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“Sleeper, awake!
Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” (Ephesians 5:14) But who is sleeping—and to what are we being awakened? What kind of death is meant here, if not the literal or physical one? The gospel passage tells the story of the man born blind and his healing by Jesus. Throughout the narrative, Jesus is confronted by the religious authorities who press him with questions designed to trap him—to name him a sinner. Their world is built on a law that draws a strict line between the holy and the unclean. To be holy is to be set apart from all that is deemed impure. This is not just a set of beliefs; it is what Michel Foucault would call a discourse—a system of language, practices, and power that shapes what people can think, say, and be. Within that broader order of knowledge—what Foucault calls an episteme—truth and reality are defined by those who hold authority to speak. In such a world, blindness is rendered unclean, abnormal, and sinful. From within this discourse, the man’s blindness is read as defect and deviation. Socially, it marks him as less than whole. Functionally, it is interpreted as disability. Theologically, it becomes evidence of inherited sin—a curse passed down from his parents. The man, his family, and his condition are all caught within a structure of meaning that classifies, excludes, and condemns. No Pharisee questions this interpretation; it simply is. The law and its divisions—holy versus unclean, sinner versus saved—are taken as the unquestionable framework of existence. But Jesus refuses to comply. He disrupts this machinery of categorization that defines identity and determines purity: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” With this, Jesus unmakes the discourse that had fixed the man’s life. He names a new possibility. The strange act of mixing mud and applying it to the man’s eyes can be seen as a symbolic undoing—an act of unlearning and unseeing the distorted vision imposed by the world’s discourse. The washing in the pool of Siloam becomes a ritual awakening, a cleansing not only of sight but of perception itself. The man rises from within the inherited system of sin and separation, awakened to a new way of seeing—of himself, of others, of God. In this awakening, he is reborn. Through the dust remade by Jesus’s touch, his eyes—and his being—are resurrected. He is no longer a sleeper caught in the world’s assumptions; he has risen from the dead, and Christ shines upon him. Now he stands boldly before the Pharisees, countering their questions with newfound clarity. He sees what they cannot: the constructed nature of their world, the way they fabricate holiness and sin. He is free—awake—in the light of Christ. “Give me a drink.” This is not a simple request for water. Jesus is doing something he is not supposed to do. He breaks a code—religious, theological, and cultural. As a Jewish man, he should not be speaking to a Samaritan woman. The social order forbids it. Such interaction exists only to confirm who is excluded, who stands on the wrong side.
But Jesus’ request is not rebellion for its own sake. It is not a declaration of social equality in our modern sense, nor an early act of progressive activism. His gesture moves differently: it touches something deeper than social liberation, though it includes it. “Give me a drink” unsettles the barrier between Jesus and the Samaritan woman—a barrier simultaneously cultural, religious, and theological. Their encounter takes place inside this structure, whose invisible norms dictate what is permissible. That prohibition—“he must not speak to her”—is an effect of this structure. And yet, where is the barrier itself? There is no wall between them, no physical division. The only wall we perceive is the one we’ve constructed in language: “Jewish” and “Samaritan.” These are names that function as dividing lines. But even those categories cannot undo their shared humanity. The boundary exists only as a social fiction—what Foucault might call a discursive effect that shapes what can and cannot be seen. This labeling, like bricks in a wall, is not natural but fabricated. Jesus’ words—“Give me a drink”—begin to dismantle that wall. The dialogue that follows is a work of mutual unbuilding. Jesus does not assert power or entitlement; the woman does not yield to subservience. She questions, challenges, reasons—meeting Jesus as equal interlocutor. Their conversation becomes a space of mutual recognition, until Jesus finally says: “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.” This self-disclosure is not a closure of dialogue but its completion. The wall between them has dissolved. She is no longer reduced to “Samaritan” or “woman with failed marriages.” He is no longer “Jewish male” or “religious authority.” Both now stand stripped of labels, as Moses before the burning bush—bare, unmediated, in the presence of divine breath. They face one another as beings re-created, as if back in Eden, where nothing yet bore a name. To meet “in spirit and truth” is to live without the walls constructed by identity or purity codes. The Breath of God flows freely where no label confines it. Lent, then, is the practice of stripping away these layers—of peeling off the names and categories that keep us from true encounter. In that unveiling, a resurrection already begins: “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; behold, new things have come into being” (2 Cor. 5:17). For those who follow Jesus, life itself can be understood as an incarnate project. To live incarnately is to inhabit the flesh and circumstances we never chose and to maturely accept life’s inherent unfairness. None of us decided the conditions of our birth—our color, body, culture, or place. It’s valid to say, “I don’t recall choosing to be born this way.” So much of what we call success arises from circumstances given rather than chosen. In truth, there is no purely self-made person.
Within this contingent and uneven world, Jesus invites us to be born again. Whatever our starting point, the call is to move inward—toward the very breath that sustains us. Breath, at its most basic level, equalizes us: every human being, every living creature, shares it. It quietly levels our distinctions and achievements and reminds us that life itself is a gift. When Jesus says, “Be born of the Spirit,” we might also hear, “Be born of the Breath.” This rebirth is what I mean by the incarnate project: our bodies, formed from dust, are continually being renewed by the Breath of God. Baptism marks this renewal—a sign of our daily, hourly, even moment-by-moment turning toward new life. To be born again is not to escape our embodied conditions but to inhabit them more deeply, in the likeness of Christ. Yet this renewal does not end in quiet introspection. Filled with the Breath of God, we are sent outward into the world. The more attuned we are to this divine Breath, the more clearly we perceive how our identities are entangled in social labels and expectations. Franz Kafka once observed with melancholy, “I was ashamed of myself when I realized life was a costume party.” We might say that life indeed feels like a costume party—but instead of shame, we can embrace the play. We learn to put on whatever costume may serve love, turning pretense into compassion, and alienation into connection. This is what I call skillful self-ing—our ongoing, others-oriented practice of identity-making. We do not destroy the party but participate with awareness, knowing that our customs are not our own. In freedom, we can wear what love requires for the sake of others. During this Lenten season, let us stay awake to our breathing, attuning it to the Breath of Jesus. He tells us, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” But we do know where our breath begins and where it leads: from and toward Jesus of Nazareth. |
Paul"...life up your love to that cloud [of unknowing]...let God draw your love up to that cloud...through the help of his grace, to forget every other thing." Archives
April 2026
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