We meet Jesus today in Jerusalem, walking along the road teaching his disciples, when he encounters a man who was born blind.
This story is long, so BJ and I are going to read it together. But as you’re listening, I want you to listen for two things: who or what is healed, and who or what is not healed?
Scripture: John 9:1-41
Every time I read this story, the question that the disciples ask just devastates me. They seem to ask it rather flippantly, assuming that this man’s life is a punishment for someone’s sin. The question is not whether his blindness comes from sin – they just assume that. They’re asking whose fault it is. They want to assign blame, point out the problem. This is a judgment parading around as a theological question.
But Jesus is having none of that.
You’re asking the wrong question, he says. This is not about fault – it’s about how we see God at work in the world.
And sometimes, God works with mud.
Somehow, this man’s remarkable healing—something that the Pharisees and the scribes admit themselves—is not the centerpiece of this story. There is no rejoicing. There is no celebration. There is no killing the fatted calf or wine flowing in the streets. His parents keep their distance and his neighbors don’t even recognize him—and not in the ‘oh my goodness you look so good!’ kind of way.
In the scenes that follow, there is only one thing that everyone agrees on: only God can heal this way—instantly, completely, with nothing but dirt and spit. Only God has that power.
But here’s the problem: Jesus healed him on the sabbath and, in the minds of these particular religious authorities, broke the 4th commandment. So how could someone who doesn’t follow God’s commandments be sent by God?
There are a lot of cultural details that we could get lost in here about religious politics and sabbath-keeping and the intricacy of the rules around that, the process for being received into religious community and the process that one had to go through to become a rabbi in the ancient world. And even though I find all of that fascinating…
I want to focus us on Jesus for a minute.
In this whole long story, Jesus actually only speaks twice—once at the very beginning, and once at the end. Both times, he makes some cryptic statements about light and darkness, seeing and not seeing. He is not equating physical blindness with spiritual foolishness, but inviting us to look deeper.
The healing he’s hoping for is not just this one man receiving the ability to see for the first time in his life. That’s great, but Jesus is once again using the physical world to help us understand something about God.
Most of the back and forth in this passage is religious leaders and crowds and the man and his parents and even the disciples trying to figure out who ‘the sinner’ is, like this is some kind of escape room or game show. If you figure out who the sinner is, and kick them out, do you win a prize?
Meanwhile, Jesus just looked at a grown man who had never been able to see in his life, made some mud with his spit, and gave him the ability to see – and instead of being happy about it, y’all are out here pointing fingers and arguing about who’s a sinner.
Talk about an exercise in missing the point.
Like this crowd, we could spend every minute of every day playing the blame game. Whose fault is it that my retirement shrank? Whose fault is it that gas prices went up? Whose fault is it that a man ran his car into a synagogue this week? Whose fault is it that the weather is such a roller coaster? Whose fault is it that someone we love got sick? Whose fault is all of this? Who sinned?
There are entire TV channels devoted to asking that question 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and they are so easy to get sucked into. They feed our ego, because we would never do anything like those people. They allow us to assign the blame somewhere else, so we don’t have to do anything. They make us feel angry and helpless.
But not Jesus. Jesus is not having any of that. Jesus invites us to see the world through his eyes: this man’s blindness is not a curse. This encounter is an opportunity to show the world God’s power in Christ Jesus, and to remind us that we can all benefit from some self-reflection before we go calling other people sinners.
Jesus calls himself the light of the world because he gives us the ability to see in the dark. Not physically, necessarily – I still have an astigmatism that is super annoying while driving at night.
But through his life, his ministry, his death and resurrection, we learn to see the world beyond our own pointing fingers. In Christ, we can look at this mess of a nation and see not just allies or enemies, those who are on our side or their side, those who are with us or against us – but neighbors to be loved. Struggling people who need compassion and a hand. Solutions to problems that require us to open not just our checkbooks, but our hearts and our tables and our minds.
We just have to be willing to stop and look.
Thanks be to God. Amen.