John 9:1-12 "Never Walk in the Dark" Scott Hoezee

When novelist William Styron decided to write a memoir about his life-long struggles with depression, he cast about for a title for his book as well as for a metaphor by which to convey what depression feels like. The title and metaphor he decided on was Darkness Visible. In this book Styron talks about something some of you have also experienced: the tangible, palpable, horrible feeling of clinical depression. Like some of you, so also Styron could find no way to describe it other than to say it feels like a black cloud, a stifling darkness which is so vivid, so strong, as to block out all of life's light. In the throes of depression nothing bright, nothing good, nothing happy can even reach a person. Light and liveliness are mentally eclipsed and it feels for all the world that the person is sinking into a black pit or abyss. So dark and bleak is this situation that suicide actually makes sense. It seems the only way out. When all you can see is the darkness, dark choices are all that remain feasible.

There can be little doubt that deep depressions like this are one of the most horrid fallouts of sin and evil in our world. All through Scripture the goodness of God is presented as something bright, as the light of life. Darkness is the first thing God overcame in the original creation, according to Genesis 1, and darkness is the first thing banished in the New Creation, according to the Book of Revelation, when God himself will become the eternal light, the new sun, for his people. Given all of that, it ought to be no surprise that depression, which often robs even Christian people of their ability to see God, routinely gets described as a blackness so dark and an abyss so deep as to permit no shafts of light to fall across the person's mind.

If you have ever experienced that, then perhaps for you Jesus' claim "I am the light of the world" may gain a special poignance. In a dark world we need to know that somewhere there shines a light that cannot and will not ever go out. We need to know that whether we can see it or not at any given moment, the world is not finally dark--indeed, one day the light will win.

The light certainly conquered the darkness for one man in John 9. The unnamed man in question had been blind from birth. For those of us who have always been able to see, that is a darkness we cannot imagine. This man may have known that he was missing something in life but really he could not even have known or been able to conceive of what he was missing. How could you even describe light and the ability to see to someone who has never seen so much as a spark of light? It is finally impossible.

Most of us are so accustomed to having the ability to see and to experience light that we don't even know total darkness. A science article that I read some time back said that researchers actually have to work very hard to shroud someone's eyes so totally that absolutely no light gets in. Remarkably, what they have discovered is that once they do completely block all light from a person's eyes, the brain resists the darkness and so begins throwing up optical illusions of sparks and other flashes of light which the brain simulates in its resistance to total darkness.

Once you have had the ability to see, you cannot really experience the darkness of true blindness. In fact, as we have noted on other occasions, neurologists like Oliver Sacks point out that if it really happened that Jesus healed the blind in ways that they were able immediately to begin walking and running around, exclaiming over their new-found sight, then actually a kind of double-miracle occurred. For someone like this man born blind simply restoring his optic hardware would not be enough. What we mostly take for granted, or at least simply fail to realize, is that functioning as a seeing person is one-part physical and one-part mental. Knowing what to make of and what to do with the visual data that come through your eyeballs comes from having a large backlog of visual experience.

So someone born blind who had his sight restored would ordinarily have to learn how to see! For instance, without any prior experience with something like depth perception, a person with newly restored sight would likely fall down a lot at first because he misjudged how far down a step was or because he tried to lean against a wall which was actually farther away than he thought. Newly sighted persons also sometimes reach for things that are well out-of-reach even as they knock over objects which are closer than they thought. This is why some people who had been blind but who get sight restored through surgery actually keep using their white canes for a while so that they can connect how the world has always felt through the tip of the cane to how it now looks through their eyeballs. It even takes time to learn how to recognize common objects. A once-blind person may know what a phone feels and sounds like but having never before laid eyes on a phone, he would not know what it was if you simply held it up in front of him for the first time and said, "Know what this is?"

So when Jesus restored the sight of people like this man in John 9, perhaps Jesus also took care to install some of the mental software needed for such a person to begin using that new-found vision. Physically speaking there is more than just one layer to blindness. Spiritually speaking the same is true. There is a darkness that has crept into the cosmos that has blinded us to goodness, to beauty, to the true light of God. We are so blind that many times it is not enough simply to be shown the light of God--we need to be told what to make of it, what to do with it, and even what it is the light reveals.

When a person has been blind his whole life, actually gaining the ability to see can be disorienting, frightening. It is the same with spiritual blindness. Sometimes, as Jesus says to Nicodemus in John 3, people grow so accustomed to the darkness that when the light comes, they flee it. They can't make sense of what they see in the light, and they also realize that the light is going to reveal some things about their lives which may not be very pleasant to see. The light is there for the seeing but unless some other changes get made in the human heart, the light alone will not be enough.

In John 9 Jesus heals this man but then disappears. In verse 12 the people ask who had given this man his sight back, and he candidly says he doesn't really know since he had quite literally never laid eyes on Jesus. Later in John 9, after this once-blind man gets excommunicated from the synagogue, Jesus shows back up, but the man, of course, does not recognize him. Jesus had to show himself and reveal himself to the man before the man could at long last fall down and worship Jesus, which he does in verse 38.

In so many ways this story in which Jesus identifies himself as the light of the world is not as simple or as straightforward as you might wish it would be. First there is that quirky way Jesus healed the man. Instead of snapping his fingers or something and just healing the man on the spot, Jesus spits, dawbs in the dirt, dirties up the man's eyes, and then sends him off to take a bath. An odd ritual. Then things get quite complicated as the Pharisees try first to claim the miracle never happened. Then, once there is no getting around the fact that a blind man had been healed, the Pharisees blame the man both for liking what has happened to him and for refusing to say that some wayward sinner was responsible! They end up excommunicating him for having the audacity to get healed and then for giving God the glory for the healing!

"The light has shined in the darkness but the darkness has not overcome it," John wrote in his famous opening chapter. Oh, but the darkness most certainly tries to overcome it! The Pharisees are so hell-bent on covering up this invasion of the light that you wouldn't be surprised had they gouged out the man's eyes with a stick just so they could say, "What miracle? He still looks blind to us!" Were it not so dark an example of sin's deeply entrenched nature in the human heart, this story would be almost funny.

When you are depressed, William Styron notes, nothing can get to you, no light can penetrate the shroud of darkness enveloping your mind. In John 9 something similar could be said of Jesus' enemies: so total is the darkness in which they have immersed themselves that they cannot even see the light of God blazing forth in glory right in front of their very eyes. It is a spiritual blindness so total as to be frightening. It is chilling precisely because it is so vivid a reminder of sin's power.

In all likelihood, however, that kind of willful, wanton, near-total blindness is not what most of us struggle with. Most of us long ago came to the light of Christ, and joyfully so. Our difficulty is not willful blindness to the light of Jesus but keeping it in view in a world which throws up so many barriers. Sometimes this world, and the genuine struggles we have in it, are a little like those obnoxious children who are forever sticking her hands in front of the video camera when you're trying to film something. We've all seen that before, I'm sure--you're trying to capture on film the beauty of the Maine coastline or something but one of your kids keeps waving her hands or sticking his nose into the lens saying, "Film me! Film me!"

Sometimes life seems like that: we're trying to keep Jesus in view, trying to let his light cascade over us, but other people, the hurts we endure, the doubts that crop up, and the tragedies that sometimes come our way all stick their faces in front of us, preventing us now and then from seeing Jesus, the light of the world. Other times we're just confused. We see Jesus' light, we are trying to live in its glow, but some days we feel like a formerly blind person whose eyes are working now but who doesn't yet quite have depth perception down right. And so we fall down a lot. We don't trip in the darkness so much as we mess up what we see in the light!

We think that being a Christian who knows Jesus the Light should lead to a life that is just generally bright and sunny like some lovely meadow on a mountainside. Yet we sometimes have days where we don't feel terribly illumined. We're not sure we can see very well after all. And so we wonder. We wonder if we're missing something. We know we're not blind the way the Pharisees in John 9 were blind, but we do feel rather dim some days, as though we had cataracts growing over our eyes of faith.

But I think Jesus understands that. And I also think the larger Gospel of John bears this out. John, of course, plays with the light/dark motif throughout his book. He opens grandly with Jesus as the Word of God who created all things in the beginning--way back in the beginning when the Word of God was the one to shout out those cosmos-creating words, "Let there be light!" John then tells us that this Word of God who had lately come into the world was the light of humanity.

But there are some other places where light and dark pop up in John. In chapter 3 Nicodemus visits Jesus, but he does it at night, under the cover of darkness. He was drawn to the light of Jesus, but was not sure at first he wanted to be seen in that light by his colleagues! Eventually Jesus gets arrested and put on trial also at night as Jesus' enemies tried to snuff out the light of the world in a kangaroo court held under the cover of darkness so as to cover up the lies and shenanigans they were pulling.

The funny thing about John, though, is that despite all of his rhetoric contrasting light with dark throughout his gospel, John ends up being the only one of the four gospels that does not mention how dark the skies grew the afternoon of Jesus' crucifixion. That is a highly curious omission! You would think that John, of all people, would have wanted to be very sure to include that detail as a way to cap off the motif of Jesus the light doing battle with the dark forces of evil. But he doesn't mention it.

It is risky to speculate as to why someone would have left something out--arguments from silence are quite susceptible to error. But I wonder if maybe the reason is because John is waiting for one last presentation of Jesus the light in the midst of this world's darkness. It is easy to miss this but I am grateful to Frederick Buechner for pointing it out. The last example comes in John's last chapter. In John 21 the disciples, not seeming to know yet what to do despite having now seen the resurrected Jesus, decide to go fishing. And they do it at night. They had no luck, however. But near the end of that long, fruitless night, a figure calls out from shore. It's too dark to see who it is but when he recommends they simply try fishing out of the other side of the boat (only to yield more fish they can handle), they know pretty quickly who that figure shrouded in the morning mist must be.

So they row ashore only to discover Jesus, the light of the world, poking a stick into a small charcoal fire. Breakfast is already sizzling, as it turns out, and some fresh bread is on hand, too. But that was not the main item on the menu that morning. Forgiveness was also served up as Jesus reinstates Peter despite his denials in the night some days back.

There in the still-dark gloaming of the pre-dawn Jesus, the resurrected light of the world, lit a small fire. I like that. As Buechner says, John opened with light of the original creation--a light almost too extraordinary to take in. But John ends with the flicker of a little camp fire on a beach, which is almost too ordinary to take seriously. Sunk near the middle of this gospel is tonight's passage where Jesus declares himself the great I Am once again, this time staking his claim to being the light of creation and now also of salvation.

But in the end it is not that blazing light of creation's dawning we are called to live in but the post-resurrection light of that other day's dawning as Jesus, the light of life, bends over a little pile of sticks and charcoal, cupping his hands around a little spark and gently blowing on it to get the fire going. In the heat and the glow of that little fire, Jesus did the one thing he died and rose again to do: be gracious, proffer forgiveness, and so gently blow on the embers of Peter's faith in a way that would ensure the flame of Pentecost would soon blaze in Peter's heart.

Jesus is the light of the world. There may well be seasons in our Christian lives when we feel like we are basking in the noontime sunshine of God's love in Christ. Insofar as we can see a purpose in life at all, insofar as we can see well enough to keep putting one foot in front of the other, we can be grateful for this bright gift. But there may well be other seasons in our Christian lives when things grow dim. But we can take heart from John's gospel: we haven't lost the light. It's still there, glowing a bit, even as Jesus cups his hands around our fragile hearts and gently blows. What flares up may not look as majestic as creation's first light, it may not throw heat like the solar furnaces blazing in outer space, but it is light. It is warm. And it is of Jesus.

When you know Jesus as the light of the world, you will never walk in the dark. The life of faith may not always be as bright as the sunshine of some May afternoon, but it will always be there, glowing with forgiveness and with hope. Sometimes it's enough just to sit with Jesus around the fire of his love to share with him a little fish, a little bread, and always a warm helping of grace. Amen.