Blindness and Walking By Faith: Lessons from John 9:1-7

Today, T.D. Jakes preached a message from God to me.  It was about the blind man Jesus healed by making clay from spit and telling him to wash in the pool Siloam after the disciples asked whose sin caused his blindness:

John 9:1-9 (NASB) 

As He passed by, He saw a man blind from birth. And His disciples asked Him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he would be born blind?"  

Jesus answered, "It was neither that this man sinned, nor his parents; but it was so that the works of God might be displayed in him.  We must work the works of Him who sent Me as long as it is day; night is coming when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the Light of the world." 

When He had said this, He spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and applied the clay to his eyes, and said to him, "Go, wash in the pool of Siloam"(which is translated, Sent). 

So he went away and washed, and came back seeing.

As usual, the Bishop made many excellent points.  I am only recording a few that speak to me in my moment...

1. Blindness was this man's particular weakness, allowed by God, that facilitated God's glory.  My strengths and weaknesses are increasingly public and difficult for me to handle.  But they facilitate God's glory--and my humility.   There is no fault; nothing wrong with me and no punishment I am suffering.  It is just my particular set of weaknesses that facilitate my utility.

2. The disciples viewed the man as a public display of the costs of sin.  For them, the man existed as a site for casting derision--derision that extended even to his family.  This despite the disciples deserving the same consequence (i.e. if blindness always results from sin--parental or otherwise--we should all be blind).  I should be careful that I can survive the measures/condemnations I use against others.

3. Jesus covered the man's eyes with clay, then told him to go to Siloam.  This is a picture of faith (and I would argue recreation).  The man is already blind, but now Jesus has heaped more "blinders/barriers" on him.  From the looks of it, his situation is made even more difficult after a genuine encounter with God.  The man must now publicly grope his way, doubly blind, through the city to where he was "Sent/Siloam."  I, too, must publicly grope my way through this particular phase of my life--one I have long feared and feel like my life has not prepared me for much at all.  ... but there is a promise....

4. The man washed in Siloam, where he was sent, and God gave him sight.  If I grope my way, understanding this a process of practicing and developing faith, I will also be healed--of fear, troubling circumstance, ignorance.  And, like the formerly blind man, I will come to know God better.

5. The process that dramatizes my weakness and results in healing glorifies God.

Extremism in Defense of Liberty...and Oppression

Lately, I've been reading Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion by Herbert Aptheker (1937/2006).  It's the first serious (second generally) history of the rebellion Nat Turner led in 1831.  It's an incredibly easy read, and I highly recommend it.

Needless to say, many things stick out to me from the book.  More posts may come...

For now, Aptheker's writing about "the effects" (i.e. social and legal reactions) of Turner's rebellion captures my mind.  Our best guess is that 60-80 black people joined the rebellion, yet at the time whites estimated as many as 800 armed revolutionaries actively participated and nearly every southern state legislature convened to deal with whites' mass hysteria following the revolt.  After his capture, Turner pleaded not guilty (because he had done nothing wrong) and never said he was mistaken in believing God led him to revolt.  Those facts lead me to my two initial thoughts:

1. Oppressors Live in Constant Fear

We, the people willing to act for social justice, severely underestimate our influence.  One of the false lessons of the Civil Rights Era is that "a movement" requires mass numbers.  I am convinced that movement requires little more than a few people willing to move.  People imposing injustice tend to freak out when directly confronted with resistance.  I am reminded of three biblical stories.  One where Elisha showed his chief disciple the invisible chariots and horsemen of Israel.  The second, when Gideon took a very small army (~300 men) and defeated a much larger army when the enemy soldiers turned on themselves.  And a third, when three lepers marched into the enemy camp only to find it deserted because the enemy soldiers mistook their footsteps for the sound of a large army.  My point, God seems to be suggesting the power of small numbers often in the Bible.

My larger point from Nat Turner is that all oppressors live in constant fear of resistance, even resistance from groups that cannot possibly overthrow systems by force alone.  Men live in constant fear that they will be exposed as vulnerable and not masculine.  Whites live in constant fear that the logic of white supremacy (i.e. justified domination because of superior intellect/morality/numerical majority/etc) will be exposed as a lie [thus The Bell Curve, the Minute Men, the Tea Party, etc].  The rich are petrified of labor coalitions.  The Christian Right is obsessed with "creeping Sharia law." Bush began a war against terror itself.  

We don't often pay enough attention to the fact that emotion is an integral part of every social structure.  Specifically, fear is an inevitable part of every oppressive structure.  That means that one of the contradictions inherent to any system of organization is the emotional vulnerability of the dominant group.  Oppressed people thus always have a structural avenue of resistance, even in the most oppressive and closed systems.

Nat Turner demonstrated that.  For months and even years after his rebellion, whites openly claimed that they could not sleep, were filled with anxiety, and were in failing health due to fear of slave rebellions inspired by Turner.  In fact, several southern governors explicitly stated mass anxiety among whites as the reason for calling emergency legislative sessions in fall of 1831.  This mass anxiety despite there being no clear evidence that a single subsequent rebellion was directly connected to Turner or his co-conspirators.  That oppressors were convicted by their own guilt is proven by two facts: 1) Turner "passed-over" the houses of whites who "did not think themselves better than blacks."  His army only targeted open bigots and slaveowners; and 2) there is some evidence that many poor whites supported the rebellion.  Whites were not afraid they would be targeted for being white; they were afraid because they knew they were targeted for being active oppressors.


2.  Retrenchment Is Not Evidence of Failure

After the Turner Rebellion, whites reacted extremely harshly.  They not only assassinated Turner and his fellow rebels, they also mutilated and murdered innumerable black people (slave and free) with and without trials.  Whites killed at least as many innocent black people as the total number of rebells in Turner's army.  In some cases, white militias lynched black people on the mere accusation of white overseers.  Whites tortured, lynched, and murdered black people without any evidence or even reason for suspicion in states as far from Turner's rebellion (in Virginia) as Louisiana and Kentucky.  Whites tortured innocent black people to the point that whites themselves began criticizing the brutality and fearing they would lose the moral ground in the slaveholding South!  [I cannot imagine the savagery that would move slaveholders even that small step toward compassion.  Our black ancestors are beyond heroic!]  Bunches of municipalities and southern states passed a host of laws tightening restrictions on free blacks and making life even more difficult for slaves.  ... None of this is a surprise, but it leads me to my next point...

For black people, the most obvious immediate result of Turner's Rebellion was increased white oppression.  In other words, black people's lives got worse; in some cases much worse.  Turner, his fellow warriors, and potentially hundreds of uninvolved black people were tortured and killed by whites.  In addition to the rampant mass murder, black people lost [i.e. whites took] the few civil rights they had.  Black people couldn't even legally have church without whites present.  Again, biblical parallels come to mind.  The Egyptians made crazy laws against enslaved Israelites (e.g. making bricks without straw) out of fear of growing Israelite numbers and fear of slave revolt.  Moses left Egypt after reacting to Egyptian cruelty, and the Egyptians reacted harshly to subsequent Israelite resistance once the Exodus began.  ... I bring up the Bible to show that the patterns are old and unchanging.  Oppressors oppress, get scared, generate resistance, clamp down, and ultimately lose.

And here, I think, is another false lesson we have drawn from the Civil Rights Movement.  Activists hesitate too often for fear that their efforts will make life harder for the very people they are fighting for.  This fear among activists is one of the main causes of "analysis until paralysis" and splits among coalitions.  We should understand that activism never causes oppression.  Oppressors do that.  We should not assume that harsh retrenchment is a sign that we did the wrong thing.  Often retrenchment is a sign that mobilization meaningfully challenged oppressors.

Again, the immediate aftermath of Turner's rebellion was death and increased white-on-black terrorism throughout the South.  Not only so, but nearly all the southern abolitionist organizations disappeared following the rebellion.  They reformed in the North, but that meant the thousands of free blacks in the South and millions of enslaved blacks had much less local white support after 1831.  But nearly 200 years later, we see that Turner's Rebellion was a positive and critically important part of the liberation struggle.  If we judged him by the lives of black people in October and November of 1831, we would conclude his efforts a failure on every level.  Now we praise Turner and name city parks after him (e.g. in Newark, NJ).  We recognize Nat Turner, John Brown, and other antislavery rebells as national heroes--certainly heroes among people of color.

Selah.

Free Writing On Impermanence

Free Writing on Impermanence

So I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately on things that are supposed to last. Specifically, I am reading an article by Tushnet (1992) about how particularities (e.g. narratives, stories) relate to general principles as inscribed in law. And I’m reading about how science is constructed (Harding ?). What brings these together for me is my recent spiritual development, one of the lessons of which is learning to embrace impermanence, including the impermanence of “truths.” As Buddha is supposed to have said, truths are like rafts that carry us across unsteady waters. Once one reaches the other side, it senseless to continue carrying the raft forever. Likewise, it is senseless to hold to the same truths forever.

I am struck by the robustness of this particular lesson. Physical science is built around the notion of debunking firmly held assumptions and presumed laws. The same is true of social science, although we social scientists are better at debunking than building. It is odd, however, that change and flexibility are also spiritual laws. I come from a Christian tradition that constantly highlights the permanent: "God is the same yesterday, today, and forever," He never changes; our souls are eternal; one cannot add to the Word of God, which is complete and unchanging; etc. But these pronouncements obscure biblical teachings of embracing life as transitory. We are familiar with verses telling us life is short (e.g. like a vapor). But we have learned to wrap those teachings in with our fetish for the permanent (life is short therefore only be concerned about your eternal destination).

But I think the Bible, like other spiritual authorities, encourages us to embrace transition and impermanence. This is true in Jesus’ encouragement to the disciples in Matthew 6:33-34. His encouragement to take no thought of tomorrow reflects awareness that tomorrow “has enough trouble of its own.” In other words, troubles are temporary. We often preach that troubles are temporary, but we don’t preach the implication: the tools necessary for confronting today’s troubles may not apply to tomorrow’s troubles. Life is not like math. One lesson does not necessarily build directly upon the other.

We see the same in Jesus discussion of the Hebrew Law. We tend to read the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7) as Jesus giving us the eternal truths underlying his apparent change in the interpretation of certain laws (e.g. You have read where it is written…but I tell you….). Pastors typically preach that Jesus’ interpretation is the one God always intended His people to receive and live by. In this way, Christians erase the notion that Jesus was introducing change. This is particularly odd given that Christians readily embrace the notion that Jesus changed our relationship to the Law generally. So on one hand, Jesus represents complete change (i.e. law as law for all God’s people to obey) and no change (i.e. Jesus as teacher of the law’s true meaning, eternal past and future).

But I digress. My point is that the Bible teaches transition and importance of letting go of “truths.” We can see this in the critical lesson of David eating the shewbread. Eating that bread was a capital offense, yet the priest, God, and Jesus all praise David for overlooking the law. David also entered the temple, despite having less than 10 generations of pure Jewish blood (his descent from Rehab meant that by law he could not legally enter the temple). But God overlooked the Law—before Jesus—and allowed David’s entry. The same is true of Jesus’ teaching about the Sabbath, that the Sabbath is created for man, not man for the Sabbath.

I think we have limited the teaching of the Sabbath too much. Indeed, there is nothing particular about Sabbath law. It is repeated, and thoroughly explained in the Hebrew Law and subsequent commentaries. It is one of the Ten Commandments. It claims to reflect, and be based in, the very creation process. The creation process, which grounds the argument of God’s legitimate rule over humanity (Romans 9). So, there can be no more central law than the law of the Sabbath, and yet, Jesus says it was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. In other words, the law is there to help humanity. If humans’ immediate good/needs and the law conflict, then change/overlook the law. Change the law, no matter how central it is to our theology because the heart of theology is God’s goodwill relationship with humanity.

So then, my point is that law and religious teaching and the truths we learn over the course of our lives should not be used as Procrustean Beds. Truths are not fixed and permanent things we have to stretch or contort ourselves into fitting. Truths are tools God gives us to aid us along the journey of humanity. We have to have wisdom. Wisdom tells us when a truth is a useful guide and when a truth becomes a prison.

Returning then, to the Buddha’s analogy…we must learn when to use acquired truths and when to discard them in favor of ad hoc or new judgments. Carrying a raft (i.e. a truth) after crossing the river would make the rest of the journey that much harder, if not impossible. Learning to abide by truths and also to discard them is a common spiritual lesson. It matches with the notion that life is about the paradox of constant change. Embracing that lesson is a perfectly Christian thing to do, despite contemporary hegemonic Christians’ resistance to postmodernism, denominations’ new rules about who can be ministers, and other issues.