Look at the Bulletin for a moment.
Look at the person’s raised arms in surrender or praise.
Look at his nakedness and vulnerability.
Look at his closed eyes.
Recall the story of today’s Gospel about the man born blind who receives sight when Jesus heals him.
Silently hum the hymn: Amazing Grace how sweet the sound…. I once was blind but now I see
Look at the bulletin again:
“Lord, I believe.” He says, worships, confesses …. With closed eyes.
He once was blind but now he sees.
So why are his eyes closed?
What does he see? What does he believe?
Is he believing with his whole heart, mind, and soul and yet with his eyes closed as eyesight is not as important as soul sight?
Today we ask:
Is seeing believing or believing seeing?
What you see is what you get!
Show me, then I believe it happened.
I need to see it with my own two eyes!
Trusting our eyesight as the source of truth and evidence is our firm belief in what we see and witness.
The Power of eyewitness testimony is still the base of our belief in the truth. In our Social Media time and age, more and more of the evidence in accidents, violent attracts, misuse of power, and racial offenses are in our hands: iPhones are everywhere.
These handheld eyewitnesses have been crucial in many cases but have also fed into our media-hungry public, where there seems to be an endless hunger for violent, disturbing shared videos.
Troubling we have witnessed in the recent case of George Floyd, where most people unequivocally trusted the brutal images before their eyes, some persons argued the footage was “staged.”
Seeing is believing or believing is seeing.
What happens if and when our eyes deceive us or if the visual evidence is tampered with? What happens when we do not see clearly with our eyes but avoid the evidence at hand?
We all know that eyesight isn’t always reliable, don’t we?
As kids, we play with optical illusions and many adults enjoy good magical shows at the Magic Castle or in Las Vegas.
In art classes, we talk about how deceptive perspective can be, and scholars have repeatedly shown how much visual information we miss when we aren’t looking for it.
We all know how easily photos can be manipulated, and now deep fakes and deliberately dangerous misinformation have hit the scene.
In a time and age of Selfies and endless self-promotions, we might very well not see the true image of the person in the photo, on the iPhone on the News, we do not always see what we get or be able to trust our own two eyes.
How many of you have edited your profile photo or altered the colors of the daffodils or the lilies to be even brighter and bolder?
In a time and age of Artificial Intelligence, possibly manipulated and edited photos, audio, and video and deliberately planted deep fake stories that mislead our trusting eyes, we need to be soundly skeptical and not only rely on what we see or what we believe we see, but even more on more information, more historical verification, and more reasoning.
AI, CGI, and all the technologies we’ve created to make our films more realistic and our entertainment more immersive —They don’t just create vivid fantasies; they also have the potential to undermine an already crumbling faith in media.
In a time with a huge gap between implicit visual trust and easy visual manipulation, we need to educate everyone on media literacy skills and secure legislative barriers that can ensure a collective understanding of truth, accuracy authenticity.
In a time where common truth seems to suffer from truth decay as our information becomes more and more toxic, divided, political and partisan, we need to defend our democracy and common sense of right & wrong, our objectivity from the decay of the rapid spread of misinformation.
In the Gospel today, Jesus heals and opens the eyes of the blind. Simply and clearly. And yet, that miracle was also debated, disputed and d credited even if they all saw it with their own eyes and even if the once blind man could testify that his eyes were wide open.
Because they could not handle the truth. They could not handle how this miracle shook their world and shook the core of their beliefs.
Seeing is not always believing.
Believing is sometimes just believing in what you already believe, without taking into account what you witness, see, or hear that might change what you used to believe.
They simply could not believe that this blind man, who was born blind because of sin, that this man could now see. Instead of seeing and believing the miracle, the healing, the joy, and the hope, they argued and questioned what they had seen, - because it did not fit their beliefs.
“Surely we are not blind, are we,” they asked Jesus. And we ask the same today.
Sometimes we might not see clearly: sometimes we might not see the miracles giving new life, new sight, new possibilities, and new beginnings in front of us, - because we choose to see with our limited pre-set eyesight.
Look at the bulletin again.
Maybe that is why his eyes are closed. His physical eyes. Because his spiritual eyes are wide open and that vision is broader, brighter, and bolder than the actual eyes. He sees deeper.
“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
These are the profound words by The Little Prince in the book -The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry).
Sometimes, to be able to see, you must close your eyes and open your heart. Only then will you be able to discover what is truly important, what counts?
Because when you open your inner eyes and satisfy your soul, your horizons will widen and new possibilities will arise.
So let us for a brief moment close our eyes. To ignite the light in our hearts and find what we see clearly.
“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
Amen.