Are We Also Blind?

Some of the Pharisees asked Jesus, “Are we also blind?”  Jesus’ answered, “If you were blind, you would have no guilt.  But now that you say, ‘We see’, your guilt remains.”

This blindness or lack of seeing or perhaps false seeing which Jesus addressed and opposed is rooted in the fact that the Pharisees’ creed exclusively regarded God’s love as something you had to earn or respond to by works. By works I mean any exterior act or stance which end is to mitigate the Deity or gain favor with the Deity. According to the Pharisees’ theology seeing was to acknowledge their approach to God as the only navigable way to the Creator. Such a shallow relationship to the One they believed they worshiped derives from the illusion of separation viz. God apart from man. Their inner eyes were transfixed on this illusion and any opposing view concerning the mysteries of God would therefore be judged as heresy. True blindness, however,  is to forget yourself and your own works or good deeds or lack thereof and simply receive God’s favor and love by faith, that is, like a child. That is in essence true seeing, and as it matures it finds its final fulfillment in seeing God only. Blessedness hence finds its genuine consummation in every man who forgets himself and embraces Jesus’ words: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

We further surmise from this encounter that guilt can only be removed in Jesus Christ. Any other imaginable way is a dead end. The legacy after Moses which the Pharisees perpetuated couldn’t remove sins. Blood of goats and calves cannot make anyone clean. Any religious idea which champion outer holiness is a counterfeit. Genuine holiness is a product of a divine intervention on our behalf where God does what is impossible for man, namely to cast out the usurper and replace this deceitful spirit with Himself. Holiness, justification and righteousness are thus the logical effect of a change of spirits. A supernatural divine operation which outcome is the foundation for Gal 2:20: I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.