Canter Bridge

The Bible exults in reversals. Beyond the established contours of what is morally and aesthetically tolerable, its stories seem almost to delight in reversal for reversal’s sake, though always with the hint that there is a subterranean logic to the events that would, if it were visible to the naked eye, throw them into a positive light.

Dead men live again. Kings lose their thrones. Peasants come to rule. The seeing go blind. The blind receive their sight. The second-born makes off with the paternal goods.

So it goes, as though life is rather more volatile than we imagine. So it goes, as though this is a truth to be welcomed more exuberantly than we know how. So it goes, as though history’s climax is scripted as the best reversal of them all, a kind of primus inter pares of liberation stories when one day’s weak become the next dawn’s strong.

It is not difficult to trace this impulse on one level to the liberation story that stands at Israel’s birth. There, the mighty who fall are none other than the world’s great imperium and its ruthless operators.

Yet the biblical literature rarely presents this penchant for reversal as mere national parable, a ‘where-we-came-from’ etiology supple enough for rewriting onto almost any available script. Rather, it discerns the hand of God in all this. It suggests that the heavens grin when reversal intrudes into the rigid horizontal beams of human society and breaks them.

It seems almost naive, does this anthology of reversal motifs, in its optimism about new beginnings.

The custodians of Moses’ legacy make a soft target. They are supremely patient of democratic disdain and our absolute individualism, for we are incapable of sympathy for what it means to reconstruct a society upon an ancient constitution when its interpretation requires the careful work of what a neighboring thinker would call philosopher kings. For this and other reasons, ‘the Jews’—as the Fourth Gospel names this Roman province’s religious leaders—seem to deserve our unmixed sarcasm, as though it is obvious that they are wrong-headed, narrow-minded, self-preserving pricks.

Such myopia is our problem, not theirs.

Yet they are no good in this passage, that’s for sure.

A blind man is given his sight but not the self-balanced wherewithal to identify his healer. This makes him seem the fool to the ever-careful guardians of Jewish religion, a treasure that would by any reckoning be unsafe in the hands of incautious enthusiasts. Such men can hardly be faulted for caring deeply.

In the midst of the sarcasm-laden back-and-forth, Jesus seizes the opportunity to declare that he’s come for judgment, a kind of judicial reversal for which the Bible has prepared us well if indeed this Jesus acts for God. Jesus is precise about the kind of judgment that has become his burden:

… in order that those who do not see may see and those who see might become blind.

The Pharisees, as those who hear this comment are identified, feel the Isaianic sting of the claim, for the similar words of Isaiah the prophet will still have resounded—amplified by centuries of interpretive fascination with his written legacy—in the moment.

‘Are we blind?’, they ask, perhaps too quickly locating themselves at the wrong end of Jesus’ allusion.

One of the most dangerous conditions, the Bible insists throughout its varied genres, is to see, to hear, to rule, to be well, to possess, to be right. ‘Woe’, Jesus says in another place, ‘to such people’.