Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity (in the Octave of SS. Peter & Paul)
Audio file of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 4 in Petertide
Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam that is in thine own eye,
and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother’s eye
The blind leading the blind is a common image mostly familiar to us from Luke’s ‘Gospel of Mercy’ in the parable where Jesus speaks about leaders leading others astray. It has its antecedents in the prophetic criticisms of the leadership of Israel such as “You have turned aside from the way; you have caused many to stumble by your instruction”(Malachi 2.8), or “Those who guide these people have been leading them astray” (Is. 9.16) and, “His watchmen are blind; they are all without knowledge”(Is. 56.10). The image has very much to do with a critique of our claims to know. “Eyes have they and see not” extends the image to all of us in our blindness about what we think we know when in fact we are ignorant, and, yet, judgemental about others, hence the moral point about hypocrisy; judging others while exempting ourselves from the same judgment, unable to see ourselves in the other.
The image of the blind leading the blind is not unique to Christianity. It belongs as well to Siddhartha Gautama’s strong critique of Hindu religion out of which arises classical Buddhism. For him the Brahmin caste, the gurus of the Upanishads, are the blind leading the blind. He rejects the Brahmins even as he rejects the caste system altogether in favour of a more inclusive ‘enlightenment’ available for all.
The image of the blind leading the blind belongs to a self-critique of reason and knowing. Perhaps nowhere is it better illustrated than in Sophocles’ great tragedy, Oedipus Rex (Wayne Hankey, Wisdom belongs to God), and in ways that speak to our current confusions about the self and the modern managerial technocratic culture which consumes us. Oedipus thought that he knew who he was both in terms of his parents and in his confidence about his form of knowing when in fact he was blind to both. The play is about how he comes to know that he didn’t know. He comes into collision with himself in thinking that his form of knowing, a kind of discursive reasoning, is absolute, only to discover that it is at best limited and partial. His discovery happens through the encounter with prophecy, in his case, the blind prophet of Apollo, Teiresias, who, though blind, nonetheless knows the truth about Oedipus. The play explores how Oedipus comes to know this truth and in so doing discovers that his form of knowing belongs to a higher form of knowing; it is incomplete and partial in itself. To use a later language (Boethius), he comes to know how ratio participates in intellectus.
