How Close is Jesus?

In the gospel text for the fourth week of Lent (John 9:1-41), we find the one we are called to imitate doing things that we would do well not to imitate. Jesus spits on the ground, makes mud, and rubs it on a blind man's eyes before sending him away to wash and be healed.

If we come to the text this week searching for a straightforwardly comforting account of Jesus' presence amidst the barrage of uncertainty in our world, we're left wanting. We can at least breathe a sigh of relief that Jesus, after spitting, didn't turn to his disciples and say, "This do in remembrance of me." And yet, this episode in John 9, along with a similarly staged account in Mark 8:22-26, is one of the most memorable in the gospels.

What do we do with this odd snippet of the larger story told in John 9, not to mention other difficult-to-digest passages of Scripture? According to theologian Robert Capon, we let it lodge itself in our memory in all of its seeming nonsense.

"Christian education" Capon says, "is the stocking of the imagination with the icons of [Jesus's] works and words themselves. It is most successfully accomplished, therefore, not by catechisms that purport to produce understanding but by stories that hang the icons, understood or not, on the walls of the mind. We do not include the parable of the Prodigal Son, for example, because we understand it, nor do we omit the parable of the Unjust Steward because we can't make head or tail of it. Rather, we commit both to the Christian memory because that's the way Jesus seems to want the inside of his believers' heads decorated."

And so we hang this icon on the walls of our minds. In the spirit of keeping ourselves busy, let's carry on with the metaphor. Where should we hang this icon? Christians in the first few centuries preferred to place it alongside their mental picture of the creation account, likening Jesus' provision of sight using spit in the dust-turned-clay to God's creation of man from the dust of the earth (see Genesis 2:7).

Since we're still in the impossibly long Lenten run up to Easter, I think I prefer the decorative sense of Ephrem the Syrian, who bypasses possible options in the Hebrew Scriptures and looks ahead in the gospel narrative to passion week. For Ephrem, that Jesus spit was significant "so that, when they would spit at him in the face, those eyes of the blind that he had opened with his saliva would testify against them."

Placed side by side with Jesus' passion and the mistreatment he faced from the ones he came to save, here is how the picture comes into clearer view for me, in the here-and-now of social distancing:

How close is Jesus? Close enough to spit.
How close is Jesus? Close enough to be spat upon.

As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote,

Put my eyes out: I can see you,
seal my ears shut: I can hear you,
and without feet I can walk toward you,
and without a mouth I can still beseech you.

There are perhaps other, more helpful places to hang the icon of this story on the walls of our minds, and what makes for wise vigilance in the midst of a virus outbreak is perhaps also true of any approach to scriptural interpretation: "I'm monitoring the situation for developments." That is, I'm rehearsing this and other narratives again and again as my calendar empties and I tend to the interior decoration of my mind.

In the coming weeks, I will hoard and fuss with the text. I will let it fill the now-unoccupied spaces, aware that other images threaten to crowd out this much more valuable collection of the works and words of the one who is as close now as ever.