Blindness, Trust, and the God Who Works in Unexpected Ways

In this sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Pascha — the Sunday of the Blind Man — Sub Deacon Timothy Grace reflects on Christ's healing of the man born blind alongside the story of Paul and Silas in prison and the life of Abba Anastasios. He explores God's apophatic nature, the call to trust his hidden work in our own darkness, and how this freedom can lead us to wonderworking acts of grace in the world.

Transcript

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Christ is risen! Truly He is risen!

There is an event in the life of St. Nectarios of Aegina, reproduced in the film entitled Man of God, where a number of students at a school where he is working are fighting and will not reconcile. Much to their surprise, he tells them that someone must be punished — so he is going to punish himself and will not eat any food for three days because of their fighting. This action has a profound effect on the boys and they forget all about their argument. It is something that perhaps no teacher has ever done before. It does not quite make sense from a rational point of view, but it achieves a better outcome than any temporary improvement in the children's behaviour.

In the Gospel and the Epistle today, we also see Jesus and the apostles undertaking actions that are unexpected or baffling — and they do this for the salvation of those around them. So let us see what insights we can derive by taking a look at both the Gospel and the Epistle this morning.

When we read the Gospels, we see that Jesus heals people in a number of different ways. Sometimes it is through words, as when he heals the centurion's servant. Sometimes it is through touch, as with the man with leprosy. Sometimes he is physically present in front of the person he is healing, like the paralysed man brought in by his friends. Sometimes he is physically absent, like the words he speaks to heal the Canaanite woman's daughter. Sometimes someone has touched him, as in the instance of the woman with the flow of blood. And there was one instance with the deaf mute where he spits and touches his tongue to heal him. And in the instance we see in today's Gospel, Jesus spits on the ground, makes clay, and anoints the man's eyes — something he has not done before.

So what is Jesus doing with all these differing methods? Why does he not stick to one formula, one practice, when going about these healings? Christ is not allowing anyone to become attached to an outward form, to be seduced by a predictable method or a formula. As soon as we have a formula, we lose connection with the person of Christ. As soon as we have a formula, we try to create God in our own image according to what we think is best — we try to control the situation. Let us not forget that performing a ritual action to get a predetermined result is characteristic of pagan religions, of magic — not of a relationship with the living God. We cannot predict how God is going to work, and what he wants with us is a relationship of trust.

Now, Jesus' actions were novel — but the blind man could not even see what Jesus was doing at all. He could never have imagined what on earth Jesus was up to. The point is that we need to trust God and not our expected image of him or of the actions we think he should take. And this is exactly what the blind man does: he is obedient when Jesus finally tells him to go and wash, and he finds his healing.

We cannot see what God is doing in our lives. We want a predictable God — a God who, because he did a certain thing for some people before, should do the same thing for us; a God who, because he acted in a certain way in our lives when we were younger, should do the same now. But we really do not know anything of God's providence. We do not know what we need, and we do not know what is going to heal us. That is a frightening reality. We may feel like we are truly in a place of total darkness. And many of the hymns that reflect on this Sunday of the Blind Man pick up that imagery — of us being in a condition of darkness: the darkness of tragedy, the darkness of our own brokenness and sin, the darkness of a lack of understanding about what is happening in our lives, and the darkness of broken relationships.

In a speech entitled "The Darkness of the Divine," given to an Orthodox university campus group, Father Turbo Qualls — whose speech you can find online — speaks of the mysterious ways that God works. He points out a quality of Orthodox theology that we call apophatic. What this means is simply that we often define God more by what he is not, because he is so much bigger than our mental concepts. We see this in the liturgy: in a few moments you will hear the priest say at the time of the Offering, "You are God: ineffable, incomprehensible, invisible, inconceivable." In each of these terms, God is described by what he is not. And this is often described as a "darkness" because it is hidden.

Father Turbo makes the claim that an aspect of this divine hiddenness, this apophaticism, is God working in the darkness of our own trauma — in an incomprehensible way. The dark places, the painful places, the broken places: these are the places where God works. And just as the blind man was in darkness, not seeing what Jesus was doing, so are we.

We see that while the blind man was still blind, what Christ was doing — as is mentioned in the Matins service today — was taking dust of the earth. Just as in the creation story God takes dust of the earth and forms man, Jesus is echoing the process of creation to create something not there before. This blind man did not even have eyeballs, and Jesus has made them. It is reassuring for us, then, that God's work in our own darkness is nothing short of continuing the act of creation — the re-creation of our brokenness into something whole and healthy again.

And once Christ is able to do that in us, it can lead us to acts of salvation and healing for others too. Let us turn our attention to the Epistle. St. Paul also had his own moment of blindness earlier in his life — totally deceived about who Jesus was, in his zeal as a Pharisee. Then he encounters the blinding light of Christ, and he is able to come through that time of darkness to see the truth. And now here he is with St. Silas in prison, engaging in an action that perhaps has never been done before. They remain in the prison when the walls have broken down and their fetters have come off their feet. They have an opportunity to escape, but they do not take it — they choose to stay. This strikes right to the heart of the jailer, and he comes in asking what he must do to be saved. The holiness of St. Paul and St. Silas has worked a miracle in the man's heart, and he too is set free from his own blindness and recognises the light of Christ that he needs in his life.

We see this type of action all the time in the lives of the saints. They have been given the creative power of the Holy Spirit to do things never done before, just as Jesus did, just as the apostles did. One of my favourite stories about this comes from the life of one of the Desert Fathers, Abba Anastasios. It is said that one day Abba Anastasios had a fine parchment — a scripture containing both the Old and New Testaments. A monk saw this parchment and was filled with greed. He stole it and went to sell it for gold. He took it to the marketplace and encountered a buyer, who said, "That sounds reasonable to me, but let me first take this parchment to someone who knows about parchments." Without realising it, the buyer took it to Abba Anastasios himself and said, "Abba, someone wants to sell me this parchment. Is it a fair price?"

The Abba said nothing about the fact that it had been stolen from him. He examined it carefully and said, "Yes, it is a very good one. I can tell you it is a fair price — you should take it." So the buyer returned to the monk and said, "I took it to Abba Anastasios and he said it was a fair price." The monk was stunned: "You took it to who? To Abba Anastasios?!" He was terrified. "What did he say?" "Only that it was a fair price — nothing else." At that moment, the monk was fully convicted of his sin. He said, "I do not want to sell it anymore." He took the parchment back to the Abba and pleaded with him to take it back. And Abba Anastasios said, "I make a present of it to you." From that day on, the monk became his disciple.

The brother was in the darkness of avarice — blinded by his sin. And it took the holy radiance of the Abba to show him the beauty of the true way, which the Abba could do because he was free — free from attachment, free from the desire for revenge or retribution, free from merely earthly notions of justice. The Holy Spirit gives creativity to do something not done before.

So, to finish: God is bringing all of us on a journey from blindness to sight, from darkness to light. In the dark, in the hiddenness, he is working. And perhaps our greatest task is simply to trust that this is so. Allowing him to work can lead us to being filled with his presence and to replicating astonishing acts of grace — in our families, in our friendships, in our schools and universities, in our workplaces, where everyone is locked into a pattern of earthly thinking, a pattern of the predictable and mundane, a pattern of the merely human. But we were created for the divine life. Like St. Nectarios, like St. Paul and Silas, like Abba Anastasios, we were created to be wonderworkers.

So next time there is a fight, a conflict, a problem — pray that God enlightens you with the wonderworking power of his mercy and compassion, to do something not done before. May God grant us the freedom that the saints exhibited, to step into the creative potential of life-giving cooperation with the Holy Spirit.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.