It is a grace to learn to acknowledge our sin.  The gospel we have just heard wants to guide us toward that grace.  The story of the man born blind wants to guide us into the light of Christ – and there, in that light, to expose our sin – to expose to us the lies that blind and bind us.

A little background helps to understand what is really going on in this story.  Jesus heals the blind man on the Sabbath.  The Pharisees object this violates the law of Moses.  God rested on the Sabbath after completing the work of creation.  Not to observe Sabbath rest is a refusal to imitate God – and therefore is a sin.

But in the gospel of John Jesus explicitly denies that God’s work of creation has been completed.  He denies God rests on the Sabbath.  For example, earlier in the gospel, when Jesus cures an invalid on the Sabbath – and the authorities object – he counters:  “My Father is working up until the present, and I also work.”[Jn 5, 17]  God’s work of completing creation is ongoing – and it’s being done through Jesus.

In today’s story Jesus completes what is incomplete by curing the blind man.  Jesus completes God’s work of creation by making the blind man into a full human being.

In the gospel the man born blind represents each of us.  Each of us is incomplete.  Obviously we have physical limits.  Even more obviously we have personal, moral and spiritual limits.  Our humanity screams for completion.  The story’s point – the gospel’s point – is that our limitations do not make up our sin.  Jesus will work with us – he will work within us and among us – to bring to fullness and completion what is incomplete and limited.  For Jesus our incompleteness is completely human – only to be expected.  He knows God will deal compassionately with it.

For Jesus sin shows itself in how the Pharisees deal with human incompleteness – in how they deal with our obvious moral and spiritual failures.  In the story the Pharisees judge, censure and expel the man born blind.  And that – that for Jesus – is the presence of radical evil in our lives:  when we exclude and expel others – even as God is working within them to bring them to fuller life.

Learning to acknowledge our sin is a grace.  And we receive the grace in recognizing when we choose to exclude others.  Our sin is when we set ourselves to resisting God’s life-giving, life-expanding energies by scorning people – and all in the name of our own petty self-righteousness.

This gospel would bring us to the grace and freedom of admitting we are all blatantly incomplete human beings.  Now like Pharisees we may want to fume against that incompleteness both in ourselves and in others.  But it is there precisely where God’s ongoing presence and work are to be found.  We run from our incompleteness only at the risk of running from where we can sense God’s presence at work in our all too human lives.  Honest self-knowledge brings us into God’s real presence – into God’s here and now presence.

But Jesus wants even more for us.  He wants the full force of this gospel to explode in our minds and hearts.  He wants us to come to the discovery that God is not Pharisee.  God does not judge – or censure – or exclude.  God has nothing at all to do with our self-righteous mechanisms for expelling what is incomplete.

Jesus wants his joy to become our joy.  And the cause of that joy is that God does not behave as we do.  The cause of our joy is God as God truly is.  And our joy will grow to its fullness and completion – as we learn to behave as God behaves – as we learn not to judge, not to censure, not to exclude.

It is here – among our very incomplete selves – here – within our very imperfect selves – that we will come to know the God who is not a Pharisee.  It is here – in our all too human church – that we will have the joy of coming to know the un-self-righteous God of Jesus Christ – the God who wants mercy, not sacrifice.