Admitting blindness

Joh 9:39-41  Jesus said, “ I pass throughout this world to set the record straight, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.”  (40)  Some of the Pharisees near him heard these things, and said to him, “Are we also blind?”  (41)  Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your guilt remains.

To "not know" is no sin at all. But to act as though you know when you don't is a great sin. The above is an interesting interaction between Jesus and the religious leaders, and an all too human one. In context, Jesus had just healed the man he was speaking to. He had healed the blindness that he was born with. This man had just been booted out of the temple after being interrogated by the religious leaders as to how he was healed. Jesus finds him after this and struck up a conversation. Jesus was speaking the above words to the man he healed. He was not speaking to the religious leaders, but the religious leaders overheard what he was saying. That is an important point: they overheard it. He wasn't speaking to them, he wasn't trying to teach them anything. They sensed that their position was being slighted by what he was saying, and they found it offensive.

Jesus didn't go around trying to convince people that they couldn't see, he went around helping the people who knew they couldn't see. The religious leaders interrupt the conversation, "are we blind too?" You can almost hear their quiet snickering. Are they blind? Yes or no? Jesus doesn't call them blind, and in their minds, to be blind(intellectually) would be the worst thing imaginable. The answer of Jesus is in effect; "The best thing possible for you would be to be blind, and to acknowledge it." Jesus always did stuff like that, said stuff like that, came at you from the left while you were waiting for him to come from the right. He turned their words back on them, he did not call them blind, he exposed them as blind, that is how he got to be so hated by the religious leaders.

Now let me say, these religious leaders were highly educated men, they had a proper education in the world, that is how they gained the status that they did in their society. I don't know if Jesus was an educated man, but I do know that what he said to these men would have rang bells in their head from their own educational past. Without a doubt, these men were learned in Greek philosophy. For 300 years or so previous to this conversation with Jesus, the forefathers of these religious leaders had been studying the wisdom of the ancient Greek world. This was known as "the Hellenistic period", with "Hellenism" meaning the study and embracing of ancient Greek wisdom. One of the greatest of all Greek philosophers was Socrates. It is beyond doubt that these Jewish religious leaders had studied him, and knew well this famous story about him:

Can you imagine how much Jesus' response to these men must have cut like a knife? Now, like I said, it can't be known if Jesus was aware of the connection, but that is neither here nor there. It was in the divine plan that his words to them would be offensive in the extreme. Jesus says (whether he realized it or not), "I don't condemn you as being blind/foolish, but Socrates, the teacher of all teachers, condemns you as being blind/foolish. There is no rebuttal to that statement, all they could do is stand there burning, red-faced and glowing with anger.

This "pretending to see/know" is not a problem with the highly educated alone, is it a problem with all people, there are so many things that we assume we know that we in fact do not know. We go around judging people, judging circumstances, events, situations with what we convince ourselves that we "know". We hurt one another greatly in this process, and we create blindness on top of blindness. We (the blind) have built a whole world for ourselves in our blindness. We follow one another around in blind circles until our last breath. But as Paul would say:

1Co 3:18  Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you seems to be wise in this world, let him become a fool so that he may become wise.

We cannot learn another way until we learn that we have not yet learned how to learn. We think we know how to learn and we tell our teachers how to teach us, but if we are telling the teacher how to teach us, who is teaching whom? If the one who needs to learn is teaching the teacher how to teach, what real learning can take place? Now because the majority of "teachers" are not truly trying to teach, but instead are seeking to be popular, they agree to teach the student in the way the student teaches them to teach. The "teacher" then becomes popular, and the student can claim the popular teacher as validating what they themselves "know"... and around and around goes this merry-go-round of the blind leading the blind.

But getting back to how the blind student tries to teach, I think this old Zen story lays the idea out well:

It is OK not to know, it is OK to embrace how little we can know, how little we can prove. It is good to look up at the night sky full of stars and let it make you feel small and insignificant. The world's problems do not come from a bunch of people who feel small and insignificant (no matter how much the latest self-help guru begs to differ). The real problems in this world come from people pretending to greatness in some form or another. Although such feigned greatness can give some sense of fulfillment in life, in the end it is illusory. The truth is that we are tiny little beings floating helplessly on a huge spinning rock, in the midst of a universe with no known boundaries... and yet how great of an experience it is to feel the sunshine, see a flower, make someone smile. We don't have to know the whys or hows for things to be very, very good. To humble ourselves under the mysteries of life will always be more fulfilling than pretending to know things. Why not instead, gain "knowledge" of just how much we do not know? To be in awe of all that we cannot possibly fathom? Like Einstein, who saw the ultimate knowledge as:

A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. (Albert Einstein)

Amen Albert.