Twice each month, members of our community join people from other faith communities in Nightwalks. We walk through our neighborhood stopping now and then to pray for an end to the violence that has caused great pain to many moms and families here in the Mission. Before we head out on our walks, we run through a few ground rules about the logistics and about how to remain safe during the course of the walk.
We’re not naive. In a neighborhood like ours, things can happen very quickly. A purse can be snatched, a fight can break out, someone can fall sick and need a hand. Things can happen. So one of the ground rules in our Nightwalks is very realistic: When we stop to pray, we pray with our eyes open.
Today’s gospel passage is part of a larger story in which Jesus has just given sight to a man who had been blind from birth. The man himself and the religious leaders are standing around wondering what had just happened, and Jesus in this passage is trying to help them understand it.
So to get the full impact of these words, let’s refresh our memory about that story of that blind man Jesus has just healed.
In the culture of the time, because of his blindness, he was considered ritually impure, barred from fully participating in the rituals devout Jews would use to be in right relation with God. Only people who were physically impeccable were permitted to serve God's cult. A son of Aaron, for example, a member of the priestly caste, could not officiate at worship if he had a physical impairment.
This ritual impurity carried a moral connotation, a stigma. The logic was that someone must have done something really bad for him to be both blind and excluded from the community in this way. “Master, who sinned,” the disciples had just asked Jesus. “Was it he himself who sinned or his parents that he was born blind?”
So not only is this man blind, but he also carries the shame and disgrace of a moral stigma.
This is a very common logic, and we find it all around us: it's called blaming the victim. If someone is raped, he or she must have done something to provoke it; if black people or Latinos are poor or incarcerated at high rates or disenfranchised, it must be because they are more stupid or lazy or criminal than others; if someone has HIV, it must be a punishment from God for some form of deviant behavior.
So in addition to living with a significant physical impairment, this blind man was stigmatized, shamed and disgraced. His story is one of exclusion, not only from being able to physically see, but also from fully participating in the life of his own people Israel.
In the face of this, Jesus carries out an act of inclusion. First he spits on the earth, and from the clay he makes a paste and anoints the blind man's eyes. Buried in the Greek text here is a Hebrew pun. The Hebrew word for clay is adamah, and in the story of creation in Genesis, adamah is what God used to make "Adam," humankind.
So, in this moment of healing Jesus is finishing creation. The man born blind had palpably not been brought to the fullness of creation, and so Jesus finishes the process by adding the missing clay.
But with that healing of his eyes, the man receives something else. Call it gumption. He begins to stand on his own two feet, to tell his story, even to talk back--especially to those religious leaders who had shamed and stigmatized him and left him without hope. And because he talks back, they of course throw him out of the synagogue, excommunicate him.
Jesus hears that they threw him out, so he goes looking for him, and when he finds him, they talk. In this conversation, the formerly blind comes to see Jesus, not only with his now-healed physical eyes, but also with his heart. He comes to trust him. “Lord, I believe,” he says to Jesus.
Some religious leaders overhear the man say this. They don’t get it, so Jesus tries to talk to them. He reverses their logic. “You who say that you can see, you are the ones who are blind here. This man who you say is steeped in sin, in this situation he is the one without sin. If there is sin in this situation, it lies not with him but with you who excluded and stigmatized and shamed him.”
That’s where today’s gospel about shepherds and thieves and robbers comes in. The shepherd is the symbol for teachers and leaders. The way they relate to people shows whether they are true shepherds or thieves and robbers.
What Jesus is doing here is walking us through a kind of discernment about how to tell good religious leaders from bad ones, shepherds from thieves and robbers.
In John’s words, thieves steal, kill, and destroy. They leave people less than when they found them. The laws and moral codes meant to form us into people who love and live more deeply--these are used as hammers by these thieves and robbers to crush people’s spirits, to shame and exclude them. “Woe to you,” Jesus once said to the Pharisees. “You lay heavy burdens on people’s shoulders but will not move a finger to lift them.”
True shepherds are the opposite. They leave people more than when they found them. They do not have the voice of a stranger. They know the human heart, they call people by name. What they say resonates with the inner world of people. They walk ahead of them, bringing them to pastures where they can find food to nourish them.
Teachers and leaders who are true shepherds are artists who make us more human, more alive, they awaken joy and zest and passion and purpose. “I have come that they may have life,” Jesus says, “and have it abundantly.” Like good mothers, good shepherds lead us to life, life in abundance.
This is good to know. Sometimes people ask “Is religion good or bad?” The fact is, in itself, religion is neutral. It’s like art. There is good art and bad art.
There is bad art that puts down people who are different, shuts down our hearts, makes us frightened of life, stirs up violence, misogyny, homophobia. Think of the novels of Ayn Rand that influenced much of the recent greed on Wall Street and in Washington; the misogynist and homophobic lyrics of many rap songs on the radio. Bad art.
There is good art, too: art that opens your heart, connects you with life, deepens your ability to feel and to love. Think of Georgia O’Keefe’s painting of a flower, or Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, a movie like Babette’s Feast. This is good art.
Art can be good or bad.
Like art, religion can be either good or bad.
The philosopher Hegel said you can recognize bad religion because it alienates you from yourself and from the world.
Bad religion is what the man born blind--living under shame and stigma and without hope--had experienced growing up.
It’s what many LGBT people of my generation also grew up with. We were told that if we followed the promptings of our own hearts and our bodies that we would burn in hell for all eternity. Bad religion. It alienates us from ourselves and from people we love. It is manifest today in an alarmingly high suicide rate among gay teens and elders, and the recent effort to pass a Kill the Gays bill in Uganda. It does not lead to the abundant life that Jesus talks about in today’s gospel.
Over the years I’ve heard many Native Americans talk about their experiences in the mission boarding schools where they were not allowed to return home for their native pow wows and rituals, were beaten if they even spoke their own native languages. Bad religion. It alienates people from themselves, their cultures and communities. It does not lead to the abundant life that Jesus talks about in today’s gospel.
There is also good religion. Not only does it connect you with God, the source of life, but it also:
Connects you with your own heart, with the lines and curves of your own body, its desires and pleasures as well as its pains;
Good religion connects you with other people, nourishes friendships, gathers communities like this one.
Good religion connects you with the earth, with all it’s species of flora and fauna, increases your sheer delight when you’re on a hike in nature.
Good religion is seen in true shepherds like Gandhi, Sojourner Truth, Martin Luther King, Chief Seattle, Harriet Tubman, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, the Dalai Lama, Oscar Romero--true shepherds who lead people to freedom, to greater justice, to building the beloved community, to realizing life in abundance.
In today’s gospel, Jesus is walking us through a discernment. When we pray, he wants us to keep our eyes open, to pray with discerning hearts. We have to evaluate the religious and spiritual teachings we are hearing--including those that came from Christian teachers.
What criteria do we use as we make this evaluation? In this passage, Jesus uses the metaphor of the gate to the sheepfold. He says that he is that gate. Religious teachers who are trustworthy, shepherds who are good, pass through that gate that is Jesus. Whether they are explicitly Christian or not, their teachings bring us closer to what he has taught us, make us more loving, more compassionate, more hopeful about the future, more joyful in just being ourselves. Those teachings, in other words, lead us to life in abundance. Ultimately, Jesus says, this is how you know if a religious teaching is good.
But if those teachings lead us to a sense of hopelessness, if they cause us to lose our zest and passion for life, our joy in being the wonderful beings God has made us to be, if those teachings to exclude people and close our hearts to their needs, if they cause us to abuse this fragile and exquisite planet, then these teachings are, in Jesus’ words, the work of thieves and robbers. They are not the work of God. They crush us. They do not lead to life in abundance.
As in the day of Jesus, so also in our own day, there are many religious and spiritual teachings swirling around us. As it was for the man who received his sight and for the early disciples, so it is for us: We need discerning hearts; we need to pray with our eyes open.
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