they had made their system into a substitute for God. Instead of being a road-sign pointing the way to God, their system had become a road-block pointing to itself. They had turned what was only a means into an end in itself.
An illustration of the above is found in a Gospel story (in John 9) about Jesus restoring sight to a man born blind. The story is not just about an act of kindness by Jesus to an individual man. It’s also a parable about different ways of seeing, for example, seeing with the mind as well as with the eyes. It’s about insight, vision, enlightenment. It’s about people who claimed to be able to see and understand reality being shown up as spiritually blind. But a key figure of the story – an ordinary Joe Soap whose name we don’t know – began by being truly blind, then recovered his sight through the gift of Jesus, became able to look reality in the face, recognize it for what it was, and call it by name.
Jesus turned the tables on the know-alls. Those who thought they had the answers were shown to have nothing to offer, and even to be an impediment to those, like Jesus, who had something to offer. The proverb says it, ‘There are none so blind as those who will not see’. By contrast, the blind man, who seemed to have nothing, not even the support of his parents, did not have an ideological bit between his teeth, but was open and receptive, spoke the truth openly and without fear. Not for the first time, Jesus did the unexpected. He showed that the ‘experts’ were wrong, and the ordinary man was right. The truth was found in unexpected places, not in the official sources but in the experience of the ordinary person. God speaking through the human – isn’t that who Jesus was?