Do you think that I have come to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. Luke 13:51
In last week’s Gospel did Jesus really do the man born blind a favor? Would it not have been better to leave him blind, a familiar beggar to whom passerby’s were so accustomed as to not even notice him – to go about their business as if he were just another – what? – a fire hydrant? After all, once Jesus did restore his sight, his life became unsettled to say the least – as did the lives of everybody in his immediate pedestrian circle. Even at a higher level, local religious leaders were left in a dither.
What had been routinely familiar, a blind beggar taken for granted as a fixture in the neighborhood, suddenly began to walk around taking everything in – probably with much excitement on his part and astonishment on that of others. His parents were startled, left facing a completely reconfigured future almost as much as he. They also drew the attention of others who wouldn’t otherwise have cared who they were. People (and a first century Wolf Blitzer) would be asking them how he had recovered his sight, what did he have for breakfast, what was his daily take in alms . . . And then: “Are you sure he was born blind? Was he ever blind? Was his blindness possibly a scam to attract sympathy and donations and thereby avoid work? And now that we know it was a scam, shouldn’t law enforcement be told?” All sorts of doubt about his family begins to spread . . .
Neighbors who knew the blind man’s family to be good citizens could not believe they would engage in such a swindle – and so they spread the rumor that their blind son must have gone away for some reason – and that this beggar who has 20/20 vision must simply be somebody else.
By this time the incident looks to resolution by the family’s religious leaders. The parents can’t explain this change in their son. “Ask him! He’s a big boy,” they say. And the young beggar testifies, “All I know is until today I had never seen anything at all – so I must have been born blind. And now I can’t stop marveling at your very faces.” The local leaders can only conclude the man and his family are lying, it was indeed a scam and the best way to restore things to the precious monotony of normality, to get back to business as usual, to keep the Sabbath “holy” is to ostracize the whole family, label them as con artists, shun them, stop them from milking us of our loose change.
What a mischief maker Jesus must have been: to set off all this commotion, ranging from the inconceivable wonder of the young man who could see things (clouds, hands, feet, cobblestones, a plethora of human features, oranges, horses!) for the first time; to parental anxiety, the intrusion of mystery into an otherwise complacent neighborhood, mystery too into the minds of theologians who thought they had resolved all the mysteries of the universe in a law book.
Was it to create such confusion, such questioning, such a violent intrusion into the shallowness of our spiritual lives that Christ performed such miracles – to open up to each of us the deeper dimensions of creation, the deeper dimensions of ourselves – in keeping with what he once said: “I came to cast fire upon the earth . . . Do you think that I have come to bring peace (to ratify the status quo of your minds and hearts)? No . . . but rather division, an unsettling, a vision that reveals how blind you and so many others have been.”