Posts Tagged ‘Covid’

Opening the eyes of the blind

March 18, 2023

Lent 4 – 2023
John 9:1-41
Marian Free


In the name of God, whose presence can only be seen by those whose hearts and eyes are open. Amen.

If the COVID pandemic taught us nothing else, it revealed that sometimes no amount of scientific evidence was sufficient to convince some people that vaccination and the wearing of masks were for their own protection and safety and were not a sign that the state was taking over their lives. Some people were so unwilling to give up their position that families were, and remain, divided. Not even stories of agonising and lonely deaths, or reports of exhausted health care workers were enough to shake their position. They were (are) so committed to one version of truth that they were unable to see (or to allow for) any other. It is clear that I belong to the group who were grateful to a government that had the well-being of its citizens at heart, and to the researchers who so quickly developed a vaccine that, if it didn’t keep me well, would at least prevent the virus from killing me. As the various protests indicated, there were a significant number of people who resisted change because they could not see or believe the danger that it presented to themselves, and to others.

Our gospel for today presents a similar situation – though perhaps in reverse. In the case of the gospel, it was good news, not bad, that was both opposed and rejected. In the gospel, it was the leaders who resisted change and novelty, and who saw it as a threat to their position and to their authority. The Pharisees and the Judeans were so stuck in their legalistic view of faith and so convinced that God demanded conformity to particular behaviours, that even the miracle of sight could not budge them from their position that breaking the law was dangerous and perverse. They (or their predecessors) had constructed a world view that enabled them to feel safe and secure in their relationship with God, but which prevented them from seeing God in any other way. For them to feel safe, their life, and their practice of their faith had to remain stable and unchanged – hard and unforgiving as the ground in the poem by Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai which seems to speak to the heart of today’s gospel.

‘The Place Where We Are Right”
From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.


The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.


But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.

In their desire to have a roadmap for salvation, to have clear precepts and laws that gave them reassurance that they were doing what it was that God wanted, Jesus’ opponents have solidified the commandments into hard and fast rules. Breaking those rules was seen to have serious consequences – not least of which was the law-breakers’ being excluded from the community of faith. The “law breaker” was deemed to have threatened the security of the community as a whole and therefore needed to be removed. The problem with holding this hard and fast position, was the conviction that God (fixed and unchanging) could be known and that God – arbiter of all behaviour – would judge as unworthy those who did not conform. There was no room for growth or development in that view of faith, no sense of wonder, no allowance for the possibility that God might act in new ways, or that, as God has done in the past, so in the present God might break through and reveal Godself in startling and fresh ways. The ground of ‘faith’ had been trampled and made so hard that new life could not possibly break through.

For those who had found security and certainty in a particular set of beliefs (truths), the thought of examining or questioning those beliefs was terrifying. What if they were proved to be wrong? If they let go of one “truth” would the whole structure on which they have built their faith be shattered? On the other hand, if they were right and yet were tempted to rejoice in Jesus’ bringing of sight, would God’s wrath be poured out upon them because they had dared to question what had always been? It was safer to hold on to what they had always believed (and to force others to do likewise), than to risk the possibility that they might have been wrong. In their desire to maintain the status quo, they needed to reject and discredit anything that threatened their way of seeing the world and God.

This explains why, in today’s gospel, no one – not even the blind man’s parents – was able to rejoice in the fact that his sight had been restored. They were terrified that their whole world would come tumbling down and with it their sense of security and (in the case of the Pharisees) their claim to authority. They were determined to hold on to what they had held to be true – that one should not work on the Sabbath – even if the alternative was life-giving and restorative. They were blind to the possibility that the giving of sight was a gift from God, and that the giver, Jesus was not a sinner but a bearer of God’s likeness.


Truth is a key concept in John’s gospel. We are told that: “The Word became flesh, full of grace and truth” (1:14). And: “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free” (8:32). We have seen that Jesus challenged Nicodemus to be open to rebirth. He questioned the version of truth held by the Samaritan woman and here he opens the eyes of the blind man so that he might accept a new version of reality.


Let us pray that we may not be so locked into our own understanding of what is true, that we, like the Pharisees are blinded to God’s presence among us – even when that presence is totally different from what we had expected. May we create a yard in which flowers may grow in the spring.

From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.


The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.


But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.

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Leaving it up to God

July 18, 2020

Pentecost 7 – 2020

Matthew 13: 24-30, 36-43

Marian Free

In the name of God who sends rain on the just and the unjust and causes the sun to shine on both the evil and the good. Amen.

The events of recent times – Covid 19 and “Black Lives Matter” – have brought out both the best and the worst in human nature and have revealed deep divisions in our society and more particularly in that of the United States. To give one example, the legislated wearing of face masks seems to have touched a deep chord in the people who are objecting to the ruling. In Florida, an enquiry into the legislation heard the most extraordinary, and emotive reasons as to why the wearing of masks was, among other things, satanic. Passions are running so high on this subject that in the United States people have been spat on, a man has been charged with making terrorist threats and woman who was asked to wear a mask in a store began throwing her groceries everywhere. In Gosford in Australia, friends of mine were rudely told to remove their face masks by a young passer-by. These reactions, though unpleasant, pale into insignificance compared with the young bus driver in France who was hauled from his bus and kicked to death simply for asking four passengers to comply with the requirement to wear masks.

The pandemic has exposed vastly different attitudes to authority, competing interests with regard to health and to the economy and opposing views about the nature of freedom. At the extremes of some of these positions are people who are so convinced that they alone are right, so threatened by change, so worried about the impact on their personal freedom that they are taking matters into their own hands with, as we have seen, tragic results. 

In these difficult times, differences and divisions between different elements of society are highlighted and exaggerated leading to parochialism and partisanship. People are divided into them and us with “them” being everyone who holds a different view or behaves differently from ourselves. 

Parables such as the one I have just read play right into this tendency to divide society into those who agree with us and those who do not, those who hold our faith and those who don’t, those who are rigid adherents of the law and those who are not. The way that this parable is usually understood  – thanks to Matthew’s addition of an interpretation – can lead to self-satisfaction on the one hand and condemnation of the other on the other hand. If we are wheat (which of course we are!) then those who are different from ourselves must be weeds and by definition must be destined for destruction.

However, as Rosemary reminded us last week, Jesus’ parables are primarily about the Kingdom of God (or Kingdom of Heaven). They are not about us. 

I have said on many occasions that parables are not neat and self-explanatory (as Matthew’s interpretations suggest). Jesus doesn’t tell parables to affirm the way we see the world but rather to challenge our preconceptions, to shake us up and to move us to a new way of thinking. In other words, rather than confirm our world view, Jesus tries to help us to view the world from another, completely different perspective – that of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Take today’s parable for example – the sower is not, as might be expected, a poor share farmer, a day-laborer or a slave but a householder. We learn that the sower owns both land and slaves. Jesus’ audience would have pricked up their ears. Why, they would have thought, didn’t the householder delegate the task of sowing to his slaves? This is not the only aspect of the story that would have jarred with common practice or experience. Jesus listeners might have wondered why an enemy would plant darnel – a weed so commonplace that it would most likely have sprung up by itself and why would the householder instruct the slaves to leave it to grow when good agricultural practice would have been to weed the crop? You certainly wouldn’t allow these weeds to grow – the seeds of darnel are poisonous. Harvesting the plants together would have risked mixing the two thereby making the wheat worthless.

What to us, who are so far removed from first century Palestine, seems like a possible scenario, would, to Jesus’ listeners, have been a reversal of normal practice – slaves plant the seeds and crops are weeded as necessary. In the Kingdom of Heaven Jesus suggests, the good and bad exist together – separated only at the harvest.

Left to stand alone the parable exemplifies the complexity of human existence and the fact that Christians and non-Christians alike comprise the good and the bad, the saintly and the unsaintly, those with open and receptive hearts and those who are narrow and mean-spirited. Discerning who belongs in which camp can be as difficult as determining which is wheat and which is weed. As individuals and as community, we represent the breadth and depth of human experience and of human behaviour – the best and the worst together. 

The point of the parable seems to be this – that the world and its people are full of complexities, and it is not up to us to make distinctions based on our ideas of right and wrong, good and bad. Only God can truly discern the purposes of our heart. Only God can recognize what has made us who and what we are. Only God is in a position to determine who is good and who is not. Judgement will happen in its own time and without our intervention. 

If the wheat and the tares are left to grow together, if the good and the bad in ourselves and others are part of the reality of our existence and if rooting out the bad has the potential to damage the good, then perhaps the lesson is that we should be more gentle with ourselves and more understanding and compassionate of others.

Above all, in today’s turbulent times, perhaps we should humbly mind our own business and leave to God the matter of judgement. 

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