are you blind?

Found this great quote today on a blog called Secret Passages:

For me the dynamic of a commitment to Scripture is not “we believe the Bible, so there is nothing else to be learned,” but rather “we believe the Bible, so we had better discover all the things in it to which our traditions, including our ‘protestant’ or ‘evangelical’ traditions, which have supposed themselves to be ‘biblical’ but are sometimes demonstrably not, have made us blind.”

This fits well with my own thinking; as I mention in my bio, when I left the traditions I was raised in, I realized there were new ways of looking at a lot of things. It is indeed true that our religious traditions can make us blind.

My father was telling me recently of a friend, a godly man, who had been very sick; after receiving prayer, he had what could only be termed a miraculous recovery. Though the man was happy to be well, he had a crisis of sorts because his theology didn’t allow for God to heal in that way. He turned to Scripture to study healing and concluded that he was a fluke. He was blind to the truth–or even to the possibility of another perspective.

Lest you think I’m above such blindness, I’ll tell a story on myself. About seven years ago, at the time that I was just discovering this wider world of faith, I was at the New Orleans airport and I could not find my car. I searched and searched, and finally I thought, “God loves you as a father; you would help your child find his car. Ask God to help you find yours.” So I prayed and asked for help. Almost instantly I knew where I had parked. But…my first thought, literally, was “Never mind, God; I found it.”

As I got in the car, the Spirit replayed the last few minutes for me; I was rather embarrassed! I had been trained to believe in coincidence and luck, and even though I wanted to believe and see providence at work, it took a conscious effort on my part to do so.

This is a rather trivial example, but it highlights at least part of the solution to religiously-induced blindness. We have to retrain our thinking–“renew our minds,” to use a biblical phrase. For me, part of my retraining in regard to providence was to remove the word luck from my family’s vocabulary. We don’t say, “we were so lucky to get this great chair on sale; it’s exactly what we were looking for.” No, we say, “God really blessed us…”

Another part of the solution, the bigger part, is a change of heart. I have to want to see. Like the blind men, we have to call out for help:

“Lord,” they answered, “we want our sight.“
Jesus had compassion on them and touched their eyes. Immediately they received their sight and followed him. (Matthew 20:29--34)

A quick search of the gospels reveals that Jesus regularly healed the blind. That’s exciting! Jesus has compassion on those who want to see.

However, this same search reveals another side to blindness. I had never noticed how often Jesus accused the Pharisees of blindness (see, for instance, Matthew 23). This is the kind of blindness for which Jesus had little patience because the sufferers had no desire to see.

The problem with blindness of this sort, of course, is that you don’t know you’re not seeing what you don’t see. It requires us to cry out and ask the Holy Spirit to come and reveal our blindness. In John 9, just before Jesus heals the blind man at the temple, He tells his disciples that He is “the light of the world” (v. 5). We need His light! And, such change–leaving behind life-long traditions and beliefs–requires courage. Courage to say, “I was wrong.” Courage to “leave behind brothers or sisters or mother or father or children” (see Mark 10). Courage to leave what’s familiar and comfortable.

Jesus, you are the light of the world. Thank you for shining your light on my sin and having compassion to heal me and make me whole. I know that sometimes I am blinded to the truth by my religious ideas and traditions. Shine your light and let me see! Holy Spirit, bring revelation of the truth, and give me courage to embrace it.

Tagged as: Bible, blindness, faith, healing, Holy Spirit, Jesus, pharisees, religion, sight, tradition