Cool Sunglasses Can't Hide Our Blindness

Lectionary reflections for the Third Sunday after Epiphany (C)

by Mark Harris

Readings for Epiphany 3, Year C, Jan. 25, 2004

• Nehemiah 8:2-10
• I Corinthians 12:12-27
• Luke 4:14-21

In our blindness we cannot or will not see.

That is too often the truth! And no more often than in regard to our understanding of the Torah, the community in its prophetic call for justice, and the fulfillment of hope in Jesus Christ.

We are blinded by the seeming unbending rightness of the law (particularly the law of ancient Israel), by the many-faceted needs of the community that cries for justice with a blinding intensity, and by the fulfillment of prophetic hope in the Christ who shines in our hearts and burns us with fire.

So we put on the shades of cool, the sunglasses that bring the light's brightness under control. We are cool. Behind the glasses who knows that we weep, like those who heard Ezra and his companions read the Torah from beginning to end? We weep because we know the Torah is the first hint of our depravity, no matter the cultural and historical distance between us and those who heard the Torah for the first time.

But we are cool. We have our shades. We don't let it really get to us. We hardly hear Nehemiah and Ezra comforting us and saying, "Do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength." We sit behind the shades of our continuing fear of damnation under the law. We never notice God's mercy.

We also know with Paul that we are all knit together, that not one thing is lost in all the gifts we bring as a whole people of God. The greater and the lesser, the cooperative and the contrary, the rough and the fine, the saint and the sinner, all, all have a place in the fullness of the Body of Christ. And although we on purpose distinguish the progressive from the sustaining, the believing from the doubter, the present doer of good from the ones who hope for the fire to come, we do so in the anguish of knowing that all are needed and our distinctions are to no good end.

Behind our shades you can't tell we are anxious, and wondering did we choose the right party, the right cause, the wave of the future, the plank on which we can stand. We hardly hear Paul saying "Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it." We sit in the shades of our fractiousness.

But we are cool. Behind our shades you can't tell we are anxious, and wondering did we choose the right party, the right cause, the wave of the future, the plank on which we can stand. We hardly hear Paul saying "Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it." We sit in the shades of our fractiousness. We can't see that God's justice is for every oppressed and bound part of the body, and for the body as a whole. Instead we watch the struggle of justice against justice and wait.

And when Jesus read in the synagogue we were leaning up against a back post in the schoolhouse looking cool. He read well, and Isaiah is powerful enough anyway. But it was too much to hope that somehow the prophecy was actually being lived out as he claimed. If that were so, then it would be necessary to take the Torah seriously, and the Community seriously, and ourselves as the body of Christ seriously, and Jesus' words seriously. He said, "Today this scripture is being fulfilled in your sight." Better to look cool, so no one may see in our eyes the relief that dawns in knowing that something entirely new is at hand. Better to wait and see, even if darkly through these smoky lenses. Be cool. Don't jump for joy just yet.

We in the Episcopal Church are hounded by factions that would pit Torah law, the body in its peculiar and partial justice needs, and the triumph of the Incarnation against one another. It is too hard to really believe that Torah and Community and Incarnation are all of a whole. In avoidance we stand back, cool, detached, just a little avant-garde, but not too much so.

What progressive Christian witness needs is the ability to take the Torah seriously, seeing it as a source of joy, not of sorrow; the ability to see justice for every faction as part of healing for the whole. . .

What progressive Christian witness needs is the ability to take the Torah seriously, seeing it as a source of joy, not of sorrow; the ability to see justice for every faction as part of healing for the whole; and the fulfillment of hope in Jesus Christ as the mercy and justice of God met in him, and by him in us as well, for we are the Body in the world.

Behind our shades, cool and distanced, we neither weep or shout for joy at knowing that we are damned and embraced by the Holy One, we never see justice for all in justice for the few, we never recognize that anything new has happened. We are blinded, and we cannot or will not see.

It is time to take off the shades and stand in the full light of day, the day in which God's people seeking mercy and God's people seeking justice find both in the presence in the world of the Incarnate One, first in Jesus Christ and then in all of us.

The Rev. Canon Mark Harris is author of The Challenge of Change: The Anglican Communion in the Post Modern Era, and a member of the Episcopal Church Publishing Company's (The Witness magazine) board of directors. He lives in Lewes, Del., and may be reached by email at poetmark@worldnet.att.net