There aren’t many who don’t dabble in one or four Monty Python classics. The movie yellow beard (1983) features John Cleese in a characteristically subversive role of hilarity. The satirical comedy parody based on the plot of the blackbeard The film (1952, 2006) is a classic. Cleese plays Harvey “Blind” Pew and says at one point, “I may be blind, but I have a nice earring,” to which Commander Clement (played by Eric Idle) says, “I’m not interested in your jewelry, clothes eyes.”
We know, of course, that the sense-deprived disabled person has the ability to compensate through the sharpness (not ‘a tenderness’) of the other senses. Blind Pew has special hearing powers, but his clumsiness in vocal delivery has Clement also in a blind spin as to his meaning, drawing our raucous laughter, of course.
The spiritual bent also revolves around blindness. John Newton wrote amazing grace to the lines of “Once I was blind, but now I see.” Spiritual blindness is a much more excruciating (and much more common) ailment than physical blindness, but it is completely curable. Newton was a cowardly former slave trader with 20,000 souls after him. His spiritual sight, however, gave him the powers of revelation—a heart after God’s—and the revelation of his guilt for sin. An impossible burden to bear without a gracious God to gird the way!
Not only did he see his pitiful acts for what they were, but he saw God’s incredible mercy in the midst of his guilt and shame, further deepening his understanding of a gracious God beyond his comprehension.
However, Jesus and John the Baptist were confronted by the blind Pharisees who, no matter what they saw, were never content to see things beyond their own blatant spiritual blindness: piously alive to God, they were ironically very dead to his Spirit. .
Like children sitting in a marketplace, Jesus says in Matthew 11:16-19, they jeered like spoiled children, preferring the future living Savior, and those who came before him, including John and the Prophets and the Law, to whistling at Dixie , chasing their tales until the cows came home!
And the vast majority of people are like that. They will prefer the pathetic security of their own irredeemable knowledge about the truth of life and the wisdom of Creation.
Those who do, that is, those who choose spiritual blindness, whether they are ‘saved’ or not, are only deceiving themselves. ‘Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand’ is, however, our constant spiritual indicator of success with God.
Those who were blind but can now truly see will truly see themselves: sinners, saved by God for works according to his purposes, saved to love God and humanity, and to continually give of themselves, walking humbly with their God (Micah 6: 8) every day, in close relationship with his Spirit.
Spirit sight can be blindingly terrifying in some respects, but it is infinitely better life than the old excuse to live, which ironically was not to live. spiritual sight is vision beyond the very superficial and linear world of first sight. It is a dynamism that creates in us the ability to even begin to contemplate eternity, a thought too amazing to even contemplate at its best.