“You’ve been down in the dumps a lot recently.”
This was how Cary kicked off our Saturday morning conversation over coffee.
“Have I?”
“Yes.”
I gazed into my coffee…
I can be as happy as the next guy, I thought, but you’re not likely to catch me leaping in the air and clicking my heels. Not that I have anything against that, but I suppose I’ve reached that certain age when, even if I were inclined to leap joyfully into the air, I might end up doing some damage.
Not that any of you would know what I’m talking about.
My point is, I can enjoy being perfectly happy without feeling obliged to make a great fuss about it. At any given moment, the casual observer might have trouble figuring out if I am delighted or depressed. Especially when I’m sitting having coffee at 7AM on a Saturday morning, the two states of being look more or less the same.
However, if there is a human being on the planet who can read me – probably better than I can read myself – it is Cary. I couldn’t pull the proverbial wool over her eyes if I tried.
So something must be wrong.
“I suppose you’re right,” I said, “but I may need a few minutes to figure out why.”
**
How fitting that we should hear this story from the gospel of John in the first week of March when those, like us, who are fortunate enough to live in New England, find ourselves mired in that charming transitional time, known to all, affectionately as Mud Season.
We are stuck in the mud… and will be for the foreseeable future…
But the Bible is not a very muddy place.
Just out of curiosity, I looked up the word “mud” in an online Biblical concordance, and found that the word “mud” appears 15 times in the Bible. Well, that is actually more than I thought, but when I looked closer, I saw that four of those references to mud happen in this story.
I think we can safely say that this is the only story in the Bible in which “mud” plays a central role.
Mud?
Mud plays a central role?
Yes mud…
Not diamonds,
Not gold…
Not medicine
Not laser surgery.
But mud.
Yucky dirt that has gotten all wet and messy – that kind of mud.
This, of course, is a healing story. In this story Jesus performs a miracle by healing a blind man.
This is not his first healing.
But this healing miracle is different from most of the other healing miracle stories in the New Testament.
Let me draw your attention to a few of the more famous healing stories:
There is the Syro-Phoenician woman in the 7th Chapter of Mark who must convince Christ that “even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.”
There is the woman who had been bleeding for twelve years who is healed by touching the hem of Christ’s garment and must confess and justify herself afterwards (Matthew 9)…
There is Jairus, the Pharisee, who, in the fifth chapter of Mark, asks Jesus to heal his daughter.
In these healing stories, and many others too, the drama of the story precedes the healing itself. The question is not whether Jesus will be able to heal them – that part of the story – which would be the central tension of any hospital drama set in the present day – is taken for granted. The question that is at stake in these healing stories is the question of whether or not the ailing person even deserves Christ’s attention in the first place.
In the story we have heard today, the question of whether or not Christ will heal the blind man is resolved quickly. Seeing a blind man in their midst, the disciples sense a teaching moment, and ask Jesus a question:
“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
To which Jesus answers:
“Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”
Jesus wastes no time.
What follows is one of the most fascinating sentences in the gospels:
Jesus 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”
Unlike other healing stories that focus on the relative worthiness of the person being healed – this story places emphasis on something unusual – on the actual procedure of healing itself.
**
I am aware that Cary’s observation, though off handed enough, is not made lightly.
She knows that there is a tendency among members of my immediate family to fall into a dangerous state of “inertia.”
Inertia… now there’s a word we use everyday.
This word – Inertia comes from Sir Isaac Newton’s first law of motion which posits that an object tends to remain as it is unless a force acts upon it. Hence, if an object is in motion, it will stay in motion unless a force acts upon it to stop it and, likewise an object that is at rest, tends to stay at rest unless a force acts upon it.
It is the second part of that definition – the part about objects remaining at rest that fills both Cary and I with a kind of quiet dread.
Without saying anything about it, we are both remembering the months of my mother’s gradual decline. These are memories that we do not often recall, wary, as we are, of their weight. These are memories of the time, after my father died, when my mother became a kind of shadow of herself.
Indeed, I would often find her, sitting in the dark.
All of her life my mother had played the piano – she played beautifully – sublime Chopin Ballades, Reveries by Grieg, Debussy’s Arabesques.
The piano – the force that had always brought her from rest into motion, into realms of beauty and mystery – the piano itself was right there, a few short steps from where she sat. But it remained at rest – untouched. Silent. Unmoving.
“Why are you sitting in the dark?” I asked.
“Oh,” she said, as if waking up… “I was sitting here, and it got dark.”
My mother was at rest, and she remained at rest.
**
I suppose it might be said that a person who is born without the power of sight might represent a person who is perpetually at rest.
Even as I say this, I can hear my friend Harriet, who was practically speaking blind, and spent her career working with blind people… I can hear her loudly disagreeing with what I just said.
To say that a person who cannot see is always at rest is to make a statement that is not literally true.
People who are blind move.
But when we consider a story from the gospel, the literal truth is often a stumbling block that obscures the deeper metaphorical, symbolic, ethical truth.
In the realm of metaphor, the blind man may be thought of as a person in a state of spiritual inertia. Even when he moves, his movement does not offer him any relief from his perpetual state of darkness – his inability to see.
Jesus is the action that acts upon this person, causing him to change his state from rest to movement.
From blindness to sight.
From spiritual emptiness, to the fullness of salvation.
And how does Jesus do it?
Here, we invoke that remarkable sentence again:
Jesus spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes,
I never fail to be astonished by this sentence.
It is shocking!
Spitting – especially on another person, directly or indirectly – is a universal taboo that evokes, in all of us, a feeling of revulsion and disgust. We cannot read this sentence and understand its meaning without shuddering a little.
And yet…
And yet there is something about the second part of Christ’s healing act – using the spit to change the dirt into mud – that seems… to me at least … to help me to forget about the spit.
Mud, somehow, seems less offensive than spit.
Mud is dirty but it’s not vulgar. Mud stains the body, it does not stain the spirit. You can wash mud off your feet and promptly forget about it, but it is more difficult to wash off spit. Usually spit doesn’t get on you without the presence of violence or hatred. And so its stain goes deeper.
There is another thing. We cannot discount the reality that this spit is not normal spit. It is, shall we say, the spit of God.
That’s a phrase I didn’t think I would ever say.
But our tradition does contain moments when the divine body interacts with our bodies. In the Book of Genesis God breathes life into us. In Psalm 139, God weaves us in our mother’s womb. After his resurrection, Thomas touches Christ’s wounds.
Christ’s spit, then, is a kind of divine essence.
But, be that as it may, in this story, this essence is delivered in a strange… a very strange manner.
We would not have flinched if Christ had kissed the blind man’s eyes.
Why didn’t he do that? That would have been so much nicer.
But Christ did not kiss the blind man’s eyes.
He spat on the ground, made mud, and smeared the mud on the blind man’s eyes.
Christ’s healing act was not designed to comfort us.
It was designed to challenge us.
Challenge and healing happen at the same time.
Challenge and healing…
happen…
at the same time.
**
The sun was painting the neighbors backyard with those hesitant, but for that, all the more delicious, splashes of early March watercolor.
“Let’s go walk down by the canal…”
We changed into our walking clothes, our walking shoes, and got the leash on the dog.
“Are we going for a walk? Are we going for a walk?”
But as we walked out the front door, snow was falling.
“Snow?!”
“Do you want to walk in the snow?” I asked
“Yes,” Cary said. “It’ll be lovely.”
Along the alley, the little flakes melted as they lit on the muddy ground.
Now and then the sun broke through, and when it did, you could see the reflection of the trees in the puddles.
When we made it down to the canal, we came upon four funny looking ducks bobbing and dancing in the water. They looked like puffins almost. Comical and beautiful at the same time.
“What are they?”
A little farther along we came upon an old timer who was peering at them through a pair of binoculars.
“Do you know what they are?”
“They are called Buffleheads” the man said.
“Buffleheads”
I remembered what Gwen use to say:
“Keep moving.”
“Keep moving” I thought… Who knows, You might see some Buffleheads…
Amen
Some good laughter!