(Homily for the Fourth Sunday in Lent. The scripture readings are 1 Samuel 16:1-13, Psalm 23, Ephesians 5:8-14 and John 9:1-41.)

Jesus’ followers come upon this man who was blind from birth, and they ask, Whose fault was this? Who is to blame for this, the parents or their child? It’s the first place they go. Whose fault was this? Somebody’s got to be to blame. Jesus seems to be saying let’s not concern ourselves with that. “It’s neither,” he says, let’s not interest ourselves with who’s to blame, but with doing God’s work. That’s what’s important.

When we get into the blame game, most of the time there are two choices like this. It’s either his fault or it’s his parents’ fault. We do the same thing now. It’s either the Republicans’ fault or it’s the Democrats’ fault. A relationship goes sideways, and we gossip about it: was it his fault or was it her fault? When it’s closer to home, we say this was your fault, or this was my fault.

There’s a third way of looking at the world, Jesus says; it isn’t either of the choices. If this man’s condition was somebody’s fault, Jesus doesn’t think it matters who. He thinks the mercy of God is what matters; he wants people to see that. He wants us to see that. People saw their world in terms of blame. Jesus proposes a different way of seeing.

I’m thinking about this in the context of what we have been hearing this Lent. Two weeks ago in the Transfiguration: Jesus showed Peter, James and John who he really was. They saw. That same day, God to Abram: Leave what you know and come to a place that I will show you. None of this, “I’ll tell you where it is;” just “Trust me.” If we were in Abram’s place, we would ask for directions, or an address to put in the GPS thing, but God would say, “You’ll know it when you see it.”

One week ago, the Samaritan woman at the well. Jesus could have scolded her about her relationships and the way she had been sleeping around, but he didn’t. She had come to the well at noon when she knew nobody else would be there, because she didn’t want to be around people; she didn’t want to be seen. But after an encounter with Jesus, she went back into the town, wanting to be with the very people she had been avoiding and wanting to share this encounter she had just had. She wanted her neighbors to see this man she had met. I could not help noticing how immediate her reaction to Jesus was. For most of us, I think it takes a while to begin seeing things as God sees them.

The message about seeing is right in the middle of the first reading today: Humans see things our way; we judge by appearance. God sees into the heart. Jesse had arranged with Samuel to have his sons present, so Samuel, the prophet, the one who would speak for God, could tell him which of these young men would be Israel’s king. Jesse prepared a banquet to celebrate the announcement. Last Sunday dozens of colleges set up watch parties as the basketball tournament pairings were announced, so they could celebrate getting to see where their teams would get to go and play on Thursday or Friday. That night Hollywood held a celebration where the stars and filmmakers came to see who would win the Oscars for their achievements. Jesse’s sons must have stood there like finalists at a Miss America pageant, anticipating that they would all rush around the one who was announced and celebrate with him. Samuel looked at them and thought to himself, “I know which one!”

And God said, nope, not that one, and not that next one, not that one either, and on down the line until a puzzled Samuel had to ask Jesse, have you got any more? That’s when we get to meet David, and God explains to Samuel: “That one.” The rest, as they say, is history, and David becomes legendary.

The cliche says that hindsight is always 20/20: when we look back on things, we see the things we did not see when we were anticipating or planning those things. We see more, and we see more clearly. At the last judgment, we’re going to see our entire lives that way: all of the impacts we had and the way they spread across the universe like ripples from a pebble tossed in a pond. But that’s not what I came to talk about. This is about what we can see now.

In today’s second reading, Paul writes to the Church in Ephesus, reflecting on light and darkness, what is visible and not visible — what we can see. Live in the light, he teaches. See what God is showing you. Christ will give you light, he says, which makes a nice connection to the man in the gospel story who had never seen a single thing in his life.

Jesus in today’s gospel gets after the hypocrites about seeing and not seeing. He has just made a man see, who couldn’t see before, and he lets the Pharisees know that they’re the ones who can’t see. Because all the Pharisees can see is that Jesus broke the rules. He healed someone on the Sabbath, when no work is allowed. Anyone who is good with God surely would not do work, even the Lord’s work, on the Sabbath, because that’s against the rules.

One of the best moments in “deacon school,” twenty years ago, was one of our teachers telling us how important it was to know the rules. You have to know the rules, he told us; you have to know them backwards and forwards, because you have to know when it’s right to break them. I recently read that the Dalai Lama has said the same thing. Actually, all of life is like that: We all do better if we have good boundaries and we learn to respect authority. It’s good for us to learn to follow the rules and sometimes to learn them the hard way and receive some tough love.

But once we learn to follow the voice of God, we discover that Love oftentimes takes us outside the structures and boundaries that were so comforting and reassuring to us. Love is risky. Love requires trust. Love asks us to be trusting and to be brave, and sometimes what Love is asking of us is not the way we remember the rules. Sometimes what God asks of us will not be the popular choice or the easy choice.

Samuel trusted in God, even when the will of God surprised him and didn’t give him what he expected. He didn’t pick the favorite to be the king of Israel; he didn’t pick the one he thought looked the part. He listened to God telling him to pick a Cinderella. Jesus trusted in God so that we, his followers, could see that there is another way of seeing. Imagine confronting our problems and challenges not with deciding who is to blame for them, but with the vision of God, who sees all the aspects that we’re going to see someday in hindsight, and more besides. Let’s pray for the vision that enables us to see who Jesus is, and to see him in each other.