Morning Prayer – Sept. 14, 2010 ~ Dr. John Ruff
Today, thinking about a miracle of vision, we honor the memory of our visionary former
president, O.P. Kretzmann, who died on this day in 1975, on the Feast of the Holy Cross.
You all know the motto of the University, taken from Psalm 36: “In Thy Light We See
Light.”
Today, in this well lit place, we have before our eyes lasting evidence of one of O.P.’s
visions. This place, that glorious window, that crucifix, that organ, these pews, you who
sit in them, who come here to pray and worship. All of that, all of us, part of a vision.
“In thy Light, We See Light.”
On this day when we read how Jesus conferred the gift of vision on a poor man he met on
the road to Jerusalem,
I am reminded of another visionary we have in our midst, Richard Brauer, after whom the
leaders of this university had the excellent vision to name our great Museum of Art. It
was Richard Brauer, along with O.P. Kretzmann and others, whose great eyes for art and
whose great hearts for this community gave birth to a persistent vision which resulted in
the great gift that museum is for all of us. And what a great place it is to learn to see. If
you haven’t been in the Brauer lately, you must go there, because Richard Brauer has
curated a great exhibition of stencil prints by the master Japanese printer Sadeo
Watanabe, yet another visionary I want to have us think about in relation to today’s
reading.
Watanabe, at age 18, suffering from a life-threatening illness, promised his life to God if
he would be spared, and when he recovered, he commenced to fulfill that promise,
devoting his life to translating the stories of the Old and New Testament into a distinctly
Japanese visual language. In 1987 this university gave him an honorary doctorate for his
great achievement, which you truly must see to believe. There are several images in the
exhibit of Jesus at sea with his disciplines, like the one in today’s reading, and there is
also an image of Jesus restoring the sight of a blind man. Go and see them, please, and
look at them closely.
If you were around in Jesus’s time, and you liked to play it safe, you would have never,
ever gotten into a boat with the guy. Yes, you’d make it back to shore, but for sure a
storm would come up, or you’d get way too many fish in your net, he might walk off
across the waves or invite you out there; something terrifying or really weird was going
to happen that would test your faith. In today’s reading, the storm doesn’t come in any
conventional meteorological way, but it does come. Jesus is fresh from another
encounter with the Pharisees who keep asking for a sign of his divinity. In Mark’s
Gospel, timing is everything; just prior to his encounter with the Pharisees, Jesus had fed
four thousand people with seven loaves and a couple fishes. But wouldn’t you know it,
the Pharisees weren’t there. So Jesus, frustrated with their nagging about signs, jumps in
the water taxi with the disciples and they head to the other side of the Sea of Galilee. Of
course, he’s still stewing about those Pharisees, and the Herodians, too. That’s the storm
I hear brewing. When he warns the disciples to beware the yeast of the Pharisees and the
Herodians, he doesn’t mean the actual yeast of the Pharisees, this is not a bread making
class, he’s speaking figuratively, but what happens? Do the disciples have what we
sometimes call in education one of those “Aha moments?” No, it’s more like a missed
“Aha moment” that becomes a “Duh moment.” The disciples, suddenly sounding more
like the three stooges and the seven dwarfs, think Jesus is talking about the bread they
forgot to pack for their lunches. Mark does not record what Jesus said under his breath,
or how he rolled his eyes. But it’s clear Jesus can’t believe it. “Why are you talking
about having no bread?” he asks. When Jesus asks them if their hearts are hardened, if
they have eyes to see, if they have ears to hear, if they recall how just the other day they
had fed the four thousand people, and how many baskets of leftovers did they haul in
afterwards?, I hear the voice of a very, very frustrated teacher. And I wouldn’t want to be
in that boat with him, would you? Here’s when you might try walking on water, to get
away.
But look how the story, like one of those Galillean boats, tacks another way. We watch
Jesus now on shore in an encounter with some people urging him to heal a blind man.
My text reads: “Some people brought a blind man by the hand to him and begged him
to touch him.” They brought him by the hand to be touched, Jesus took him by the
hand out of the village. Why? Well, Jesus is very secretive in Mark; it’s almost like
he’s on the lam, and maybe what he’s going to do he doesn’t want just anyone to see.
So what does he do? The text reports how he put saliva in the man’s eyes, laid his hands
upon him, and asked him what he could see. I imagine Jesus spitting in his hands or
licking his fingers and then rubbing his spit in the man’s eyes. And that’s my favorite
part of this story. I’m reminded of times I have seen mothers, in some situation where
they didn’t have water or some sort to wash cloth or towellett available, see some smudge
on their child’s face, lick their thumb, and rub it away. You know what I’m talking
about. It’s something only a mother or Jesus can do. That’s the sort of intimacy we have
here, loving, cleansing, and curative. Asked what he could see, the man replied “I can
see people, but they look like trees, walking.” It’s like we’re at the eye doctor, and Jesus
is working that machine with the lenses. “How’s that, is that better, or is that better?”
The doctor and the patients are working together, trying different things out, trying to get
it right. What did Jesus do, hearing the man’s response? Tell the man his faith was
insufficient? Say to him that he wasn’t trying hard enough. No. He laid his hands on him
again, and the man gave it another shot, and bingo, 20-20 vision.
I love that story, and I think Watanabe did too. I don’t think the story he depicted was
the story of Blind Bartimeous as the wall text in the Brauer suggests; in that story, there is
no record of Jesus touching Bartimeous. In this story as Watanabe depicts it, Jesus’s
hands are all over the man; they are on his shoulder and in his face; and the trees
mentioned, yesterday morning I spotted them on the man’s gown, a whole forest of them,
and more in the background. It’s a wonderful detail, that rewards a close look, and I love
the great humor with which Watanabe works it in. I didn’t see them before; they were
there all along, plain as the nose on my face. I just missed them.
What follows this story? The story where Jesus asks his disciples who everyone says he
is, and they say John the Baptist or Elijah, all except Peter, who sometimes is so thick
headed. Simon is called Peter, or “Rocky,” by Jesus for a reason, but this time he gets it.
“You are the Christ,” Peter says. It reminds me of the moment in Mark’s Gospel just
after Jesus dies on the cross and the Centurion exclaims, “Truly this man was God’s son.”
Do you ever wonder what he saw, that would create this moment of vision? It is what all
of the Gospel of Mark builds toward, so think about it.
Today’s reading from Mark’s Gospel helps us to see this divine curriculum we are given
to study as a process, he helps us to understand discipleship as a process, and learning to
hear the message, to heed the call, to see the signs, as a process. It is so instructive for
teachers and learners, which is all of us here. Learning to understand Jesus’s message,
and then taking it to heart, is not always easy and it will not happen all at once. Students
will fail, teachers will be frustrated. Many things will blind us and harden our hearts. We
must follow Jesus’s example, and learn to touch others, even as others touch us, with
love. This is how we will learn to see with our hearts.
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen