“Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?”
This morning’s reading continue the underlying theme of the Trinity season which is about the relation between knowing and doing, between things intellectual and matters moral. Jesus commands us to “be merciful as your Father also is merciful”. But what happens if and when we turn our backs on the mercy of God revealed in Jesus? What happens if we fail to act upon what we have been given to see in Jesus? “And he spake a parable unto them,” the parable of the blind leading the blind.
I cannot hear this parable without being reminded of Brueghel’s marvelous painting of a troupe of blind beggars all in the process of falling into a ditch, the leader having his cap pulled down over his eyes, not only blind but doubly blind, almost willfully blind. And in the center of the painting there is the image of a church from which we have turned away. It suggests the disconnect between what we are given to know and what we do which goes to the issue of hypocrisy signaled in the Gospel. Such forms of blindness belong to a wisdom that is both ancient and modern.
In Sophocles’ great tragedy, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus thought that he knew who he was and thought that his form of reasoning, that of the being a solver of riddles, of problems, was the only form of knowing. He comes to learn, paradoxically through his reason, that the blind prophet, Teiresias, actually knew the truth of Oedipus even when Oedipus didn’t; in other words, there are other ways of knowing. Oedipus comes to know who he is, namely, the man who unwittingly killed his father and married his mother. He learns that he didn’t know what he thought he knew. He was blind to the truth about himself. He had eyes but saw not. But Teiresias, who was blind, knew. He had no eyes and yet he saw. Oedipus, in this moment of realizing who he is, puts out his eyes. He is now literally blind and yet now he knows. For the Greeks, he is “the paradigm of fate”. The one who didn’t know who he is provides the example of the importance of knowing yourself and your place in the world. The forms of his blindness, first, the presumption of thinking he knew what he didn’t know and thinking his form of knowing the only form of knowing, and, secondly, his becoming literally blind, are lessons for the culture. At the end of the play, he is no longer king and is led out of the city, no longer its leader, no longer the blind leading the blind.
Samson in The Book of Judges is deceived by Delilah and loses his strength and power. He is taken captive by the Philistines who gouge out his eyes and make sport of him, after which they place him between two pillars of their temple at a celebration of Dagon their god; in the Jewish understanding, an idol. Samson’s strength returns and he pulls down the pillars causing the temple to collapse upon him and upon a great number of the Philistines. The story of Samson is a lesson to Israel about the truth of God and about human blindness and folly.
Margaret Laurence’s novel, The Stone Angel, begins with the image of a stone angel standing in a cemetery. The angel is described as being doubly blind; not only because of being made of stone but without even the illusion of sight. The image serves as a literary metaphor for Hagar, the main character, who at the age of ninety looks back on her life and realizes that she has been doubly blind herself, blind about her own character and blind to the needs of others. And yet, through the discovery of the forms of her blindness, there is self-knowledge. “Pride was my wilderness,” she says, recognizing precisely the truth about herself.
Pride is our blindness because it cuts us off from everything that is around us. It is the opposite of the humility which we saw last week was the condition of rejoicing through repentance which is about a recognition of our failings. The parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin are about God finding us when we were lost and gathering us back to himself and to the human community. We cannot restore ourselves. The last parable of that chapter is the parable of the prodigal son which adds the further dimension of knowing your blindness; in a “far off country,” the prodigal son who has wasted his father’s inheritance, “came to himself” and returns home, not on the presumption of his sonship which he has betrayed, but as a servant. His words of self-realization belong to the liturgical patterns of confession. “Father,” he says, “I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.” But the Christian lesson here is that God is greater than us in our sins; mercy restores and rejoices in the penitent. It is not just that we are lost and now are found; it is that we were blind and now we see. Something is learned through our blindness or rather through our knowing our blindness. We are opened to grace and mercy.
The other day, in conversation, a couple were lamenting the dismantling of a rural church further down the valley, a church too poor to afford to have it taken down and so former parishioners were invited to come and take what they wanted as momentoes before the entire edifice was handed over to the Home Renovators to take what was left to be incorporated into the building of new homes. It is a common story in Maritime Canada. The conversation turned, as it often does, to the precipitous decline in church attendance and to the observation that this no doubt contributes to the messed up lives of people, especially young people in our communities. The assumption is revealing and worth pondering. The assumption, in part, is that the Church exists for the moral good of the community; that somehow we can be taught how to be good. But can we? And can the Church lay claim to any kind of moral authority?
This, too, is an ancient question. Plato, in The Meno, explores the question whether virtue – being good – can be taught. Socrates points out that you would first have to know what virtue, what being good, is. You just can’t assume it. Unable to arrive at a satisfactory definition of virtue, the dialogue embarks upon a thought experiment, the hypothesis that virtue as a form of knowing can be taught but the argument collapses upon the observation that there doesn’t seem to be anyone who, though virtuous themselves, is able to teach it. There is a gap between the knowing and the doing. Knowing, it seems, does not always result in doing.
But doing what is good is not enough either without knowing what is good, as Plato teaches in The Republic. He ends that dialogue with the Myth of Er, a vision of the afterworld in which the traveler sees a man who was brought up in a virtuous state but makes a bad choice about his future life. The point is that he was good but without knowing the nature of the good.
Here in the gospel Jesus addresses this similar problem about the relationship between our knowing and our doing. The point of the parable and its explanation is that we are to learn from our blindness, in this case, the blindness of our hypocrisy. And what is our hypocrisy? Knowing one thing but doing another and particularly in the ways that betray spiritual communities, that is to say, the problem of self-righteousness. We are quick to point out the small faults of others, “the mote that is in [our] brother’s eye,” while being blind to “the beam that is in our own eye.” Is this not a criticism, too, of the contemporary church? To be sure, the Church in the form of the churches lacks moral credibility in the contemporary world; in part, because it has betrayed the understanding of God for which it exists and in various ways that, perhaps, can be summed up as ‘sex, money and stupidity, but the greatest of these is stupidity’. Yet, as this Gospel teaches, by far the greatest problem is hypocrisy, the challenge for each and every moral and intellectual enterprise and institution. It is a kind of betrayal of what has been given to see. Yet the thing about hypocrisy is that the principles are always there to be reclaimed and recovered. For the lesson is very clear. Sin is precisely about that gap between what we know and what we do. “The good that I would do I do not do,” Paul says, “the evil which I would not do is what I do.” And this is from one whose conversion is about being blinded into sight!
What Paul describes is the human condition of our fallenness, our sinfulness. Yet to know this is salvation. The Church cannot make people good; the idea that it can is large part of the decline. What the Church can and must do is to teach the mercy and the goodness of God in the face of human evil, one form of which is our technocratic arrogance which devalues individual life and wreaks havoc upon the world. It is the only lesson, the lesson that can only be learned from our blindness. I was blind but now I see. What I see is not about me but about the mercy of God for our humanity. We have to learn once again to act upon the mercy that has been shown to us. We confront our blindness; only so can we begin to see. Only so can we begin to “be merciful as your Father also is merciful.”
This morning Maggie and Paul have brought Nolan to be baptized. That is to recognize his need for something “which he cannot have by nature.” It is to recognize his being part of the human condition of fallenness. It is to seek for him the mercy of God revealed in Jesus Christ, our liberty as the children of God. Nolan is an infant, one who is unable to speak. In a sense he knows everything and nothing because he does not know what he sees and knows. He is to grow up into understanding through the paths of forgetting and remembering; in short, learning. He is to learn what has happened to him here today and what it means. There will be suffering and sorrow in his life and yet “the sufferings of this present time” are as nothing in comparison with the mercy of God revealed in Jesus Christ and to be realized in us. But that means knowing our blindness and learning to see what God gives us to see. It means learning to act upon what we see. It is the constant struggle of our lives. It can only happen in the same way that it begins, by the grace of God given and received.
“Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity IV, 2015