Homily 642 – 6 Pascha
Holy Transfiguration, Ames, Iowa
May 25, 2025
Epistle:  (38) – Acts 16:16-34 and (176) – 2 Corinthians 4:6-15
Gospel:  (34) – John 9:1-38 and (40) – Matthew 11:2-15

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, One God.  Christ is risen!

During my time as an Orthodox Christian, I’ve seen myself move through a variety of phases.  The first was one of knowledge – seeking to know things.

I think it is common to begin that way.  Many of us, when we first encounter the Orthodox Church, we’ve already had some exposure to Christianity, and what we see in Orthodoxy is a place of resolution for all the seemingly endless debates we have as Christians.

We hear the arguments – all of them quite rational, quite appealing.  In most cases, the arguments are about how God works.  We try to explore the mysteries of God, hoping that by understanding, we can then believe.

That’s what most of us were brought up to think.  If we are afraid of something, the answer was to understand it.

Now, that wasn’t always the case.  The reason fairy tales became so popular for so long is that they helped children address the fears they had, when they had no understanding of the process involved.

Today, we see that in action – why was this man born blind?  It is a question that resonates throughout history.  Why does evil exist in the world?  Why do bad things happen to good people?  Why do good things happen to bad people?

In the Slavic world, there is an understanding that we are not in control of anything.  I had a friend, a professor of Russian, who spoke to the fact that the Russian language itself expresses this idea.  In Russian, you don’t own anything, or have anything.  Rather, in the literal, it exists within one’s sphere.  There is this near fatalism about everything.

Perhaps most telling is the belief that suffering is God’s way of paying attention to us.  It sounds crazy to a western ear – but the proverb in Russian is that we should ask God to pay less attention to us.

Now, Christ explicitly tells us here the reason that the man was born blind.  He was born blind so that the works of God may be revealed in him.  That’s a revolutionary statement.

Nothing he did, or didn’t do, or his parents did or didn’t do, is the cause of his blindness.  The man was simply born into a fallen world.  Christ tells us that God, creator of all and giver of all life, is revealed through our weaknesses.

This much is understandable – we can’t take credit for our accomplishments if they are in fact our weaknesses.  That’s why God chooses to work through sinners and the weak and the powerless and the ones who are different.  God gets the credit.  And only God gets the credit.

After all, who were the Apostles?  Fishermen, for the most part.  Matthew may have been the most educated of the group, as a tax collector.  Most were uneducated, at least by worldly standards.

Yet God chose them – not the Pharisees, not the scribes, not the lawyers, not the rulers.  The powerless.  Because when the powerless are used by God and do great things, God gets the credit.

When the blind man is healed, God gets the credit.

That’s the part that utterly confounds the Pharisees in the story.  They knew that if something indeed had happened, God would be the one to get credit.  And that wasn’t terribly good for their brand.

So they, like many of us today, go through the litany of possibilities.  Maybe he wasn’t really born blind.  They ask the man, not getting the answer they want.  They ask mom and dad, again, not getting the answer they want.

They call the man back again.  Here’s where it gets really, really interesting.  They tell him to give credit to God.  Now, remember – this is important – the man had already given credit to Jesus.  So the Pharisees were asking this man now to deny Jesus and give credit to God.

This man didn’t seek to evaluate the situation.  He didn’t seek to “know”.  He didn’t seek to “understand”.  He simply stated his experience.

“I don’t know if this man Jesus is a sinner or not.  The one thing I know is that I was blind and now I see.”

This changes the dynamic for how we understand the Orthodox faith.  Because understanding isn’t central.  It isn’t even necessary for us.  Unlike our brothers and sisters in other traditions that tell us that we must understand – we must be rational.  We must assent to a set of intellectual beliefs in order to be healed.

Nothing of the kind.  The only thing we have to do is follow Christ.  The only thing that happens is that we were blind, and we begin to see.  We are baptized, and we are illumined, and we follow the one who heals us.

Nothing and nobody else will heal us.  The world won’t heal us.  Power won’t heal us, wealth won’t heal us.

Only Christ.  Only Christ.

The implications are immense.  It’s quite OK to not understand how God works.  It’s quite OK to not understand all the theological back and forth about this and that.  That knowledge doesn’t heal us, and in fact, serves to inflate our ego – causing further harm to us.

What is important is recognizing what God is doing and has done and will do for us.  We can set our ego aside, and simply recognize and say, about Christ I do not know.

What I do know is that I was blind.  And now I see.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God.  Christ is risen!