Please Click Here For Sermon Video
I’m sure you folks are familiar with how when there’s a pink elephant in the room, people will generally refer to it as “it” or “this”. “What are we going to do about ‘this’?” I bet you didn’t notice but there’s a whopping big “this” in our reading where the story of the healing of the two blind men comes in to play. They are following Jesus up the road yelling out over and over again, “Have mercy on us, Son of David.” Jesus goes into a house and they come up to him. Jesus just asked them, “Do you believe I am able to do this?” They answer, “Yes, Lord”. I’m kind of curious as to what exactly “this” is. Restoring their sight hasn’t been mentioned. We just assume that’s what Jesus is talking about but the story never says what “this”, what mercy is. That intrigues me.
These two blind men were just begging all along the way, “Have mercy on us, Son of David.” That is what you say when you petition a royal. They were begging maybe even groveling for mercy as they would if maybe King Herod was parading up the road. That’s what beggar’s did. But here they were begging for mercy from the one they believed to be the Son of David, the foretold king from King David’s lineage who would bring about God’s kingdom and rule righteously as David had. In essence, their asking for mercy was asking for a royal favour. They were asking King Jesus, the righteous king, to regard them as true citizens of the Kingdom of God and extend a royal favour to them. One would expect that favour to be something like giving them a coin and some bread or a raison cake. But…
Well, Jesus asked them, “Do you believe I am able to do this?” So, there’s the “this”. What is “this”. Is Jesus maybe asking them a bit of a sarcastic question that goes like, “Do you believe I’m just some sort of king who can show you a royal favour and just give you a coin and a raison cake to make you go away?” Jesus’s answer on the mouth of any other king could quite easily be understood as a response of dismissal that would sound like, “Who do blind beggars think you are to ask me for a favour? The nerve. Somebody give them a raison cake and get rid of them.” But Jesus isn’t like any other king and they indicate this with their answer, a simple “Yes, Lord.” There’s only one person a Jew is going to call Lord, and that’s the God of Israel. Apparently, these two blind beggars see who Jesus is when the religious authorities and the disciples of John the Baptist are quite obviously having difficulty seeing “it”.
Since they believed that Jesus was the Son of David who was able to show them mercy, Jesus really shows them mercy. He touches their eyes and says, “According to your faith let it be done to you.” Suddenly they could see. King Jesus, Son of David, their God somehow with them instead of a pittance of a hand out, he restored them to being able to live fully and with dignity among people and to be able to earn their keep instead of having to beg alongside the highway on the outskirts of town. You see, they were reduced to begging because the religious authorities had decreed them to be cursed by God as evidenced in their blindness; cursed for some horrific yet unknown sin they had committed. The penalty for being cursed was that they were no longer considered citizens of Israel, no longer children of God and so they were to be cast out from the city. A healing act of God, a life-restoring act of God, was the “this” that Jesus did in accordance to their faith.
I puzzled over this text for several days wondering why it was that sight was the “this”, the act of mercy that was done to them in accordance to their faith. In some Christian circles this passage comes up as one of those faith-as-magical power texts where if you believe hard enough then Jesus will do it for you, and conversely, if Jesus doesn’t do it for you, it is because you don’t believe hard enough. But, as I said, these blind beggars were not asking to see again, they just wanted to be treated fairly by Israel’s true king with some act of royal favour. So, I pondered.
Not surprisingly, the answer came to me in one of those bathroom moments. Fortunately, I was only brushing my teeth before bed Tuesday night. It has to do with what faith is. Faith isn't simply just this head and heart thing, an inward believing or trusting. The German Theologian Karl Barth in his commentary on Romans defines faith in a very helpful way. He says that faith is what happens when the faithfulness of God encounters the fidelity of man. It is better here in this passage that we say, “In accordance with your fidelity let it be done to you.” Their fidelity here is that they, two blind men were following Jesus. You have to be able to see to be able to follow. Though they could not see Jesus, they could “see” that he is the Son of David somehow indwelt by the God of Israel and they were following him along the way hoping for a royal favour knowing that Jesus could grant it. So, in accordance with their being able to “see” who Jesus is and the act of fidelity in trying to follow him, Jesus indeed granted them a royal favour. He restored those two outcasts to the full community of God’s people by healing their blindness.
Something else we have to note is how Jesus showed these blind men mercy. He touched their eyes. He touched the part of them that they and everyone regarded to be cursed, the part of them that made them unclean which meant not allowed to come into the presence of God at the temple. Anyone who touched a diseased person particularly the diseased part of that person especially if it was discharging something also became unclean and so also the toucher was not allowed into the presence of God for a period of time. This is true if you touched the dead or come into contact with a woman during menstruation as in the stories immediately preceding this one. Thus, in this passage three times Jesus shows what mercy is. It is touching the cursed and taking to oneself the curse of the cursed and the result is their healing. It is touching people at the point of their deepest needs, their most shameful places. He touched with love and acceptance and that unleashed the power of God to make them whole.
Well, moving on, these acts of mercy, these restorations of people to wholeness from cursedness, come about in the context of Jesus confronting the religious authorities, the Pharisees. The Pharisees had the audacity to claim the authority to be able to declare who was in and who was out with respect to the people of God. The confrontation began, of all places, at a meal that Jesus was sharing with his disciples and some “tax collectors and sinners.” The Pharisees in all their bigoted authority found it quite objectionable that Jesus kept company with such as those. Jesus says to them “Go and learn what it means, ‘I desire mercy, rather than sacrifice’.” Jesus is most likely quoting from Hosea 6:6 which reads, “For I desire steadfast love (mercy) and not sacrifice, the knowing of God rather than burnt offerings.” And, the point of that passage is God basically saying, “If you want to know me, you won’t find me by acting religious. Show mercy, show steadfast love, and you will learn who I am.” The Hebrew word for mercy is chesed and is better translated as steadfast love.
In the Old Testament when God shows chesed it means he is being steadfastly faithful and kind in providing for his people even when they worship other gods. This love too often comes in the form of God not giving us what we want and instead discipling us or even disciplining us to seek his presence and guidance to break us of our unwholesome attachments delusions and in the end restoring us to himself so that we have a greater knowing of him as being steadfastly loving and faithful. When we humans do chesed, it is showing our love and adoration for God by doing kindness to others especially in their brokenness. Acting religious does not please God as there is no love in action involved. But rather, showing steadfast love to others especially when they are broken and hurting somehow teaches us something about who God is.
So, the main point of this passage from Matthew is that following Jesus; i.e, fidelity displayed in touching others at the point of their “cursedness” or shame and attempting to restore them to health and healthy community is the way that God makes himself known through us. So, steadfast love, love in action, rather than just trying to go through the motions of being good religious people, is what God desires from the disciples of Jesus Christ. May we go and learn mercy that we may come to know God all the better. Amen.
