Everything Exposed To The Light Becomes Visible

[Note: Today’s guest blogger is Theresa Tensuan-Eli. Theresa teaches writing at Haverford College where she also acts as an advising dean – a role in which she’s found that the many mistakes that she’s made in her own life enable her to be an empathetic listener to students in their own processes of discernment and reflection.  She is happy to be part of the Across the Miles family and grateful to the amazing Spiritus parishioners who compose the Prayer Line.  Theresa lives in Ardmore, PA, with a rotating cast of family including a playwright husband, and two kids whose skills include small household repair work and prairie restoration. Thank you, Theresa!]

Today’s readings feel a little like a “greatest hits” compilation:  we start with a story from the first book of Samuel (1 Samuel 16), in which the prophet is called by God to visit Jesse to discover which of Jesse’s sons is to be anointed as king. Initially, Samuel thinks that it is the haughty-looking eldest, Eliab, but God reminds Samuel that appearances can be deceiving, leading Samuel to ask Jesse if he has any other sons – and thus the youngest David, who will someday slay giants, is called in from the fields where he has been tending the sheep. 

We then have the 23rd Psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd, there is nothing that I want” that contains the line that “You spread the table before me/in the sight of my foes;/ you anoint my head with oil;/and my cup overflows” and then, from the Gospel of John chapter 9, we have the story of Jesus encountering a man who had been blind from birth. The man’s neighbors as well as the disciples take his blindness to be a sign that either he, or his parents, had sinned to which Jesus replies:

“Neither he nor his parents have sinned.
It is so that the words of God may be made visible through him.
We have to do the works of the one who sent me while it is day.
Night is coming when no one can work.
While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” (John 9:3-4)

Jesus makes a poultice out of his saliva and the dirt at his feet and rubs the clay on the man’s eyes and tells him to wash it off at the Pool of Siloam – a pool hewn out of rock during the reign of Hezekiah to divert spring waters from invading armies, which had become a mikvah, a ritual bath.  When the blind man follows Jesus’ instructions and becomes able to see, his neighbors are unable to believe their own eyes, and in face of a miracle drag him to the Pharisees, who themselves try to discount the grace of God by a technicality – no one is supposed to be working on the Sabbath, and in performing this act of healing Jesus, they claim, has broken the law.  Thinking back to Mike Boucher’s reflections on the Ten Commandments and other foundations of our faith “as the structure[s] that need to be carried on, learned and embodied. They are not seen as restrictive so much as leading to life” the Pharisees fall back on the letter, rather than the spirit of laws meant to foster a living and breathing faith.

I have a feeling that if I were around in Jesus’ day, I may have been one of the Pharisees – a sect that sought to interpret the Torah through a lens of social justice, who worried about their tribe’s assimilation to a ruling culture that did not share their values, who were seen as more democratic than the haughty Sadducees. The majory of the Pharisees are clearly unnerved by this upstart – he claims to to be the son of God! – whose actions appear to be breaking down the fragile order they had worked so hard to create. The few Pharisees who are considering the possibility that such actions could not be the actions of a sinner are discounted.  The man’s parents are called to testify about his transformation:  terrified of being cast out of the synagogue if they attest to the miraculous actions of a man who has been discredited, they push their son before the tribunal.  

The formerly blind man quickly and simply becomes tired of being asked the same set of questions by a group of people who, rather than sit in wonder in the face of the miracle and mystery of his healing, want to hear a version of events that will satisfy their sense of their own righteousness. The Pharisees throw him out, and, upon hearing of this, Jesus finds the man and proclaims to him “I came into this world for judgement/so that those who do not see may see/and those who do see may become blind.”  Some Pharisees who seem to have been trailing Jesus – perhaps an act of surveillance, perhaps out of their own sense of wonder – ask if they themselves have been blind, and Jesus says to them “If you were blind, you would have no sin/but now you are saying ‘we see’ so your sin remains” (John 9: 39, 41).

Thinking back to Samuel, who initially mistakes grandeur for grace, and to the 23rd Psalm which notes God will bestow upon us gifts in full view of those who wish us ill, and to Jesus’ own words that in and through our actions in service to one another, we make visible the hand of God, I am now sitting with the letter of Paul to the Ephesians, part of which is today’s second reading, 

Friends,
You were once darkness, 
but now you are light in the Lord.
Live as children of light…
Take no part in the fruitless works of darkness…
everything exposed by the light becomes visible, 
for everything that becomes visible is light. (Ephesians 5: 8, 11, 13-14)

Here, I am thinking of the Quakerly insight that each one of us has an inner light, and that part of our daily practice is to seek that of God in one another – to be attuned to one another’s foundational grace and to thus enable us all the “live as children of light.”  Each one of us is anointed, and it is when we lose sight of the divine in others – casting others outside of the circle of approval, as well as when we act against what God calls us to do – that we fall from justice to self-serving righteousness which ends up not serving anyone well at all.  

Given the extraordinary gift of God’s love, I am wondering “what is keeping me from seeing and honoring the light in others?  Where in my life am I in need of more light?  What is that small step that I can take to discover, uncover, and shine my own light?”