The meditation for Lent IV on Jesus’ healing of the blind man in John’s gospel effectively opens the central question before our beleaguered, cacophonous church. The PC (USA) is in an identity crisis. Publications and websites put forward by numerous associations claim to know the truth and to have the truth, and the truths are as different as night and day. Such stubborn knowing (seeing) is appropriately called into question by Chris Chakoian’s meditation.
It set me thinking about how our eyes are opened, and how we learn to see. In John’s story, learning to see is costly for the man healed, for his community of faith — and even for the disciples. It is not, pun intended, a pretty picture. The healing provokes judgment as well as grace, for the light, which in John is never extinguished by the darkness of the cosmos, reveals as well as it enlightens.
In the church of Jesus Christ–which is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic — how do we learn to see? How can we, in faith, test the spirits to know which are of God and which are of the devil? How do we separate the wheat from the chaff, not by pulling the weeds out of the field — that is God Almighty’s responsibility? But how do we sift the many disparate claims to know and have the truth that frustrate our witness? Can we maintain a common witness?
Well, “we [first] must test any word that comes to us, from church, world, or inner experience, by the Word of God in Scripture. We subject to its judgment all our understanding of doctrine and practice.” (1) The operative word is we, not I, not they, but we. Within our Reformed understanding, the only reliable determination of what is genuinely and finally Christian is decided corporately, by the church, over time, as we confess our faith with Holy Scripture as the supreme authority.
When I think back on how fidelity to scripture changed the PCUS in which I grew to maturity, I can only marvel at the power of the Spirit, speaking through the Word. We were a stubborn people, theologically certain we possessed the truth about relationships between blacks and whites, about the role of women in the church, and, God help us, even about the way the Holy Spirit spoke within the church. One ancient version of the Southern Presbyterian Book of Order, in explaining the reasons for why we ordain deacons, claimed that one reason was that the gifts of the Spirit (healing, prophesy, tongues, etc.) had now ceased in the life of the church! What a gem of stubborn, ignorant, fundamentalist, Enlightenment rationality.
But faithful attention to the Word of God broke loose those certainties and transformed our church. The Bible, testifying to Jesus Christ with his liberating, saving power, was, you might say, hidden in a confused and fighting church, slashing itself to death with its certainties. But the Bible was there in the hands of believers, in the hearts of faithful pastors, speaking its two edged truth, in pulpit and Sunday School class, in stories to children told on flannel boards, in memorizing the books of the Bible, the Beatitudes, and the 23rd Psalm, in hearing the stories of the heroes and heroines of faith — and the stories of Jesus and his love (not his hatred but his love). Those long years of opening the eyes of the blind did not make for a pretty picture. But the church was transformed — to become a more true witness to what God wants for all the sons and daughters of humanity.
Can we possibly look back to move forward in faith? How are you, but more importantly, how are we learning to see?
1 From A Declaration of Faith, Chapter 6, lines 50 — 54. They are preceded by this confession: “The Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are necessary, sufficient, and reliable as witnesses to Jesus Christ, the living Word.”
