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In many ways, we have been trained to think like attorneys. Who’s guilty and who’s innocent? Who is lying? Who has the authority to make decisions? Who is right and who is wrong? A courtroom posture can feel like moral seriousness, but it can also lead us to a place of darkness.
Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is a wake up call. To those who have wandered into darkness, Paul says, “Sleepers awake!” “Once you were in darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light.” (Ephesians 5:8)
When Paul talks about darkness and light, he isn’t talking about who’s smart and who’s foolish, or who has the best arguments. He’s talking about what forms us. Darkness is what happens when fear runs the show, when we reduce people to categories, when we turn suffering into a case, when we grasp for certainty because we don’t know how to live with grief. Darkness can look like rage, but it can also look like numbness. It can look like posting, scrolling, and judging, never actually touching the real world.
Light is different. Light doesn’t erase complexity; it reveals what’s true without destroying what’s tender. Light allows us to see a human being again. It lets us tell the truth without turning truth into a weapon.
Paul says, “Sleeper, awake… and Christ will shine on you.” That sounds to me like an invitation to wake up from the trance of certainty, to stop outsourcing our conscience to outrage, and to let Christ form in us a steadier way of being human.
Just last week, I noticed myself going to that place of darkness. It happened when I heard the tragic news of a young person’s death in a motorcycle accident. The person who told me about the incident said, “He wasn’t wearing a helmet.” My first instinct was to rationalize the tragedy by deciding fault. He wasn’t wearing a helmet. But do you know what that is about? It is about me. It is about calming my fears as a parent, as a friend, as someone who rides a bike in Seattle traffic. I wanted to explain away the tragedy instead of sitting with the pain.
The gospel story of the blind man receiving his sight begins exactly there, with a question about blame. “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” But these are all the wrong questions. When the disciples ask Jesus who sinned, they are trying to make suffering categorical and causational.
I want to say that’s an ancient worldview, but I think we are still guilty of this. When bad things happen, we grasp at straws hoping to find an explanation or a reason. We like having someone or something to blame. And yet, more often than not, suffering is simply suffering. There is no cure for being human.
In this story, Jesus doesn’t deny evil or pain or suffering, but he does refuse blame as the doorway into truth. Jesus says, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”
And in the very next breath, Jesus rolls up his sleeves and spits into the mud. He rubs his hands in the dirt and spreads it on the man’s eyes. He touches the blind man and tells him to go and wash. He does and now, he can see. In this, Jesus will not let suffering be reduced to a verdict.
Political dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, (sol-zen-it-syn) spent years in Soviet forced labor camps. He wrote about evil, suffering, and blame in a way that is piercing. In his writings, he rejects the comforting idea that evil belongs over there with the villains, the regimes, the other side. Instead, he writes something far more unsettling: “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either but right through every human heart and through all human hearts.”
We are not simple creatures. Humans are complex and complicated and things get messy. We are neither all good nor all bad, but some kind of murky blend most of the time. It can be difficult to hold two things to be true, especially when they are contradictory. That’s why we feel more comfortable with a binary. Good or bad. Right or wrong. Darkness or light.
But this is exactly what Solzhenitsyn is saying. (sol-zen-it-syn) Usually, things are a murky grey in between.
Paul’s light and dark metaphor is a murky grey too. It’s not the blinding light of an interrogation room. It’s more of the dappled light of sunshine coming through the window or filtering in through the stained glass. Remember, light doesn’t erase complexity; it reveals what’s true without destroying what’s tender. Dappled light allows us to see a human being again through the murky blend of grey.
In this long story from John’s gospel, the characters are all of these things, good and bad, murky grey. The neighbors, the parents, and the blind man vacillate between goodness and judgment, hope and blame. Yet, Jesus refuses the courtroom script. He moves toward the person and shows us a different path.
This story almost reads like a legal transcript. The neighbors know this man, have known him since he was a child. He is the blind beggar and they can’t see him in any other way.
The authorities try to control holiness by controlling the narrative. “Give glory to God!” They say, “We know that this man, Jesus, is a sinner.” Case closed. Nothing to see here.
When questioned, the man’s parents are evasive likely because they are afraid. When things are in turmoil, or the vulnerable are under attack, fear makes people silent or loud in the wrong ways.
The blind man refuses to be managed or dismissed. He counters the authorities’ grasp at control and his parents quiet fear. He says, “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” He doesn’t pretend to understand the how or why, he simply bears witness to his truth.
In a world addicted to certainty, the Christian vocation is truthful witness, not blame and rationalization.
In this miracle story, while everyone is arguing about God, Jesus shows us God. The authorities drive the blind man away, but Jesus goes to find him. That’s what God cares about; not winning the case, but seeking the excluded; not saving face, but saving the person.
This is what it means to live in the center. The center isn’t moderate opinions. It’s Christ, the steady, non-anxious center that refuses the cynicism that dehumanizes and the naïveté that denies harm. The center isn’t neutrality or compromise; the center is Christ.
We want our worldviews to easily explain the suffering in our world, but they cannot.
In this healing story, holding the center looks like Jesus refusing scapegoats, telling the truth, healing real bodies in a real world, and going back for the outcast.
What I hope you take away from this sermon is this. Change your first question. Instead of “who sinned?” Ask “Where is the human being?” What does love require of me today as I look through the murky grey? What is actually true and what am I only repeating?
Jesus shows us that sometimes this means rolling up your sleeves and reaching out to another person. While the world is busy litigating, building cases, and casting blame, Jesus is busy finding people.
Sleepers awake! May Christ shine on you, so you can hold the center not with a clenched fist, but with the steadiness of love and dappled light.
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 168.