Blind in both eyes

A recording of the gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 15: 1-2, 10-14) brings us another episode in which Jesus is questioned insincerely by the Pharisees and scribes. The extract read in today’s liturgy omits verses 3-9 in which Jesus demonstrates the Pharisees’ insincerity with regard to the fourth commandment, making it void so one of their rules could be observed. Quoting Isaiah, He tells the crowd:

This people honours me with their lips,
    but their hearts are far from me;
 in vain do they worship me,
    teaching human precepts as doctrines.

We do, however, hear Jesus explain that food cannot make a person impure; rather, impurity is the effect of a wayward heart. As for the Pharisees, He concludes, they are blind guides, and their actions will bring about their own doom and the doom of those who blindly follow them.

This then is a spikey encounter that occurs during the late Galilean ministry but before Peter’s appointment as the ‘rock’ and Jesus’ final journey towards Jerusalem. It is a gospel which encourages us to reflect on the mystery of our own call as disciples: a call to listen and hear carefully, but a call also to internalise the lessons given. Do we consciously sit everyday at His feet and try to hear His gospel? Are we doing so even now, letting its words search our hearts and test our deepest motives?

The case of the Pharisees should stand as a warning to us, as we undergo that process. Who were reputedly the best Jews if not the Pharisees? Who knew the Scriptures better, and who observed the law more carefully than they? And yet, Jesus criticises them mercilessly – if such an epithet can be said of the merciful Saviour. How did they end up as the blind ones, leading other blind followers into the pit? We are accustomed to think of mysteries only in a positive sense, but here we are faced with a kind of mystery of iniquity.  

Jesus’ words suggest two problems. The easier one to understand is simply that the Pharisees are blind guides. Human beings proceed by insight. Even those who prefer to think of their religion as an affair of the heart require some kind of light where their minds perceive the truth to lie. That is why it is so dangerous just to be a sentimentalist. As Chesterton said, the aim of opening one’s mind, as of opening one’s mouth, is to close it again on something solid. The need for insight and direction, indeed, our lack of insight and direction, is brought home to us by Jesus describing Himself as the way, the truth and the life: the way for we need His direction, and the truth for our minds are like an image of the Son’s relationship to the Father, begetting truth through internalising the act of another’s being (not that the Father causes the being of the Son; their being is one, but it is always hard to speak of that mystery!). When Jesus says the blind cannot lead the blind, He is saying that error cannot of itself lead to anything but error. Notice He does not say here that we must focus only on what unites us with the Pharisees. Unfortunately, some things must be called out lest the blind mislead the blind and both fall into the pit. Truths have consequences, especially the most controverted ones.

So, there are serious implications that arise from this, the first and the easier of the problems with the Pharisees. One is that the pious are wasting their time and the Lord’s if they are just superficially pious. God has no interest in our deceiving ourselves; He is unimpressed by pedantry and appearances. Those who unconsciously consider themselves just because their external actions conform superficially to the rules have not even begun to open themselves up to the work that God wishes to accomplish in them. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, says St Paul. What is required here is not greater effort towards superficial perfection, but rather a greater, a finer contrition, a heart that has learned to break itself over even its smallest faults, because in the end, God calls us not merely to perfection so much as to the depths of union with Him; that we might be One with Him in the eternal communion of the Blessed Trinity. As we noted the other day, the ethics of Christianity are important, fundamental, but it is the ethos, the spirit, which runs to the very depths. That is why there is hope for the undeserving workers of the eleventh hour, and why not even the apparently meritorious workers of the first hour may presume on their superiority. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

Speaking of superiority, let us come finally to the second of the problems I mentioned above, for the Pharisees are blind in both eyes. Here, Jesus’ words may be the cause of some anxiety:

Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be rooted up.

While some see this verse as referring to the idea of a fixed predestination, others see the plant metaphor as a reference to those man-made doctrines that Jesus had just denounced – those growths on the Jewish religion that had nothing to do with the Law of God. Yet we may go in a slightly different direction. One lesson this line contains is the reminder that, as every gardener knows, not all those things that look like plants are indeed plants. The devil is the ludicrous ape of God but best appears as an angel of light, and his kingdom is a kingdom of imposture and deceit.

 One of the fundamental mistakes of the Pharisees, therefore, is the vice of self-deception, the sin of being impostors to themselves but it is by no means restricted to them. We may think of this as a kind of blindness that produces hallucinations! To be humble is not only to restrain our burgeoning vanity; it is also to challenge the little lies we tell ourselves, those dear but misleading ego-facing fantasies that blossom and bloom like weeds in the blink of our imagination’s eye. If, as St Thomas teaches, humility moderates an appetite for excellence, it must block most concretely the workings of the inner movie screen on which the spectacle of our wonderfulness appears to us. Here, we are often torn between what we think of ourselves, and what we consider others might think of us. When I am vain, when my deepest question and need are how I appear to the world, then I am who I think you think I am. When I am humble, in contrast, when my deepest question is how I stand before God in all my real misery and my potential glory, then I am not who I think you think I am. I am who God knows me to be, but with this difference: that only when I come to know who God knows me to be can I become who God calls me to be – to know God’s dream for me.  

Then, even if I am blind, rather than following other blind guides, I can sit beside the blind beggar Bartimaeus who is there on the dusty road in Jericho, crying out to the passing Lord: Son of David, have mercy on me!