March 28, 2012
Naming names
Yesterday’s report not due till today’s end, I brought my Bible into work. The gospel
passage for Sunday, the internet tells me, is John 9. A change of pace from
what I have been reading, Sheridan’s wonderful and wonderfully named The School for Scandal. He has a
way with names, Sheridan does: Jack Absolute and Lydia Languish; Ladies Sneerwell and Teazle,
Mrs. Candour − all among those that “teach” and “learn” at the school − Sir
Benjamin Backbite, and his hot-blooded Irish friend O’Trigger; and all of them make
use of a journalist/dogsbody named Snake. Among their intended
victims are the Brothers Surface. In today’s world there’s a kind of artistic
incorrectness about naming characters like that, so that if we’ve read the
playbill, we can know who they are, even before the play has begun. And by the play’s
end, because they meet our expectations, they are old friends.
It’s incorrect in today’s world, I’m
guessing, because you shouldn't judge people by their names − or their faces, or
their clothes, by where they went to school, or even by their reputations. People
aren’t always what they seem. Even if they are, we shouldn’t prejudge, though
we are glad, aren't we, when people don’t surprise us − when we’ve pegged them right.
John
isn’t completely unlike Sheridan, these characters he creates: the transparent Christ
walking a centimeter above the ground; the solid, stolid disciples
dragging their feet in the dust; the man born blind at sea in sight; his muddled neighbors
and frightened parents; the easily irked and terribly efficient Pharisees.
Enter Jesus, two disciples rumbling along
behind. The man sightless, quiet as a rock. The disciples speak as if he can’t
hear: “How does it happen, Rabbi, that he is blind?” They imagine two possibilities:
Either his parents sinned, or he did, though how he sinned before he was born .
. . ? But they aren’t the kind of men that think that far.
Jesus says, “No.” It’s not either.
“Let me show you,” he says. And he
bows. He spits on the ground. He bows lower to pick up the dust and the spit
and roll it into a cake. The cake he puts against the startled man’s eyes: “Go,
wash. Use the waters of Siloam.”
“What?” the blind man asks.
“You’ll see.”
And he
floats away − Jesus does. He’s won’t be there when the man returns. Enter
instead the man’s consternated neighbors, wondering who this stranger can be. One
thinks he’s not a stranger; he’s the man that was born blind, a fixture on that
corner; but another is surer it can’t be. They argue among themselves − as if
he can’t hear. They argue loudly enough none of them can hear him: “It is! It’s me?”
The authorities are called in, a trio
of lawyers whom nothing can muddle, because they have categories that cannot be
confounded: the law and its ensuing logic:
1.
No
one has ever healed a man born blind; it follows that
2.
if
this man sees, could not have been born blind.
Moreover,
1.
All
healing comes from the God of the Sabbath; it follows that
2.
anyone
that would break God's Sabbath law cannot heal.
Now law and logic have been parsed and the ground rules have been
set, summon the witnesses.
The man himself, though he is the only
“eye-witness” cannot be correct. Yes, he can see, but that is proof he wasn’t
born blind. Bring in his parents. Unfortunately, in their own timid way the
parents support their son’s story. The two facts they know are the two facts he has insisted on: he was born blind; he can see. Dismiss the witnesses.
Jesus is still somewhere else. In
John, Jesus is always somewhere else.
Only
when the stage has emptied does he return. And the blind man kneels. “Rabbi,
you are the son of the living God, the king of Israel,” he says. “Oh,
Nathanael,” Jesus answers, “you shall see greater things than these. Not only
will the blind see but those that see will go blind.
“Those that hear will go deaf, those
that speak become dumb. The clean will become leprous, the living will die, and
the rich will get bad news.”
b
(bicbw)
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