Can you hear the strings?
Justin Timberlake, or “JT” as I like to call him, sang a song back in 2006 entitled “What Goes Around…Comes Around.” In it he articulates our idea of justice. Of course it’s in the context of a love relationship because it is after all a hip hop/R&B song, and everything boils down to love and/or money in hip hop and R&B songs. But JT sings,
“Is this how we say goodbye? Should have known better when you came around that you were gonna make me cry. It's breaking my heart to watch you run around 'cause I know that you're living a lie. That’s okay, baby, 'cause in time you will find…what goes around, goes around, goes around comes all the way back around.”
What goes around comes around. This is the way we see the world work…at least it is the way we hope the world works when we have been hurt by someone. We call it poetic justice. I know you’re all thinking about the not-so-great 1993 movie Poetic justice, starring Janet Jackson and Tupac Shakur in which Janet plays a girl named Justice who happens to write poetry…very on the nose. Not great, but it was Janet and Tupac, so it’s iconic anyway. BUT that’s not the poetic justice I’m referring to. I’m referring to the idea of experiencing a fitting or deserved retribution for one's actions…another way to say it is karma. The idea of cause and effect…the basis for most of the far eastern religions. What goes around comes around.
This is how we hope things work especially when we’ve been hurt like JT was in that song. He was hoping his ex “baby” would experience the same pain that she had caused him. This is our idea of justice…retribution. It is what is behind the disciples question to Jesus in John 9 about the man born blind (the Lenten gospel reading this past week in the Anglican word). “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” The presupposition is that this guy is clearly getting his just desserts in some way…that’s the reason bad things happen because someone did something bad to deserve it. The disciples would have loved Justin Timberlake’s song. They were basing their thinking in, surprise, surprise!…the law. Exodus 34:7 says, “[God] will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation.” The law operates in cause and effect, tit for tat, if-then. It is the way of the old covenant. Covenantal conditionalism…if you do this, then you will be blessed. And the opposite, if you do not do this then you will be punished, and according to Exodus 34:7 so will your kids and grandkids, etc. As Radiohead sings in “Karma Police” (amazing video above)…”this is what you get when you mess with us.”
So, according to this framework either this guy sinned in the womb somehow or his parents sinned because he was born this way…not blessed. And they ask Jesus, which one is it? To use the National Enquirer’s slogan “Enquiring minds want to know…Lord.” And that is about the extent of the disciples curiosity. They are not interested in actually helping the man born blind. They are not asking Jesus this question out of compassion for the man. To them the guy is simply a case study…they are theologically curious and probably somewhere in the background is the desire to know some gossip about this guy and his family. They didn’t want to help him…he was just a good example for a good philosophical question. The disciples operated from a karmic perspective on the world and so do all of us naturally. We want retribution…at least we want it for those we see as bad guys in life…people who have hurt us or others. The story changes when we are the perpetrators, but we’ll come back to that.
Amazingly, Jesus blows up this paradigm, and it leads me to another song…this time by U2 entitled “Grace." This one is from 2004, so just a couple years before “What Goes Around…Comes Around.” Bono personifies grace as woman in the song and sings, “Grace, she travels outside of karma, karma, she travels outside of karma. When she goes to work you can hear the strings. Grace makes beauty out of ugly things.” This is what Jesus tells us and shows us in this passage…that grace travels outside of karma. He answers the disciples, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him” (v. 3). There is something far bigger going on here than your small retributive understanding of the world, guys…this is not poetic justice…this is not tit for tat. This is for the glory of God. Can you hear the strings starting to play?
You know, Jesus doesn’t talk about the word of God, he is the Word of God, and he does the word of God to us. That’s exactly what he does here. He spits on the ground and makes some mud and then he rubs it onto the blind man’s eyes. This seems quite strange at first and pretty gross too, but look at it again. You will see Jesus the Creator God at work. John opens his gospel telling us that Jesus is the Word and that all of the universe was created through him (John 1). And here in this literally earthy and personal way we see the Creator of the universe recreate this man. Genesis 2 tells us that God made humanity out of the earth in his own image and Jesus once again takes earth and mixes it with his own DNA in his saliva and uses it to heal his beloved creation. John is showing us Jesus’ divine majesty here. And Jesus is giving this man something that he can respond to…he makes the whole thing physical.
This man was blind from birth. He has only understood the world through his other senses: taste, smell, hearing, and touch. If you have ever known anyone who is blind you know that they engage with the world very significantly through touch. Jesus is communicating to this man in a way that he would understand, which is what he does with all of us. On top of that, a little later in the story we learn from his neighbors that the man was well known as a beggar. The disciples’ assessment of him was clearly everyone’s assessment. He was in this state because of sin…either his or his parents’, and he therefore was unclean, lesser than, outcast. He didn’t have any options other than to sit and beg. In other words, he was lost…and he knew it. He didn’t have any hope in himself or in his situation. He was a helpless and desperate person. Just the kind of person that Jesus had come for. For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save the lost (Luke 19:10).
This man would have heard Jesus’ conversation with the disciples because John paints the picture that they were right next to him when Jesus answered their question. And when he experiences Jesus’ touch and hears his words “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam.” He does it. Faith had been born in him in that moment. There was a promise in Jesus’ words and actions. He said that God’s work would be displayed in this man…God was going to reveal himself through dealing with this man’s pain. And then Jesus’ touch and instructions all carried with them a promise that something was going to happen. Something different had just transpired between them. It’s not everyday that a man comes up to you talks about God’s glory and then rubs spitty mud on your eyes. At the very least the guy would have been motivated to clean off his face…but there was clearly more going on here, and he knew it. He had nothing to lose. He was as lost as can be already and here was the promise of something new. You’ve heard me say it before here on Dandelion, this is how faith works. It is not something we stir up out of nowhere. Faith is not something we do. Faith is created in us…it is born in light of a promise. Faith needs something to hope in, and this man had no hope before this encounter with Jesus. Now, because of the promise of Jesus’ words and actions, faith was alive in this man and it spurred him onto action. He goes and washes in the pool as Jesus said, and he gained his sight. He had been recreated…Jesus had given him a completely new life.
Then comes the back and forth with the Pharisees. The guy’s neighbors and others who had seen him begging before we’re shocked that he could see and asked what happened. The man tells them the story play by play and reveals that he had at least heard of Jesus before...he says the man called Jesus did this. They are obviously surprised and take the man to the Pharisees. They grill him about it because it just so happened that Jesus did this on the Sabbath. This upset many of the Pharisees. They were still living in that covenantal conditionalism…the if-then, tit for tat system that said if you keep the Sabbath holy unto the Lord then you will be blessed (Exodus 20). They interpreted that to mean you can’t do any work on the Sabbath and Jesus making mud with his spit and then healing this dude was work. It might sound ridiculous to us, but they took the law very seriously, after all it was a matter of blessing and curse, life or death.
The man tells them the whole story, and they don’t believe it. The Pharisees begin to doubt that he was actually born blind and grill his parents to find out. The parents are scared of getting into trouble with the Pharisees so they punt and say their son is of age he can answer you for himself. When they ask the man what happened again, they are more convinced in their opinion of Jesus. They say give glory to God and not this Jesus guy…he is obviously a sinner because he broke the Sabbath. And I love the man’s matter of fact response. He says, “Whether he is a sinner or not I do not know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see” (Jn 9:25). There is no going back for this guy. No matter what the Pharisees throw at him…his world was completely changed. He was blind and now he can see. There was no doubt for him that this Jesus was the real deal.
The Pharisees were stuck in their karmic world, the tit for tat conditional system of the law, to the point where they could not recognize Jesus. As they press the man he sarcastically asks them, “Why do want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples too?” And they flat out say, “You’re his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses” (vv. 26-29). We believe in the law, pal. We believe in justice, retribution, what goes around comes all the way back around. And according to that system, you were born in utter sin and you are out! They cast him out…excommunicating him from the temple. They could not handle the grace Jesus had shown this man. They couldn’t even recognize it because grace travels outside of karma. Jesus was operating outside of their paradigm, their understanding of the law.
Jesus hears that the man has been cast out, and what does he do? He does just what he said he always does…he goes and finds him. He came to seek and save the lost. He finds the man and asks him if he believes in the Son of Man. The man doesn’t recognize Jesus because he never saw him before. He was still blind when he left Jesus to go wash in the pool of Siloam. This was his first visual encounter with him, and now Jesus wants him to see him fully. As we saw earlier, faith had already sprung to life in him, and he clearly believed Jesus was from God in his defense of him to the Pharisees, but now Jesus wants him to use his new eyes to see him fully. So, he changes the way he communicates with him…before it was with touch and now it is through his new sight. The man is ready. He says, “Who is he so that I might believe in him.” And Jesus tells him, “You have seen him, and it is he that is speaking to you.” And the man immediately says, “Lord, I believe” and begins to worship him (vv. 35-38). “When grace goes to work you can hear the strings…grace makes beauty out of ugly things.”
Jesus sums up the whole encounter saying, “For judgment I came into the world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.” Those who are lost are the ones who are ready to be found. Those who do not think they are lost do not think they need to be found. The Pharisees hear Jesus say this, and they ask indignantly, “Are we also blind?” They’re ticked off that Jesus would show favor to a person who clearly did not deserve it. They had spent their whole lives studying and learning the law. They had worked so hard to be good and worried about falling into sin every second of everyday, and here was this guy who was a blind beggar, clearly an outcast, and he was getting the attention?
Jesus’ response explains it all. “If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your guilt remains” (v. 41). When we think that we can see, when we think that we have been good enough through our obedience to the law, when we think that we are somehow not guilty because of our work, we prove that we are blind. We are blind to our own brokenness. We are blind to our own need for grace. We think we want poetic justice…we think we want retribution…we think we want what goes around to come all the way back around, but what we really need is grace. Those who know they are blind…that have no hope in themselves…that know they have failed to keep the law to love God perfectly and to love others and themselves perfectly…they are desperate for grace. They praise God that grace travels outside of karma because they are dead under karma. They are dead under the conditional tit for tat system. They are dead under the if-then nature of the law…but by God’s grace they are recreated…made new. They only know one thing, they were blind, but now they see.
In God’s grace what goes around never comes back around because Jesus took it. It stops with him. He absorbed the effects of sin for you. He took the conditions for you, all of the retribution you deserved…and paid the price for you on the cross. Jesus reveals a God who came to seek and save the lost, a God who came to give sight to the blind. He travels outside of karma. When he goes to work you can hear the strings…Jesus makes beauty out of ugly things. Amen.
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