Sermon: Blind Spots

Text: John 9:1-41

Date: March 6, 2005

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church

Here’s a little trivia for you—do you know who said this: “As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” Those are the words of our Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. Mr. Rumsfeld has been the subject of some mocking for saying this, but I’d have to say I agree with him as far as these five sentences go. I confess I do not know the context of the speech he was making. But when I stumbled across these words in the U.W. newspaper Ruckus the same week I was thinking about this blind man story in John, I could suddenly see the truth in them. This gospel story has known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, all three.

Here’s a known known: The man born blind knows that he has been healed. He says, when being interrogated by the religious leaders for the third time, “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”

Here’s a known unknown: The parents of the man born blind do not know how he got healed or who healed him. “We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind; but we do not know how it is that now he sees, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him.”

The unknown unknown is one of the most intriguing parts of the story. The religious leaders identified as Pharisees don’t know who Jesus is, and they don’t know they don’t know. They are trying to figure out if the healing is real and if it could have come from God. Most of them jump to the conclusion in the first interrogation that Jesus was not God’s agent, God’s healer, because he healed the blind man on the Sabbath. You see, it was against the rules to knead anything like bread dough on the Sabbath day of rest, and Jesus would have had to knead the dirt and spit together to make mud. What’s more, it was just against the rules to do the work of healing on the Sabbath. The religious leaders are so sure that the Sabbath rules are fool proof that they can’t begin to see that Jesus is doing God’s work. And they don’t even know that they don’t know this healing is God’s doing.

The religious leaders’ fanatical commitment to the rules of their religion created a giant blind spot where Jesus was standing. Do you know what a blind spot is? (We should have one of the teenagers who has been studying the rules of the road preparing to get a driver’s license define it for us.) When you’re in a car, the blind spot is a place you can’t see in the rear view mirror or the side mirror; it’s between the places you can see in those two mirrors. You have to crank your neck around and look for a second to see what’s in that blind spot before you change lanes, because a whole car might be hidden there. One of the tricky things you learn while you’re practicing driving is that it’s easy to forget about your blind spot and just rely on what you can see in the two mirrors. When you forget you have a blind spot, whatever might be there instantly becomes an unknown unknown, something you don’t know you don’t know. That’s dangerous.

There are blind spots outside motor vehicles. We all have blind spots as we look around at the world and try to figure out what’s going on. Our minds and our habits create blind spots. Our habits of mind create blind spots. We, like the Pharisees, jump to conclusions about what’s happening based on what we are used to seeing and used to thinking about.

Nations can have blind spots. Take WMD’s as a fer-instance. In the time leading up to the soon-to-be two-year-old war with Iraq, we read and heard and talked a lot about finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The merchants connected with a newspaper called The Funny Times started selling a T-shirt that proudly proclaimed, “WMD’s: We Found ‘Em!” The background of the slogan was a map of the United States with the starred locations of the many missile silos that harbor nuclear missiles scattered across the heartland of America. As a nation, we seem to find the weapons of mass destruction owned and operated by foreigners more troubling that those we own, use, and continue to produce. We’re rightfully unhappy about the likelihood that Iran and North Korea may be manufacturing nuclear weapons, but don’t get too worked up about our own nation’s proposal to develop some new mini-nukes that could be used against our enemies in a ground war. We’d like other nations to disarm, but we aren’t exactly volunteering to disarm ourselves. We used to talk in a hopeful way about nuclear disarmament back in the 80’s when the cold war was winding down; now it’s not even on the radar screen of our consciousness. It’s a blind spot.

Other nations have their blind spots as well, of course. North Korean state television broadcast a number of descriptions of their dictator-president Kim Jong-Il that the station claimed had been used by leaders of other nations to describe their Dear Leader: “Greatest Saint Who Rules with Extensive Magnanimity…Heaven-Sent Hero…Power Incarnate with Endless Creativity…World’s Best Ideal Leader with Versatile Talents…Eternal Bosom of Hot Love…Guardian Deity of the Planet.”[1] The North Korean citizens who have starved to death under his leadership may beg to differ. Or they might have a state-sponsored blind spot about their leader.

Individual people can have blind spots as well. Big town people might think small town people are dumb, and small town people might think big town people are snooty. Rich people might think poor people are lazy and poor people might think rich people are mean. If you have an idea like that it can get in the way of seeing the truth about people. If you have an idea about yourself, like you’re the hero in every story or you’re the goat in every story, it can get in the way of seeing the truth about yourself. And just like when you’re driving a car, if you forget you have a blind spot (as we all do, somewhere), it can be dangerous. It’s the times when we don’t know we don’t know that compassion goes out the window.

Steve Covey, who wrote The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, tells about riding the New York subway one Sunday morning. People were sitting quietly. Some were reading newspapers, some napping, others contemplating with their eyes closed. A man and his children entered the subway car. The children were soon yelling back and forth, throwing things, even grabbing people’s newspapers. It was all very disturbing, and yet the father just sat there next to them and did nothing. Steve started to feel really irritated. He could not believe the man could be so insensitive as to let his children run wild and do nothing about it. Finally Steve said to the man, “Sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people. I wonder if you couldn’t control them a little bit more?” The man lifted his gaze, as if coming into consciousness for the first time and said, “Oh, you’re right. I guess I should do something about it. We just came from the hospital where their mother died about an hour ago. I don’t know what to think, and I guess they don’t know how to handle it either.”

Steve says, “Can you imagine what I felt at that moment? Suddenly I saw things differently. Because I saw differently, I felt differently. I behaved differently. My irritation vanished. I didn’t have to worry about controlling attitude or behavior. My heart was filled with this man’s pain. Feelings of compassion and sympathy flowed freely. ‘Your wife just died? Oh, I’m so sorry! Can you tell me about it? What can I do to help?’ Nothing changed in the subway car. All was the same: the same people, the same irritation, the same kids. What did change was a way of seeing it all, and with the seeing, a change of behavior.”[2]

Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” I think he meant by that, those who think they see may become blind. The self-righteous need a little mud in the eye, blurring what we think of as a complete grasp of the truth. Until we see from God’s perspective, there will always be things we don’t know we don’t know. As long as we are able to admit that, as long as we don’t insist that we see everything exactly the way it is, there is room for healing and forgiveness, for learning and compassion.

May love and light heal our blind spots; may the light of the world truly enlighten us. And until that day of glorious vision, let us concede with Mr. Rumsfeld that “there are also unknown unknowns,” even in the depths of our own hearts.

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[1] Cited in Harper’s Magazine, February 2005, p. 16

[2] Covey, Steve cited in William J. Bausch, A World of Stories for Preachers and Teachers (Twenty-Third Publications, 1998, p. 214-15