Our Mucky Humanity: Sermon Preached on 19th March 2023 (Fourth Sunday of Lent)

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

Ephesians 5. 8–14; John 9. 1–41

“…he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes…”

Some of you will have noticed that there was a rugby match between England and Ireland yesterday. For those who have not the slightest interest in sport, let me cut a long story short by saying that Ireland won comfortably. I tell you that not to gloat – although I’m sure that some of you will be cynical about my intentions! – but to provide context for this morning’s readings.

When I was schoolboy I wanted, for a brief time at least, to play rugby for Ireland. In my imagination, I would see myself in a green jersey on the pitch at a packed Lansdowne Road, on a mild March afternoon like yesterday’s, in the final weekend of  a Six Nations championship, crashing over the line for the winning try as the seconds ticked down in a Grand Slam decider. Hopefully, a Grand Slam decider against England! It has, however, been a long time since five-foot-five has been a sufficient stature for international rugby, and so those dreams had to remain unfulfilled. I must trust that God’s plans for me never involved international rugby, for otherwise he would have given me an extra centimetre… or twenty. Indeed, in His good sense God probably realised that I was never going to enjoy a life of getting up at half-five every morning to lift weights and down protein shakes. God made me to be me, not just in my soul and my mind, but also in my body, which He made specifically for me, with its stumpy little legs and fat backside.

Christians face the constant danger of reducing their faith to something otherworldly, overly spiritualised, and detached from physical reality. Yet one of the things that stands out in this morning’s long Gospel reading is the sheer physicality of its portrayal of Jesus. The passage rejoices in the messiness of human life and the human body – Jesus spits in public, indeed in front of his own followers, then rubs his spittle in the mud, makes a paste out of it, and rubs it in the blind man’s eyes.

Even more significantly, this comes immediately after Jesus saying, “I am the light of the world”. Jesus has therefore just identified Himself with “I am”, the Hebrew term for God, and said His life was of global importance. Then He gets His hands muddy with his own spit and washes a stranger with the product.

We shouldn’t shy away from celebrating our bodies, even if they aren’t bodies likely to be asked to grace the catwalk or the professional rugby field any time soon. That is particularly the case on Mothering Sunday. Jesus was a son born of a mother. And it is a core belief of Christians that Jesus was not just a human teacher or prophet, but that Jesus is God incarnate. So God took on a human body, just like ours, and more than that, started His journey as a human being just like we all do, inside a woman’s body; His mother’s body.

Christianity should celebrate humanity not the abstract, but in the sometimes messy physicality of human beings; similarly it should not celebrate an antiseptic pastiche of motherhood that leaves the messy bits out, but the actual God-given physicality of women.

Therefore, the first lesson I’d like us to take from this morning’s Gospel reading is to celebrate our humanity, and to celebrate our physical bodies as part of that humanity.

The second lesson I’d like us take from this morning’s readings is this – that the only reward that following Jesus can ever guarantee is access to the Truth. It might seem odd to say that in the context of one of the most melodramatic of miracle stories in all of Scripture, when a man born blind is given his sight for the first time. But pay close attention to the details of the story. The man does get his sight, but as a result he is “driven out”. We are not told from where or to where, but on hearing that, we might reasonably question whether Jesus would have been better off leaving him alone. The man born blind, however, does not himself regret Jesus coming to him. In fact, he worships Jesus – but not because his life has been made problem-free, but because He has learned that Jesus is the Messiah; because He has been given access to the truth.

The third lesson I’d like us to take from this morning’s readings is that the people most prone to lying to any of us are we ourselves. Many Pharisees know their attempts to dismiss Jesus as evil or mad don’t tally with Him performing miraculous healings. So why do they try to dismiss Him? Certainly, this outsider who heals on the Sabbath was never going to endear Himself to them by rocking up in their Jerusalem stronghold and refusing to play by their rules. Peer pressure is almost certainly part of the story too – it’s never a comfortable experience to be the person who breaks ranks to point out a convenient lie that has become toxic, or a source of injustice. Truth-tellers are not always thanked, certainly not in closely-knit communities, whether they are villages or workplaces or religious congregations.

There is no magic solution to this problem. The Internet has allowed people to break out of ghettoes of the likeminded where they live, but sometimes at the price of joining online communities even less comfortable with dissenting opinions and without the physical cues that help us notice manipulative or unhinged people in physical communities. It’s much easier to be a self-deluding fanatic behind a fake name on the Internet than in a real community where you have to rub along with people you disagree with at the village pantomime. Once again we discover that our physical humanity, the reality that we are creatures of flesh and blood is a gift to be celebrated and treasured, not something that somehow prevents us from becoming our real ‘spiritual’ selves.

For my final point, I’d like to turn to our short epistle reading, having otherwise dealt exclusively with that very long Gospel reading. In this passage from his letter to the Ephesians, St Paul hammers home that we are often confronted with a conscious and concrete choice between darkness and light, good and evil. This is not something I always find comfortable, as someone who is instinctively drawn to ambiguity, complexity, and shades of grey. But sometimes choices really are matters of darkness and light – often when we have the choice to collude with a lie or, like the man born blind, to risk everything for the truth.

Let’s draw all that together – the truth is that we are creatures of flesh and blood. Our bodies are not some sort of cloak or vehicle for the true ‘spiritual us’ – our bodies are as much gifts from God as our souls. So much so that in the person of Jesus Christ, God became one of us in the body of a woman and died on the Cross to open eternal life to us. Christians have always faced the temptation of seeing our bodies as less God-given than our souls, and the physical world we live in as somehow a distraction from our true natures.

This temptation is magnified in an Internet era where we can easily retreat behind our computer screens and find people from the four corners of the world to share our worst delusions and lies with. Yet that is a rejection of the humanity that Jesus Christ, God made man, modelled for us in His earthy life – that was a humanity that was messy, physical, and intimately connected with the messy physical world around Him.

It takes courage to be people of truth because it is usually easier to collude with what we know to be lies – but in a world where technology makes it easier than ever to live by convenient lies, choosing light over darkness, truth over deceit, may be the greatest gift we as Christians can share with those around us.

Now praise, glory, and honour be to God who is with us in times of plenty and times of austerity, in all the earth and for ever and ever. Amen.