This is much more than the usual healing story from the gospels. We know that Jesus healed people who came to him, or sometimes even people who didn’t seem to be seeking him out.
But this is a long story that seems to have a much bigger message for us, about what following Jesus really involves. It’s actually a story about what it means to be a holy and grace-filled human being and how you get there.
Let’s start by noticing all the talk about sin and uncleanness in this gospel. As a blind person of course this man who was healed was an outcast, but it seems like he is an outcast even after being healed — the authorities keep looking for him, calling him a sinner, warning him that he’d better know his place. Even his parents aren’t sure that they want to be identified with him once he’s cured. And then there’s Jesus, also accused of being a sinner, no one seems to be able to say why exactly, except that he’s a sinner for healing this other sinner in a way that stirred people up.
So many people in this gospel seem to think that the goal is not to be around someone who is a sinner, that that is how you avoid sin yourself, that is how you attain a state of cleanliness and maybe even holiness. They all want to be on God’s side, and they assume that is how you do it.
But what’s where the real message of this gospel comes in, and not just today’s reading, but really all the stories about how Jesus encountered so much hostility in this world.
You don’t encounter God by avoiding uncleanness, he taught us that’s not where holiness comes from. Holiness isn’t even all about not sinning. Instead, you approach God through going to the unfortunate and the rejected and the difficult. Jesus revealed that that is where holiness has been all along. That’s what Jesus is trying to show us in all these stories we hear during Lent, talking with the woman at the well, or the woman taken in adultery. Human contact with people who are suffering, or on the outside looking in, being present with them without judging them, accompanying them, as Pope Francis likes to call it, helping them if you can and treating them as fellow human beings if you can’t. That is where Jesus is pointing over and over.
If you want to feel the presence of God in your life, we are never closer to it than when we are with someone who is in need. Even if we are not miracle workers and healers the way Jesus was, we are following him when we do that, just show up somewhere, and he is never more present than when we take down a barrier between ourselves and someone that the world judges harshly or has no interest in.
Every barrier that we put up to this way of living, from I can’t help, to I don’t think anything can be done, to I sympathize with these refugees but not these other ones, they are all barriers to the city of God we’re called to live in. In that city we stop worrying about who is right and who is wrong, who the sinner is and isn’t, and just try to operate on the system Jesus used, the one that wasn’t very popular in this gospel and often still isn’t popular.
True love like his requires taking such a risk requires so much patience, that it’s a miracle when we’re able to do it. But miracles happen, even in our lives, and today we find out how to make them happen. Simply show up with someone who the rest of the world has decided isn’t worth it. That will turn the world upside down.