Jesus said, “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.” Some of the Pharisees near him heard these things, and said to him, “Are we also blind?” Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have
no guilt; but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your guilt remains.—John 9:39-41 (ESV)There are a lot of folks who have trouble with these verses. For some, it’s a matter of not understanding Jesus’ rabbinic way of talking; I actually had an elder use this as an example of her contention that “there are lots of contradictions in the Bible.” Others, more seriously, wonder why Jesus says here, “For judgment I came into the world,” when he told Nicodemus in John 3, “The Son of Man did not come into the world to condemn the world, but to seek and save those who are lost.” The answer is that this isn’t a statement of what Jesus wanted to happen, but simply what he knew would happen; there are those who, in the face of God’s offer of salvation, do not want it. They would prefer to hold fast to their idols, to gods of their own invention, which they can control. They refuse to believe they need Jesus—they think they can see just fine without him, thanks—and in their refusal, their true blindness is revealed and confirmed. It isn’t that Jesus judges them, but that in response to his coming, they judge themselves.Now, Jesus is drawing this language from Isaiah, who repeatedly associates blindness and deafness with the worship of idols instead of the one true God—idols being blind and deaf lumps of inert material, those who worship them become as blind and deaf as the false gods before whom they bow; and the interesting thing about this when it comes to the Pharisees is that they weren’t blind in the same way as the people Isaiah was talking about—or at least, they would have said they weren’t. They knew the prophet’s complaint about the people of his time; they knew the dangers of idolatry, of worshiping the gods of the nations, and they were devoutly opposed to that. Their whole effort, their whole reason for existence, was focused on worshiping God faithfully and keeping his law as well as they possibly could. They no doubt saw themselves as the exact opposite of the blind and deaf Israel against which the prophet spoke. And yet Jesus makes the same charge against them: they are willfully blind.The biggest reason for this is that they were no longer truly worshiping God, for they had made an idol of their own religion; their focus had shifted from worshiping God and giving him glory to worshiping their own purity and glorifying themselves. They were worshiping their own worship, and their true god was their idea of their own wonderfulness. While they would no doubt have balked at 7 Simple Steps to Your Best Life Now, the spirit of their religion was really very similar to that sort of American self-help/therapeutic religion, just as it’s very similar to the idolatry of style, taste and preference practiced in so many of our congregations that underlies American Christianity’s “worship wars.” Our worship is supposed to be our gift to God and the window through which we look at him; they had stopped looking through the window and started looking at it, shifting their focus from the Giver to the gift. Too often, if we’re honest, I think we’d have to admit that we do the same.
