The experience of being excluded, on the outside looking in, is a painful part of life. Maybe you have a memory of being the last kid chosen for a baseball team, or not chosen at all. OK, I confess, that was me in grade school, and I vividly remember the coach’s name. Or, maybe you have at one time or another found yourself suddenly fired from a job, an outsider after years of being an insider. But exclusion can get much uglier. Any week, you can read the stories of Christians in parts of the world who find themselves hated and persecuted and the targets of violence, or gay teenagers who are subject to laughter, bullying, or much worse. People have a lot of ways of trying to secure their own identity by excluding someone they consider The Other.
Today’s gospel has many layers we could focus on, but at one level it is definitely a gospel about exclusion. First, the blind man. At the beginning he is singled out as a nonperson because his blindness was a sign of sin, then he’s expelled all over again because he had been healed by the wrong person on the wrong day. Then, the blind man’s parents, who don’t tell the whole truth about what happened to their son, since they are worried about being thrown out of the synagogue if they did. There is Jesus himself, under suspicion, living his life on the outskirts of official religious authority. And of course there are the Pharisees, trying to decide who needs to be punished and excluded, never once praising God for moving silently onto the scene doing something that, as the blind man says, something that had never happened before.
Exclusion is very human. But there’s more than that going on in this gospel. The question “who sinned” is at the heart of why people are excluded here. The disciples ask if it’s the blind man’s sin or his parents’ sin that caused his blindness, the Pharisees tell the blind man even after his cure, that he’s totally born in sin, and they can’t seem to decide whether Jesus and the blind man, or both of them, have somehow sinned by healing and being healed.
So much talk about sin in this gospel, the sinful turned into outcasts. But who are the only actual sinners we meet in this long reading? It is the people doing the excluding, not the people who have been excluded by them. The Pharisees are so worried about the defects in others that the presence of God, standing before them as the Messiah, has become invisible. They just don’t see it or believe it, despite all evidence to the contrary.
This blindness afflicts all of us. It causes other people’s imperfections and strangeness to conceal from us who they really are, how they appear in God’s eyes. Just as important, our judgments of ourselves can blind us to who we really are, how we appear in God’s eyes. Our faults lead us to think that we can’t be disciples, people who are the subjects of God’s loving attention and high expectations. The faults and sins of others lead us to think that clearly they can’t be either.
But what’s invisible in all this exclusion, just as he was invisible to the Pharisees, is Jesus. Maybe the most important line for us to remember in the gospel today is that Jesus says all our imperfections, even our blindness, are here so that God can be made manifest in us, so that God’s work can shine forth, so that we can be washed clean, over and over, and begin again. God can do things that have never happened before, maybe especially for those who have been shoved aside or shoved themselves aside.
Sin is real, other people’s and our own. But damaged people and sinful people are where God works. In fact, they’re the only thing God has to work with. He seeks us out, just as Jesus seeks out this blind man at the end of the story, maybe interested to see what he would do with his new sight and his new life. After all, he is no longer on the outside of life unable to see in, he sees who Jesus is, and what he can do. If we wash the mud from our own eyes, we can, too.