Lent 4

May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)

SEASON: Lent 4
PROPER: A
PLACE: St. John's Parish, Kingsville
DATE: February 13,2002

TEXT: John 9:1-38 – “Lord, I believe.” And he worshiped him.

ISSUE: The most important thing to see in this passage is God’s grace, God’s unwarranted forgiving and recreating love. It gives to us the ability to have self-esteem, and to see effectively the human need around us. It enables us to see that without God’s redeeming love in Jesus Christ we remain blind living in darkness of past misinterpretations and lack of understanding about the love of God..
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The long passage concerned with the healing of the blind man reveals a period of great struggle. It ends concerned with the question of who Jesus really is. The passage is almost like a court scene where Jesus is on trial.
There is a great deal of argument in the passage related to the healing of the blind man. There is argument over whether or not the community has the identity right of the blind man. Was this man in fact blind, or was it someone else. It’s hard to prove identity in a world where there is no social security numbers, or photo ID’s. There is argument with the blind man’s parents. Is he really their son? If he is, was he really blind from birth? Blindness was a curse, and blind people were a part of the expendable people in this society. He must be a sinner, or if born blind, his parents may have sinned to cause his blindness.
If this man is truly the man born blind, and he is cured, then who is Jesus? Is he some demon come to claim his own cursed people, or is he of God. If he is of God, when then would he cure a blind man on the Sabbath, which was against God’s law? There is so much struggle in this passage, tension, uncertainty, and yet hope that God has in Christ come into the world to bring a new enlightenment.
John’s gospel was written in a time of great tension and anxiety within the early church. The disciples and those who had know Jesus had died off by the time of his writing this account of the Gospel. There was tension and anxiety. Christian believers were being expelled from the synagogues. Maintaining the importance and the identity of who Jesus was and allegiance to him for the early church was a struggle in the midst of persecution from both the Judeans and the Romans.
It is a significant passage of struggle, but at the same time a passage of hope and enlightenment, and a call to faithfulness. Jesus is a folk healer who sees a blind man with all of the degradation that went with the disease. He dares to touch and deal the man, unlike the regular physicians of the time. Jesus takes earth, and mixes it with his spittle. Spit was believed to have curative power. Didn’t your mother ever spit on her hand or handkerchief and wife a scratch on you finger, and tell you it would be okay. And it was! Jesus makes a mud pack for the man’s eyes, and sends him to wash in the pool of Siloam, which means sent. (Notice the word sent. It is used throughout the Gospel of John in a significant way, which seeks to tell that God sends Jesus to the world, and Jesus is sending others as well to the world for healing. It is a motif throughout the Gospel of John.) But what we are seeing in this passage is a man who is blind, an expendable sinner, who be no effort of his own, is becoming a new creation. Here comes the creation of a new man who is re-shaped and re-formed out of the clay, the spittle of God, and scooped up out of the water with the ability to be enlightened and who can stand in the light and the love of God. It is unearned merciful grace that is granted through Jesus Christ the Lord. Can it be so? Is there such grace, forgiveness, and love possible from God? Hence, all the tension and the argument, and all of the anxiety! Jesus returns to the man born blind who is driven out by the Judeans from the synagogue, and asks:
“Do you believe in the son of Man?”
The blind man answers, “And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him.”
Jesus says, “You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.”
“Lord, I believe. And he worshiped him.”
God’s bounteous grace is given, and a sinner man responds in unrelenting faithfulness.
What is given to the blind man in this story? He is made a new creation of God’s. He stands in the light of God. He is given a whole new sense of self-esteem as a forgiven and loved child of God. He is given the insight to see the pain and the suffering of others around him, and he is sent with Christ to bring healing, hope, love, forgiveness, and enlightenment to the world.
See clearly what is happening in this story. Those who are thought to clearly see, the Judeans, are really quite blind to the loving grace that has come among them. Those that were thought to be able to see are spiritually blind, and the one that was blind through his faith is the one who truly sees the grace of God come to him in Jesus Christ. Therein lies the message of this Gospel reading.
I’ve just returned from a trip flying across the country. When you look down from 39,000 feet, the earth looks scored by farmlands, and you can make out little towns and villages. You can make out snowy mountains, and if you’re lucky you might even see the mighty Mississippi River dividing the country. But from that height and distance, what you don’t see is people and moving vehicles. The country can look empty. It is only when we get back down to earth that we see the real beauty of this earth: it’s people and children, the colors of the flowers and loveliness of the trees and the real splendor of magnificent snow capped mountains, and the shining waves of the seas. It is only then you know there are pain and suffering, and beauty and hope in people’s lives. We have to be closer to one another and to this earth to really see well.
We must stay close to God in and through the Spirit of God and Jesus Christ. We have to get close to Muslims and Jews, to blacks and Hispanics, to people of other races, to the poor and needy to really see and too understand what is going on with them in their lives, and to see their pain and suffering as well as their joys and who they really are as children of God. The message and the power of God in this passage tells us of God’s grace and his desire to open the eyes of the blind that God’s love and glory may be seen without prejudice and misunderstanding, and without hardness of heart. God has come close to us in Jesus so that we may see his love and grace, and to send us to see one another in that same spirit of insightful love and grace.