In our zeal to share the gospel, sometimes we forget…
by Dan Pizaro for Bizarro.com
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In Sharing the Gospel
Posted: April 5, 2011 in Original ContentTags: Bizarro Comics, Dan Piraro, Folks I Read, Heaven and Hell, St. Peter and heaven, The Gospel
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so good!
The story begins when Jesus and his disciples encounter a man who was born blind while they are in Jerusalem to celebrate Succoth, the Feast of Booths. Because he was born blind the disciples want to know who sinned to cause the curse of this man’s blindness? For them, this is a serious theological question because the religious ideology of that era taught that physical illness was punishment for sin. But the disciples presume that the man could hardly have sinned before be was born. If he hadn’t sinned, then his parents must have. But why didn’t God punish them instead of their child? Perhaps the parents’ agony over his blindness was their punishment. But wasn’t that unfair to the blind man? Those questions are typical of the dilemmas that come from thinking that having a good relationship with God is all about believing the correct ideology.
Despite what some might think, Jesus was not a theologian. He tells the disciples that the accepted religious ideology should not be accepted. He says the man was born blind so he could be used to reveal the glory of God at work in his ministry. (According to my religious ideology, that doesn’t sound fair, either, but then I’m as bound by ideology as the disciples were.) To reveal the glory of God at work, Jesus opens the blind man’s eyes for the first time in his life, and apparently for the first time in history for a person born blind. In fact, it was such an amazing feat that some of the folks who saw the blind man in the market place where he used to beg, refuse to believe it’s the same guy. “It’s just someone who looks like the blind beggar,” they say. But the newly sighted man keeps insisting that he, indeed, is the same man they had seen begging only hours before.
Now, when facts are in dispute, people consult an authority. The authorities in those days were the Pharisees, because they knew religious ideology backward and forward. So the people in the market place take the man-born-blind to them. The Pharisees ask him how this amazing thing happened, and the beggar tells them what Jesus did to give him his sight. “Well, we can be sure of one thing,” the Pharisees say, “the man who did this is not from God. He did it on the Sabbath. No self-respecting respecter of God would do that.”
But there’s a problem with applying the accepted religious ideology in that way, as some people are quick to point out: “How can a sinner do something so fantastic?” “Uh-oh,” the Pharisees say, “they have a point. Let’s get the blind man’s parents in here to be sure that some snake oil salesman has not conned us by substituting another guy.” Unfortunately for this theory, the parents testify that the man who now sees is the grown up baby who was born blind to them some years before.
So the Pharisees look for another explanation that will make what happened consistent with their ideology. They propose that maybe some other power restored the man’s sight. They decide to grill the man one more time to test their hypothesis. They tell him, “Jesus is a sinner. We know that he could not do this. On God’s honor, tell us how you got your sight?” “I already did,” the man replies. “I don’t know if Jesus is a sinner or not. I just know that I was blind from the day I was born, but now I can see because of what he did. Why do you keep asking me? Do you want to be his disciples, too?”
No sir, they don’t want to be Jesus’ disciples! “We’re Moses’ disciples,” they say. “We know Moses is from God. We don’t even know what part of the country this Jesus is from?” Indeed, they don’t, and they don’t know that Jesus also comes from God, because their religious ideology cannot accept that. In fact, their ideology has so closed their minds to the possibility that Jesus is doing God’s work on earth that they can’t believe the obvious when the man-born-blind points it out to them. “This is amazing!” he says. “The fact is, he opened my eyes! It’s well known that God isn’t at the beck and call of sinners. If this man didn’t come from God, he wouldn’t be able to do anything.” The Pharisees replied, “You’re nothing but dirt! How dare you take that tone with us!” Then they threw him out in the street.
The accepted religious ideology has made the Pharisees as blind to seeing God in Jesus as the blind man’s blindness made him incapable of seeing his physical surroundings. Yet the Pharisees stick unshakably to their religious ideology, because it gives them confidence that they have God figured out, and, therefore, have the authority to speak for him. But by putting their faith in intellectual propositions about God, they have placed their faith in an idol that only perpetuates their arrogance in thinking that they know the mind of God.
We still have Pharisees in this world who think that knowing who God is and what God is up to depends on believing certain intellectual propositions about God. I encountered one of these Pharisees on the golf course last summer. Both of us started out playing alone, but came together on the third hole when we had to wait on the group in front of us. When he found out that I am an Episcopal priest he asked me, “What do you Episcopalians believe about how we are saved.” By the tone of his voice I sensed he was spoiling for a fight. I told him I could not speak for all Episcopalians because we kind of leave that up to each person’s own conscience. “You mean that in your church you are not required to believe that we are saved by the grace of Jesus, and only by that grace?” I said that is correct…and that led to an argument that absolutely ruined my golf game.
If we are going to avoid the kind of thinking that blinded my golf partner to the godliness of Episcopalians and blinded the Pharisees to the godliness of Jesus, we will replace belief in beliefs about God with trust in God as the basis for our relationship with him. Our relationship with God does not depend on getting the right answers on a test that asks us what things we believe about God and Jesus. Our relationship with God depends on trusting our experience of God, gained through worship, private prayer, and participation in the fellowship of the church. It depends on learning, appreciating, and participating in God’s story as we learn about him, worship him, and try to live a way of life that tangibly reveals his love for the world.