The Fourth Sunday after Trinity
On the cover of your bulletin you’ll see an image from a painter that I have talked about before, Pieter Bruegel the Elder – one of the most famous Renaissance artists, who lived through the middle of the 1500s.
Bruegel’s paintings run the gamut from landscape, to highly detailed images depicting life in the Flemish and Belgian countryside – windows into the common lives of common people 500 years ago. But Bruegel also painted Biblical scenes as well, including the one before us today – the Blind Leading the Blind, from our Gospel reading this morning.
If you look at the image in large format online you can see the detail with which Bruegel painted, but he often included somewhat comedic elements in his work as well – meant to convey a message, but meant to make us laugh a bit with the frontman of the group on his back laying on his lute or hurdy gurdy or some other instrument, legs in the air with the second man about to topple on him, his own hat in midair.
These men are clearly the focus of the painting, the subjects, at first glance, and like many paintings we can think of you might expect the background scenes to be less defined and kind of meld together, it’s easy to missbackground details. If I ask you what was in the background of, say, the Mona Lisa, my guess is few of us would have paid any attention; Michaelangelo, who painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel – very much against his own wishes, but forced to by Pope Julius – took his frustration out in little ways. A rude hand gesture in his days, called giving the fig – akin to our rude hand gestures today – is, in one of his paintings, being given by an angel leaning over the shoulder of Jeremiah…directly 60’ above the Pope’s seat. Presumably, nobody noticed.
But in Bruegel’s painting of the blind men you cannot help but notice the church in the background. Not only is the church almost central to the piece, but if you looked at the full detailed image, the church is painted in as much detail as the figures – not something a painter usually does. So is it the church, or is it the blind men who are the subject of the painting? Well…yes, but what is Bruegel saying with such a thing?
In Scripture, and perhaps even in Bruegel’s time, there was often thought to be a link between illness or physical ailments – like blindness – and sin, if not our own personal sin, then the generational sin we’ve inherited, recalling the words of the Lord in Deuteronomy when He said that he would punish the children of parents to the third and fourth generation of any who rejected Him; and if not this, then at least sickness was understood to be a result of that general fall of humanity from the Garden of Eden. If the blind men in the painting represent at least what we’ve all experienced when we come up against our own frailty and brokenness, then it’s important to note what they are walking past.
Because when you look at the blind men we can all perhaps see ourselves. Each one of us has been at some point the man in the front: our own carelessness, sin, foolishness has totally tripped us up and we’re deep in a rut, on our backs, ashamed and facing the consequences. And we’ve all been the second man (the first on the right on the bulletin), just starting to realize that we’re falling, but unable to right ourselves, and we’ve been the third man with his cane, waving about in the darkness knowing that something bad is coming but unwilling or unable to see; and we’ve been the last two – things are okay, we’ve got our support, we’re on steady ground, but can’t yet realize that we’re walking towards a fall.
But how often, like the blind men, does all of this happen right in front of, or how often do we, lost in our own confusion and brokenness, walk right by the very thing that might ground us, open our eyes, give us sight, and allow us to walk confidently? That is why the church is in such detail in Bruegel’s painting, it is the subject that we are not to miss lest we want to be like those who do miss it and find themselves tripping over their own feet.
A lot of sin – just the ways we tend to hurt ourselves and hurt others – often comes from the ways that sin has already hurt us, the ways that we’ve been wounded by others’ pain; hurt people hurt people, as they say; when the sin of violence is a normal part of someone’s growing up, it’s not unsual for that sin to manifest in them, the same with addictions – things that can be almost passed down generationally. The trauma we suffer from these things are, untreated, like open wounds on our hearts, and often the cruddy ways we treat others are because something comes close to touching that wound and we, like an injured animal, snap back.
One contemporary author who writes on trauma and healing says that as long as we don’t face our own hurts, or look at and heal those nasty open wounds – our anger, our lust, our greed, our pride – we remain at war with ourselves; what they’re saying is that until we deal with these things then we are always going to be in the ditch, or on the cusp of falling into it, always acting out of a response to that painful unhealed wound, and not acting out of a response to wounds that have been healed.
This is the irony about sin, I think: that if our hurtful behaviour is a response to the painful wounds in our hearts, we often turn to things to try and defend ourselves from the hurt but they are things that just lead us deeper into it: we can try to hide in a bottle of rum or a heroin needle, and that might numb things for a bit, but it doesn’t heal the wound. But there in Bruegel’s painting is the salve for every wound that we have, in fact the only thing that truly heal us; the church is, at its best, a hospital for our wounded selves wherein we come to visit and to receive the physician of our souls himself, Jesus. There it is…here it is…and how often, like the blind men, do we stumble by the very answer to all of our problems, insistent that we can make it on our own.
This delusion of thinking we can heal those wounds; that those deep, lingering, bleeding wounds in your life, the ones that still sting to think about that keep you from loving most fully that you think you can fix yourself…well this delusion is the beam that we are meant to take out of our own eye. This is the judgement we are meant to deal with before we judge another.
This life, this faith, is about removing that log so that we can clearly see the wounds within that need healing; so that we can recognize all the little ways we run from wholeness and love, because those things will make us face our wounds; so that we can see clearly our neighbour in whom we are to find our life; and to see clearly what St. Paul reminds us of in the Epistle: that the glory of God is so much bigger and more powerful than whatever darkness we think has control over us now; and to see clearly the healing life that is put into our palms and our hearts every Sunday at the altar, in which we see clearly, and take into ourselves him who never ceases to behold – to see - us in love.
