Christ Church

That I may receive my sight

It is an intriguing story and one which speaks to the nature of education, especially in conjunction with Paul’s great hymn of praise to love which was read last week in Chapel. We see “in a glass darkly,” yet we see, albeit imperfectly and unclearly. “We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus says, expressing in a metaphor what belongs to the universal journey of our souls into an understanding of reality. Going up to Jerusalem is at once about the spiritual practices of ancient Israel but also extends to the concentration of that journey into the span of the  forty days of Lent in the Christian understanding.

The story concentrates for us some of the essential features of our lives in terms of desire. What do we seek? To seek is to want, to desire. But what? Somehow something of what we seek has to be known in some way or another. To desire is to have some sense of what we want. And there is the greater question about wanting what is right and good without which “all loving [is] mere folly,” as Shakespeare puts it (‘As You Like It’). There is a necessary and crucial interplay between our willing and our knowing present in this story.

Jesus tells the disciples about what going up to Jerusalem will mean. It will mean all of the terrors of his passion and death; in short, the sufferings of Christ which reveal the sin and evil of our humanity. Such things show us the radical disorders of our humanity; not just the incompleteness of our loves, but their destructive capacity as well. Jesus tells us these things but, as Luke says about the disciples (and us), “they understood none of these things … neither knew they the things which were spoken.” Such is the reality of the educational experience. Things are spoken and taught but are they learned? What does it take to learn? It requires the journey of education in which we confront over and over again our ignorance and not-knowing. Education never ends. It is not a finite product, a thing to be possessed. It is life-long.

What it takes to learn is seen in the figure of the blind man in this story sitting as a beggar by the way-side near Jericho, the image biblically speaking of the earthly city in contrast to Jerusalem, the symbol of the heavenly city. “Hearing the multitude pass by, he asked what it meant.” That is significant. It shows that he wants to know what is going on. In discovering “that Jesus of Nazareth passeth by,” he cries out incessantly and will not be silenced even by the disciples who rebuke him. “Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy on me,” he cries.

We are like the blind man on the road in this story which is the reason why it is read on the Sunday just before the Ash Wednesday beginning of Lent. He is blind and yet he sees; like us, perhaps, “in a glass darkly.” That is to say, he knows something. He knows three things which we, in turn, need to know, paradoxically in order to come to know more fully; in short, to know even as we are known, as Paul puts it in his great hymn to love which accompanies this Gospel story. He knows, first, that he is blind; secondly, he knows that he wants to see, to know more fully; and, thirdly, he knows that the power of healing and sight belong to God which he ‘knows’ is in Jesus.

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If I have not love, I am nothing.

Love is in the air and snow is on the ground. It is hard to know of which there is more – love or snow? Paul’s great hymn to love in 1st Corinthians 13 has been the traditional scripture passage for the week of winter carnival and the attendant Valentine’s Day celebrations at King’s-Edgehill School. It is one of the great literary classics and perhaps one of the more familiar passages of Scripture even in our spiritual-lite and religious adverse age.

What is love? It is the question of Plato’s Symposium and belongs to a serious reflection upon the understanding of our humanity in its desires and drives that concern our relation with one another. Love is a big little word. Paul uses the word ‘love’ explicitly ten times and refers to it another seven times. In other words, love is emphatically front and center in 1st Corinthians seventeen times in seventeen verses. What does he mean by love?

As with Plato, love means more than simply the romantic and the sensual even as it shapes and informs those aspects of our humanity. As with Plato, Paul is not arguing for the idea of love as an object, a thing, even love as the beloved, but as an activity of the soul. There are a great number of words for love that the ancient Greeks have bequeathed to us and which have carried over into a variety of Latin terms as well. Ordinarily in English we have to make do with the big little word love to cover a whole range of meanings.

In Greek, there is eros, for instance, from which we get the idea of the erotic and the sensual; there is philos, or friendship love, we might say, and which extends to a whole host of words like philosophy, the love of wisdom, or philanthropy, the love of our humanity associated with generosity; there is storge, the love of family or nation or community; and there is agape, the social and communal love which extends to matters spiritual. That is the word which Paul uses but which is translated as caritas in the Latin with its connotations about grace, and rendered rather beautifully in the King James version as charity. But it would be a mistake to place these different terms for love in tight little boxes, sequestered and isolated from one another. Plato deliberately, it seems to me, uses the word eros with all of its sensual connotations to embark upon the journey of love which is spiritual and intellectual but as such embraces all the forms of love, from the lowest to the highest.

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