I once had the privilege of listening to a conversation among blind Christians who were discussing the healings Jesus performed for blind men. Some wanted to be those blind men. They said they would jump at the chance to see the world they had never seen.

Others disagreed. They would not ask for sight, or accept it if it were offered to them. They did not feel deprived because they could not see; they related to the world in ways that were full and good, not in spite of being blind, but because they were blind.

Still others weren’t sure how they felt about those healing miracles. Being able to see would be wonderful, but having to leave blind culture behind would not.

But there were two things they all agreed on:

First, they didn’t like that the healing of the blind is often preached as a metaphor for coming to insight out of ignorance, or crossing from moral darkness into the light of faith, as if to say that being blind is something God thinks is bad. In fact, one of them said he was permanently miffed at the prophets, the evangelists, and Jesus himself, whom he otherwise loved, for using the bestowal of sight to the blind as a way of talking about the kingdom of God, implying that it’s a place where there ought not be any blind people, or people with disabilities of any kind.

Now, I have had blind parishioners and students who used blindness as this kind of metaphor themselves. They were not the least bit put off by it; which leaves those of us who are sighted with a challenge when we try to be respectful both to the text and to metaphor and to real live people whose experience includes blindness, but who, like all human beings, do not agree with each other about what being respectful about all this means. But this group agreed that the stories were irritating to them.

The second thing they all agreed on was that they liked these stories anyway. The espcially loved the chutzpah of the blind man in one of the gospels, the one we call ‘the man born blind,’ who sticks it to the authorities after his sight is restored, taunting them for being so stupid when they were supposed to be so smart. And they loved the enthusiasm and determination of Bartimaeus, who was no wallflower, but hollered and hollered and ran to Jesus when Jesus called his name.

And the thing they loved most in this story was that Jesus touches the man and touches him a lot—taking his hand, guiding him away from the village, touching his eyes not once but twice, as a kind of booster shot, since the healing power didn’t completely succeed the first time.

They liked the way Jesus touched the man as if Jesus knew how critical touch is to a blind person, that it’s one of the main connectors between a blind person and her world. The tactile way. The human and bodily way. The sacramental way.

One of the most thoughtful people in the room was a fellow who had lost his sight as a young man. He told us that the first thing that happened to him after he started venturing into the world as a blind person was that people seemed afraid to be near him. They moved away, in part to give him space to maneuver with his red-tipped cane, he assumed, and for which he was grateful. But they always gave him a much wider berth than was actually necessary. And when people did touch him, to assist him across the street, for example, they seemed to push and steer him rather than guide. Their touch seemed nervous and unsure. Ordinary human touch had suddenly become complicated; he missed its ease and naturalness. He felt a loss of a small fraction of his humanity in this. He didn’t want to be healed in his eyes, but his diminished spirit could have used some care.

Perhaps you and I devoutly wish for healing from a disability, or from cancer, or from a mental illness. Perhaps we would love Jesus to march right up to us and cast out our demons, settle our stomachs, pacify our angry friends and relations, convert our politicians, and pay our bills. Or maybe we are at peace with our limitations, at peace with the way of life we have fashioned in spite of and because of our many challenges. Maybe we don’t want or need a change in the status quo so much as we long for more faithfulness, love, courage, and grace to live in and with and through it all. Each of us is different. Each of us frames the question of peace and wholeness and reconciliation differently. Our metaphors for what ails us and humanity everywhere may or may not include blindness.

But here’s one thing most of can agree on:

Our wonderful world is also a world of sorrow. Each of us bears some burden that is sometimes too heavy to carry alone. And being in this flesh, in a body that so keenly bears, feels, and expresses all our longing and pain, one of the ways we receive the well-being we crave is through the reverent touch of another. By not avoiding each other’s deepest need, but by touching it, and making it our own.

The evangelical author Philip Yancey tells a story about one of his college roommates, a German named Reiner, who returned to Germany after graduation and began teaching Bible at a camp for people with disabilities. Using his college class notes, he started giving stirring lectures on the victorious Christian life: “Regardless of the wheelchair you are sitting in, you already have a victory!  A full and victorious life!” All this he announced energetically to a roomful of paraplegics and young people with cerebral palsy.

Reiner had never addressed a group of people lacking motor control. He found it disconcerting. What he didn’t know was that the campers found listening to him equally disconcerting. Some complained to the camp director that they couldn’t make any sense out of what he was saying. “Well, tell him!” she replied.

One woman did. “It’s like you’re talking about the sun in a room without windows,” she told him. “We can’t understand anything you say. You talk about solutions, overcoming, victory over our circumstances. That has nothing to do with us.”

Reiner was crushed. He was also angry. The message seemed clear enough to him – it was biblical, it was pure St Paul, it was why he loved the Lord. He thought about telling them that they lacked faith, that they needed to love Christ more so that they could triumph over adversity.

Instead, by some grace, he spent the night praying.

In the morning he went to class and told them, “I don’t know what to say. If I can’t preach victory, I don’t know what to preach. I don’t know what to think. I don’t know what to do. I just don’t understand.” Then he just stood there in front of the class, hung his head and was silent for a long time.

After a while, the woman who had confronted him spoke up from the back of the room. “Okay. Now we understand you. Now we’re ready to listen. Now we can begin.”

Nicodemus comes to Jesus in the night. Some commentators say he’s afraid of being seen with Jesus, that he represents wimpy “closeted” early Christians who feared social ostracism. Others say that it’s because in John’s gospel, night is usually a metaphor for ignorance and confusion.

But it could be simply because Nicodemus is a Pharisee. Devout Pharisees often set the night aside for Bible study. The psalms say that our hearts instruct us by night, that the righteous meditate on God on their beds. This prominent Pharisee is accustomed to nightly study, and on this night, the subject of his study is Jesus.

Jesus doesn’t make things easy for him. He rebuffs Nicodemus’ well-meaning offer of faith based on signs. Then he shocks his common sense with talk about a new begetting from above, ignoring his protest that starting over is impossible, especially once you’ve gotten to be of a certain age. Finally, Jesus unnerves him with a description of the Spirit-led life—an anarchy of breath and wind and energies unseen.

By the time Jesus is finished with him, Nicodemus is reduced to futility. All he can muster is a helpless “I don’t understand…”  before he hangs his head and keeps still.

If Nicodemus came to Jesus at night to learn, Jesus sees to it that no ordinary learning takes place. He aims not to help Nicodemus understand, but to make him begin at the beginning; not to help him know, but to reduce him to unknowing, to drive him into a wilderness of silence, a desert of humility and obedience.

Nicodemus hails from a constituency that knows things—the Law, the oral traditions, the customs, the prophets, the prophecies. “Rabbi, we know,” he says to Jesus. “We know who you are, we know what you do.”

But  Jesus doesn’t care about what Nicodemus knows. He cares about Nicodemus’ life. He wants to save it, and to do that, he first has to undermine it, undermine the sensible, reasoned thing that passes for a good and virtuous life. And at the end, when all Nicodemus can do is throw up his hands and keep still, Jesus knows he has him.

Nicodemus lives in everyone who has ever come up against the limits of reason in the death of a child, in the powerlessness of addiction, in the panic that no one will ever love us the way we want or deserve to be loved, in the derailment of a dream or a career or a relationship, in the failure of prayer, in the blank dullness of depression, in despair over the human condition, in the world’s greed and violence that spirals and builds with no end in sight, in the futility of our efforts to know and love and improve ourselves, and to control and change the world, in the face of ineluctable death.

Nicodemus lives in all who have come to the end of our convictions and assumptions, our denominational identities, our doctrines, our pictures of God, our wisdom or skill or courage or knowledge or self-confidence; who have hit that limit hard, head-on, and finally thrown up our hands in defeat in the face of implacable mysteries; in all of us who have ever hung our heads in humility and surrender, who have ever just stood there as if obeying something, someone immensely powerful; stood there long enough, humanly enough, nakedly enough to finally hear a voice speak out of the silence and redeem us, saying “Now you are ready. Now you can begin.”

He lives in all of us who, reduced to the futility of our ignorance each day, begin again each day, are born from above again each day, and who are, by  grace, becoming every day what we practice, while the Spirit moves where it will in the world. Moves in this world God so loved that God sent a beloved Child, not to condemn, not to condemn, but to save.