Blind Faith and Hearing Hearts: A Sermon for Quinquagesima (February 17th 2023)
We often hear religious people being accused of having blind faith. And the problem involved in that concept is real. Christians who follow their leaders uncritically, or who don’t have a self-motivated desire to know and understand their faith, and who are anti-intellectual about the questions which life poses to us, are vulnerable to manipulation of wolves in sheeps’ clothing, are not equipped to the attacks on our faith which come from the world, and are not able to honestly deal with their own sins. Blind faith, in that sense, is the opposite of true faith. Hebrews 11:1 defines proper faith as “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” As it is the substance of things hoped for, that means there are real grounds for our belief – a basis which can be analyzed and defended in terms of the historical evidence of the Gospels, the theological wisdom of Christ and those who explain his teachings in the Epistles, and the philosophical insight of observations about human nature made by writers like Solomon in Ecclesiastes and Paul in Romans 1. Christian faith is not blind in the sense of unintelligent or uninformed by knowledge, wisdom, and curiosity – to the contrary, some of the greatest thinkers in history have held the position of Christianity and defended the substance of things hoped for with clarity and truth. But the second part of that sentence from Hebrews, faith as the evidence of things not seen, is quite the paradox. How can evidence be of something unseen?
To understand this claim about the nature of evidence, we also need to know something about what God teaches us about the human condition. Deuteronomy 6:4-6 says, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart” (Deuteronomy 6:4-6). If you went to your doctor because you had a hearing problem and he said, “You can’t hear because you have a bad heart,” you might be rather confused. Actually, I became curious about whether heart health could be linked to hearing health, and I did a little research and found that in fact, yes, a bad heart can actually cause hearing problems. The American Academy of Audiology writes, “The ear is supplied by several small arteries and requires a sufficient and rich blood flow to maintain proper function. It is believed that Cardiovascular Disease can reduce blood flow to the ear and in turn cause damage to different parts of the auditory system.” What we learn in Scripture is that this physical connection is mirrored in our spiritual condition. In 1 Kings 3:9, 11 when Solomon prays for wisdom from God he says, “Give to your servant a hearing heart, to judge your people, to discern between good and evil . . . you have asked for yourself to discern, to hear judgment.” When our hearts do not have the spiritual flow of the Holy Spirit, when our heart is stuck in fleshly, sinful, and worldly ways of thinking, we cannot hear God the same way. So when Christ exhorts his listeners, “He who has an ear to hear, let him hear,” you might say that he is inviting them to search their hearts to ask if the reason they do not hear – that is, understand – what he is saying is because they have a spiritual blockage in the invisible heart. And hearing, of course, is naturally the way we see the invisible things of the heart. I cannot literally see the love my wife has for me. But I can hear it in her words, “I love you,” and I can hear it in actions that I see – that she lifts me up when I am low, that she encourages me when I am insecure, that she prepares food for me when I am hungry. Those actions are saying something – they are evidences, manifested to my vision, of things unseen – it’s not enough to see what she does for me, but for me to have a hearing heart to know what what she does means.
You could say in that sense that I have blind faith in my relationship with Camarie – not because I have no evidence for her love towards me, but rather because if I attend to what she does and says with a hearing heart, I can know that something is real that I cannot directly see. This kind of faith does not have the blindness of ignorance like that we started off with, but instead knows that things that our physical eyes are blind to are just as real as the things we can see. When we look at today’s Gospel lesson, we see a counter-example of this with the disciples. By the time the events of Luke 18 are recorded, Christ has already performed twelve miraculous healings, as many healings as he had disciples, and had also performed four exorcisms and brought two people back from the dead, not to mention miracles showing his sovereignty over the natural world such as the miraculous catch of fish by the lake, the calming of the storm and the feeding of the five thousand. And those miracles had been performed to seal the truth of what Christ had been saying. Now look at what Christ says of himself in today’s Gospel: “For he shall be delivered unto the Gentiles, and shall be mocked, and spitefully entreated, and spitted on: and they shall scourge him, and put him to death: and the third day he shall rise again.” How could it be more clear? He references this as foretold by the prophets and directly asserts what it is they will see happen – that he will be scorned, slain, and resurrected. It seems like there should be no cause for confusion in this teaching. But it says, “And they understood none of these things: and this saying was hid from them, neither knew they the things which were spoken.” Well, why not? Not only had Christ been perfectly clear, he also had referenced Scriptures they surely knew confirming what would happen. Well, doubtless, their hearing problem showed a heart problem. What was in their hearts? My guess is fear. How could they even begin to come to grips with the idea of their Messiah being slain? They probably didn’t even register the part about being raised again – probably their minds were stuck on what they heard that they didn’t like, and because their hearts were filled with doubt, they couldn’t have faith. Mockery, spite, the dishonor of being spat upon, scourging, death – that’s all they can hear. But they hadn’t sufficiently fed their hearts on the whole of Christ’s testimony, so when he says, “and the third day he shall rise again,” their minds were elsewhere. It’s like when your spouse is telling you something important and you’re too busy looking at some horrible news on your cell phone, and you miss the important information.The problem with the disciples here isn’t that their faith was blind, but that their faith was based on what they could see, and what their imaginations made of what Christ was saying instead of really listening to what he was saying. Their faith was too much in the fleshly, unspiritual vision of normal human eyesight – when someone is scouraged, spat upon, crucified, in the measure of my eyes, that is only bad news. How could that be good news? So, in God’s providence, they are about to be witness to a miracle which offers a rebuke to how they were thinking. The disciples are walking with their Lord near Jericho stuck in a human vision of what their more than human Lord had said, “And it came to pass, that as he was come nigh unto Jericho, a certain blind man sat by the way-side begging: and hearing the multitude pass by, he asked what it meant. And they told him, that Jesus of Nazareth passeth by.” Now, since this man is blind, of course, he had never seen the miracles like the disciples had. It seems that he had never even been near Christ before. But he had heard about him. And being blind, the man had lived with a reality that most of us struggle to imagine: he always had to believe things were real that he couldn’t see. He had to live by hearing, to have a heart open to know the difference between a true voice and a false one. And in the practice at hearing his blindness had given him, this man heard truth in the words he had heard about this Jesus of Nazareth. And as sure as he was that vision and sight was something real though he had never had it, he knew that the testimony of this Son of Man was sure. “And he cried, saying, Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on me.” It’s already courageous for someone in his vulnerable state of life to do this, but his heart had already been opened to the power of Christ’s ministry, and he wouldn’t even be deterred when those around him told him to pipe down: “And they which went before rebuked him, that he should hold his peace: but he cried so much the more, Thou son of David, have mercy on me.” Now there you have, you could say, blind faith from a hearing heart.
Like the disciples, even though we have salvation through the sacrifice and resurrection of Our Savior, we get stuck in a worldly way of thinking about the world’s problems. We get stuck in our human vision, and when we try to muster up the courage to have faith in the evidence of things unseen, like those who rebuked the blind man, there are those who will accuse us of having a blind faith. Why are you believing in this God you cannot see with human eyes, and in this Risen Christ whom you have never seen for yourself or touched with your hands? Oh, there is evidence enough – the Gospels as reliable historical documents have been attacked time and again but have withstood even the most scrupulous attacks precisely because the Gospels provide the substance of something true to hope for. But the first answer is not in something we have to see to believe, but something we have to hear. After all, the disciples had seen plenty – they had witnessed first hand miracles unlike anything that had happened in history before and anything that will happen again until the Second Coming, and they still struggled to believe. When people say that they will only believe it when they see it of the things of God, what they miss is that God is Spirit, and is more real and eternal than the merely physical things that we can see with our eyes. To see an invisible truth will require that you use that part of your self which is made from the same realm of things invisible spoken of in the Nicene Creed. The same invisible heart that can hear true love in the words and actions of friends and family is the heart that must be trained to hear the invisible truths of God, for which there is ample evidence of such things though unseen.
The miracle of the blind man receiving his physical sight is nothing compared to the miracle of him receiving a heart which could hear the Good News of Christ and say, “Lord, have mercy on me.” Plenty of people received healings from Christ and having gotten what they wanted moved on with their lives, no more spiritual than they had been before. But not so with the blind man. Christ knew this would be no flash in the pan expression of faith, for it says: “And Jesus said unto him, Receive thy sight: thy faith hath saved thee. And immediately he received his sight, and followed him, glorifying God: and all the people, when they saw it, gave praise unto God.” The blind man already had the seed of faith growing in his heart, and the miracle of his restored eyes became an opportunity for him to expand the ministry of Christ rather than to simply enjoy the benefits of eyesight.
In many ways, we feel blind in this life. This is what Paul is saying when he says, “For now we see through a glass, darkly.” With Paul, we can admit that our faith has an element of blindness to it. In our human limitations, we will never fully remove the blindness caused by only having partial knowledge, by having a disposition to sin, and by having a culture which often tries to discourage us from dwelling in Christ’s grace. But that blindness of the mind can be a means by which God teaches us not to lean merely on our own understanding, but like the blind man to rely on the substance of faith despite our ignorance because our hearts are open to hearing the Shepherd’s voice. As we enter the season of Lent, we can come with lowly and penitent hearts and say, “Lord, I am blind in my sin. Have mercy on me. Lord, I am blind in my faith, for I can’t always understand how Christ is using me and I doubt if He really loves me. I am blind in my hope, and I cannot see how you are at work in the mockery I feel from others and the suffering I feel in my life. Lord, I am blind in how I fail to love, and so I am like a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. Lord, Lord, I am blind in my trust, and I come before you, that I may receive my sight.” And as we bring our doubts and our sins to the foot of the Cross throughout this penitential season, our hearts become lighter by letting Christ bear the burden of the finished work of our salvation, so that on Easter Sunday, when we think of the empty tomb and the Risen Lord reappearing to his disciples, we can hear him say, “Receive thy sight: thy faith has healed thee.” And in joy our hearing hearts will be lifted up in faith which sees the throne of Glory with spiritual eyes, and we will glorify God, and give praise to the name of the Son of David and Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.