Oh Magoo, You’ve Done It Again!

Referring to the 1997 Mr. Magoo movie, Don Markstein of Toonopedia fame commented,

“The Disney film drew protest from advocates of the vision-impaired, who pointed out rather vociferously that there is nothing funny about blindness. They’re right, of course — but it’s not his blindness that has always made Mr. Magoo pathetically funny. It’s the fact that he stubbornly refuses to admit or compensate for his disability.”

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If I had been diagnosed with a disease such as hardening of the arteries, my doctor would have advised me to make lifestyle and dietary changes, as well as take certain medications. If my condition wasn’t too advanced, these changes could help me avert a heart attack or stroke.

In a figurative sense, my diagnosis of  Pharisaism similarly forced me to make lifestyle and spiritual outlook changes. I would have to confront the causes and symptoms of my “hardened heart” (something Jesus accused the Pharisees of having) in order to avert a shallow and legalistic faith.

The first symptom was spiritual blindness. In order to understand my particular type of blindness I went back to my medical manual, the bible, and read about the Pharisees’ sight impairment. Their insight impairment.

The Pharisees’ figurative blindness was evident from the moment they stumbled onto the stage of Jesus’ ministry. These self-important clerical leaders first showed up at the Jordan River to investigate John the Baptist, whom they probably suspected was a religious insurrectionist. He emerged from the wilds of the desert as a bug-eating character dressed in rough clothing and quickly attracted a following. People came from all over to hear his radical message. He proclaimed that the long-awaited Messiah was finally arriving and that individuals needed to be ready to meet him. His job was to “prepare the way for the Lord,” or “to clear the road.”

John’s preparation, of course, did not involve clearing a literal road for the Messiah to travel on; it involved clearing out the path to people’s hearts.

When the crowd heard John’s words, they submitted to the only outward rite that was associated with belief in the Messiah—baptism. John declared that being baptized was a public sign of a person’s awareness of their sin. By recognizing and confessing that they were sinful, people were, in effect, preparing their hearts to receive forgiveness from Jesus. They were clearing the road for him to come to them.

The Pharisees simply couldn’t wrap their minds around this.  Biased as they were by their preconceived notions of what a prophet sent from God should look and sound like, they completely missed the point of John’s powerful preaching. To them, baptism had always been a rite reserved for converts to Judaism. They couldn’t figure out why people who were already Jews would do this. They certainly didn’t need John’s baptism.

A public sign of sin recognition was not on the agenda for those who considered themselves the most pious, the most religious, and therefore the most sanitized from sin. They were completely blind to their own inward sins of pride, greed, selfishness, and hypocrisy.

And so was I.

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One of my important bible word searches revealed a seemingly inordinate number of sight-impaired people in the New Testament. Jesus bumped into them everywhere he went. (‘Scuse the pun.) As an extremely nearsighted person myself, I pondered this for a while. It dawned on me that without my bifocals or my mega-correcting contacts I could have been one of the blind roadside sitters in Jesus’ day, crying out to him for mercy when he walked by.

In fact, a huge number of us would have been in that position. Millions have sight issues to one degree or another, but modern optical technology insures that in developed nations, at least, many of us can carry on with normal lives. For me, that means that my glasses and contacts are daily, tangible instruments of God’s mercy in my life.

As referred to in my last post, my husband’s stinging sentence was the laser beam that instantly corrected my vision. I’ve read that the LASIK surgical procedure for eyesight correction can often be completed in less than ten minutes. Mike’s incisive honesty cured my blindness in less than ten seconds. That procedure instantly gave me insight. I could suddenly see what was inside of my heart, and what I saw made me realize that I was sick. Sin sick. Sick with sins that were as acceptable in church as a drinking problem is at a frat party.

True to the typical onset of Pharisaism, blindness had developed in me first. It was Wally The Internal Pharisee’s doing. Looking back through my spiritual medical history, I’ve concluded that Wally probably moved into my heart about ten years after I became a Christian. He arrived quietly, slowly, sneakily—slithering into my being like a crafty snake and setting about the business of dulling my senses in tiny, almost imperceptible increments. My decreasing ability to see clearly caused me to start to wander off the right faith path. Without realizing it, I began to veer off course, just like the Pharisees of old.

The danger for me was that, unlike physical blindness, which is the loss of sight to the outside, spiritual blindness prevented me from seeing inside myself. It blocked my vision into my own heart—again, keeping the illness “out there,” instead of “in here.” It ensured that I didn’t seek help because it kept me from seeing that I needed any! I stood in my ignorance like a Pharisee standing on the banks of the Jordan River refusing to dive into the waters of repentance.  Like him, my haughty blindness kept me from enjoying God’s plan of freedom for me. As Luke reported:

“…all the people—even the tax collectors—agreed that God’s way was right, for they had been baptized by John. But the Pharisees and experts in religious law rejected God’s plan for them, for they had refused John’s baptism.” Luke 7:29-30 (NLT)

To make matters worse, the dimmer my ability to look into myself became, the more I fixed my focus on everyone and everything outside of me. How many times did I participate in passionate discourses about the sad state of the culture, out there? How many times, often in a bible study setting, did I play the part of latter days doomsayer—pronouncing judgment on our nation’s moral bankruptcy and teachers with tattoos? And over how many church potluck platefuls did I rouse a whole table of eaters to join with me in denouncing celebrities’ and politicians’ greed?

Or, how about the times when I even decried the shortcomings of the church—out there? When I instigated a tsk-tsking conversation lamenting other denominations’ lack of Holy Spiritness, or certain church leaders’ abundance of self-righteousness?  How many reproving sentences did I start with the phrase, “The church today is just so___          .” You fill in the blank. I dished out my stale and tasteless observations like an ungloved lunch lady with weeping sores on my hands.

I became so blind to myself, but so focused on others that I could spot the tiniest piece of sawdust in someone’s eye while not even noticing that I had a huge wooden barn beam jutting out of my own.

“Oh Magoo, you’ve done it again!” was the catchphrase Mr. Magoo always congratulated himself with as he blindly mistook his acts of destruction for brilliant deeds.

So, suffering as I was in the throes of my Pharisaism, I was a veritable Mr. Magoo, driving my jalopy all over other people’s lawns, thinking I was on a road.  I gossiped and judged and left a wake of disaster behind me, yet congratulated myself on a job for Jesus well done.

My blind judgmentalism made me a menace to society–and to the church.

I’m ashamed of how long I went around that way.

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..Then Jesus [said], “I entered this world to render judgment—to give sight to the blind and to show those who think they see that they are blind.” Some Pharisees who were standing nearby heard him and asked, “Are you saying we’re blind?” “If you were blind, you wouldn’t be guilty,” Jesus replied. “But you remain guilty because you claim you can see.” John 9:39-41 (NLT)

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(Coming up: My sick presumptions are exposed in Monday’s post entitled, “A Partial View of Raw Egg Skating.”)