😇 Lent 4
Readings: 1 Samuel 16:1-13; Psalm 23; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9.
From the TRNG Room:
Central Thesis/Theme:
This episode is about sight — and about who gets to claim it. I'm arguing that the RCL's pairing of 1 Samuel 16 and John 9 is not a coincidence: both texts are about the limits of human perception and the subversive nature of divine sight. Samuel can't see David without God's help. The Pharisees think they see everything, but their vision has calcified into an idol. And the man born blind ends up seeing more clearly than anyone. True sight — prophetic sight — is never a credential you hold. It's always a gift you receive, and it always tends to show up in the people the institution has already written off.
Key Textual/Historical Insights:
The Hebrew term ro'eh (seer) predates the court-bound navi (prophet) — and that distinction matters. By the time the monarchy co-opted prophetic language, "prophet" had become a role the powerful assigned to people who would tell them what they needed to hear. Samuel represents a transitional figure: Nazarite by birth (his mother Hannah's vow echoes Numbers 6), judge, and seer operating before the institution fully captured the role. In John 9, the Greek doxa — typically translated "glory" or "worship" — carries the weight of focused attention, something I connect to our modern attention economy. The blind man's confession isn't flowery piety; it's the plain acknowledgment of a seer: I see. Therefore I follow.
Theological Argument:
The Pharisees in John 9 aren't villains in a simple morality play — they're the logical endpoint of what happens when a faith system mistakes its own interpretive framework for God. Their God has become a private god, a totem shaped to ratify their conclusions. That's not Yahweh. The God of the cosmos doesn't subordinate temself to institutional convenience. Meanwhile, the man born blind does something radically democratic: he reasons from observable evidence — I can see, therefore the one who healed me operates with more authority than your rules — and that bare empiricism becomes an act of worship. This is the "federating" move I keep returning to: prophetic sight isn't locked in the holy of holies. It never was. The tent poles stuck out past the veil on purpose.
Contemporary Application:
I've used John 9 in my safety brief and in God Is a Grunt because it names something veterans and other institutional outsiders know viscerally: sometimes you can see clearly and the people with credentials simply refuse to look. Lent, in this light, isn't a season for performing darkness — especially not for people already carrying it. The Lenten discipline I'm lifting up here is the one my professor named for women, and that I'd extend to anyone conditioned to diminish themselves: stop giving up on yourself. The prophetic task for this moment isn't more self-abnegation. It's learning to trust what you actually see, even when — especially when — the institution tells you you're blind.
Questions Raised:
When does institutional authority over interpretation cross the line from stewardship into idolatry?
What would it look like for Western Christianity to genuinely subordinate its epistemology to indigenous ways of knowing?
Is the "seer-to-prophet" co-optation a cautionary tale about language, or about power — or can you separate the two?
If true sight is always contingent on divine input, how do we distinguish prophetic humility from epistemic paralysis?
Who in your community is the David out back — the person you've almost forgotten to bring in — and what are you afraid of if you do?
Reflection
Good morning and welcome to Fighting Words. This is Brother Logan Isaac, broadcasting from the Chapter House in Albany, Oregon. This morning's readings come to us from 1 Samuel 16, Psalm 23, Ephesians 5, and John 9. Before I get to the meaning I see in these texts, I want to point out what the Revised Common Lectionary is doing.
We're in Lent — a mournful period, a fasting period where we're meant to get rid of the extras, to focus, to concentrate. And in the first week of Lent, I said that as a vet, maybe we've lost the meaning of this season so thoroughly that Lent can actually harm veterans — by putting them in the darkness, or by collectively claiming that we're in a dark time of year and expecting them to follow along. Maybe we're actually doing harm. Just like we do harm to people with eating disorders when we say "give up chocolate." A female professor of mine had a habit of pointing out that for women, maybe the Lenten discipline should be to give up giving up on yourself. That's the message I want to carry through this episode.
I'll come back to John 9 in a moment. I've used John 9 in one of the last chapters of God Is a Grunt, which I'm currently revising into a second edition paperback — self-published, no more middlemen. I use it in my safety brief. It's a really important text to me, and I want to give it the attention it deserves.
But the RCL chose to pair it with Psalm 23, Ephesians 5, and 1 Samuel 16 — the anointing of David. That text is prefaced by Samuel, who is the last judge, though he isn't quite a judge in the traditional sense. He also serves as a prophet and is a Nazarite by birth. His mother Hannah promised him to the Lord — and "promise" in Greek corresponds to the language used in Numbers 6. He's a Nazarite. Without getting too deep into that, I do want to note that in one of the other prophetic passages in the TaNaK, Samuel says something like: I was once what you would have called a seer, but now I may be called a prophet. In Hebrew, the seer is ro'eh, and the prophet is navi. A seer is a more primitive, less derivative form — a diviner, someone who can perceive beyond what everyone else sees.
I raise this because one of the things I believe Western Christianity must do in order to navigate this moment — a moment I think we've been in for about a hundred years — is to turn its gaze toward the people who stewarded this land and ask what we might learn from them. To subordinate our assumptions about wisdom to indigenous life ways. Western culture is stuck. We're making movies about comic books because that's how creatively bankrupt white culture has become. But that's a side note.
The point is: "seer" is the old word for prophet, and it's a co-opted term. By the time this material was written down, a prophet was a court figure — someone the king brought in to tell him what he needed to hear. That's when the corruption begins. There are false prophets throughout the Egyptian and Israelite record. And so the term had to be reclaimed, again and again.
When Samuel comes to Bethlehem — Beit Laham, the House of Bread, the House of Meat, the Slaughterhouse — the elders of the city are afraid. Think in terms of tribal structure, indigenous community: the elders are the oldest and wisest, still alive, no longer running off to war, but sharing their gifts and wisdom with the community. And when they see this man coming, they ask: Do you come in peace, seer? That fear tells you something. If you are afraid of a prophetic intervention, you're afraid of having your mistakes exposed. And actually, that's what we all need — for our errors to be named, so we stop repeating them. The problem in our time is that people have forgotten how to feel embarrassment. We say "don't judge me," but in refusing judgment we also refuse genuine affirmation. It's not that we don't want people to judge us; it's that we don't want our faults seen. We hide them. The legitimate prophets, the ro'eh types — they helped communities diagnose what was wrong, name it, and enter a period of healing. That's the cycle.
Moving into John 9: there's no mistake that this text is about sight. In 1 Samuel 16, when Samuel goes through Jesse's sons, he is doing his prophetic work — but he can't do it properly without God. That's how you know he's legitimate. He's not manufacturing insight for his own self-interest; he senses something, asks if these are all the sons, and hears what feels like a question in return: Is this the end? Don't you believe there's another one? And Jesse finally admits there's a kid out back, the youngest, pasturing the flock — pastoring, feeding the things that need to be fed. Go get that outsider, that one you almost forgot. He's the one.
In John 9, the dynamic inverts. The Jewish believers, the Pharisees and Sadducees — those who held the institutional keys to belief — had become so rigid that they thought they were the seers. Anyone else who saw must be wrong. So when a Messiah, a christos — a smeared one, a dirty backwoods figure who doesn't adhere to their interpretation of the law — goes around healing people, the response isn't gratitude. It's hostility.
When the Pharisees say in the text that he doesn't keep the day of rest, what they mean is: he doesn't keep their interpretation of rest. He doesn't serve their God. Whatever their God is, it doesn't appear to be Yahweh — not the God of the cosmos. It appears to be a private god, a Greek-style deity you can manage and deploy in service of your own conclusions.
And here's the point: it's not just that Christ heals. It's that none of us — not the Sadducees, not the Pharisees, not even the blind man himself — can really see without God. And when God does grant someone sight, when God makes someone a seer, that person becomes prophetic. We're all meant to be seers. That capacity was never supposed to be locked behind a sanctuary veil. That's why the tent poles always stuck out past the curtain.
This is a story about healers who think they hold the keys to healing. It's about a faith system that had calcified — not healing anyone, just reproducing its own power. They'd become so backward that when someone is literally just healed, nobody debates whether the guy could see. There are no signs to argue over. He can see. Period. Nobody questions that. They just want to know how it happened outside of their authority. And the answer is: their authority was an idol. They'd fashioned it themselves, put yellow lenses on their glasses, and couldn't understand why the world didn't look the way they expected.
Step outside yourself and it's obvious. A man was cured. So the logical conclusion — which the formerly blind man basically reasons through out loud — is: I can see. Ipso facto, the one who did this is more powerful than you, more powerful than your God, your Sabbath rules, and all the institutions you've built around them. So I'm going to follow him.
The word here is doxa — which we hear in "doxology" — and in our current attention economy, where everything is about advertising and curating the right images to drive clicks and move money, worship is essentially concentrated attention. When the blind man says he believes, when he says I see — that's not Shakespearean affect. That's the pragmatic acknowledgment of a seer. I see. And with that sight comes responsibility: to name what I see, and to remain open to the possibility that my sight depends on the input of others — people better than me, equal to me, or who the world considers lesser than me. The people the system has written off might see most clearly of all.
I think that's what we need to recognize here. Not just "oh, the two stories are both about sight, cool." I used John 9 for my safety brief in God Is a Grunt because, honestly, there've been a lot of times I've felt like the blind man — trying to explain something obvious to people who refuse to look. After more than a decade of trying to get the Pharisees and Sadducees of my world to see, and writing God Is a Grunt out of that frustration — the safety brief was the first place I addressed my own audience and realized I was part of my own audience. I was reminding myself, and people like me, that you're not broken. Maybe if you don't think you're broken and everybody else does, you might be right. And if they don't get it, maybe they never will. That's not your responsibility. It's theirs.
