Sermon for Lent 4A - John 9:1-41

In all four gospels, we hear stories of people who have physical disabilities who encounter Jesus and he heals them. By far the most common one is blindness. And by far the most detailed story of Jesus healing a blind person is today’s story from chapter 9 of John’s gospel.  

This story presents us with some troubling imagery to unpack. It’s troubling to me because it seems to use blindness to describe a spiritual failing. I find that troubling because there are people in my life who have been impacted by blindness and vision issues. Perhaps that’s true for you also. I need to name this reality at the outset.  Because of my discomfort, I spent a great deal of time with this text this week. And I hope that as we make our way through the text together, we’ll see that there’s nuance in what’s happening here. And even while the story might make us  feel uncomfortable, it also invites us to see things in new ways. 
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Together, we’ll look at some of the challenges in this text and some of the invitations. Let’s start with the challenges. 

Right at the beginning of the story, Jesus says about the man born blind, “He was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” To me, that sounds like God made this man blind, and caused all the suffering he experienced, for God’s own purposes. It reminds me of the story of Job. But, I think what Jesus is saying is that God didn’t cause his blindness. Rather, the man is blind and in this present moment, God’s power of healing, through Jesus, is then able to be revealed by his healing.

This story also highlights a troubling aspect of life in the first century. Having any kind of physical disability made a person a social outcast. Remembering this aspect of first century Roman culture can help us to understand the passage, even when we disagree with the perspective. First century Roman culture was obsessed with social status. There were many things that could help a person accrue status, or take status away. Having wealth, social position, and family connections conferred status. So did meeting societal standards of beauty or attractiveness. Lacking any or all of those things could take status away. Any physical disability was another of the things that could lower status. And while first century Palestine wasn’t Rome, it was occupied by Rome and influenced by Rome’s values and culture.  

The third thing that is challenging is they way Jesus labels those who are spiritually unaware as being blind. But if we keep stay with the text, we can see that Jesus is doing something quite different here. Jesus is flipping the assumptions of his world around. In first century Palestine, those who were blind had no status, no power, no way to support themselves, and often no home. I noticed in my reading and re-reading of today’s text that the man’s parents are still alive, but they are not caring for him. He has to beg to survive. However, by the end of the story, he’s the one who understands better than anyone else who Jesus is, while the Pharisees, who had way more power and status, who were supposed to be the experts on all things holy, didn’t get it at all.    

The person society places on the bottom, Jesus places on the top.  It’s the kind of reversal that we see all the time around Jesus and his followers. In Paul’s day, one Roman writer actually described the social upheavals that Christians brought into his city as “the world turned upside down.” 
So now, how does this text invite us to see things in new ways? 

First, this text dispels any anxiety that we might have about why things happen the way they do. The disciples assume that someone is to blame for the man’s blindness. They ask, “Who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?” Jesus is quick to reassure them that the man’s blindness isn’t the result of anyone’s sin. 

Yet, the Pharisees are quick to label both Jesus and the man born blind as sinners because they don’t fit the Pharisees mold of faithful behavior. John warns all of us to hold our judgement lest we turn judgement back on ourselves.  This instruction to not judge is a common gospel theme - take the log out of your own eye before you try to remove the splinter from someone else’s, Jesus teaches in Matthew (7:3-5). 

Next, this text invites us to notice that here, and in many places throughout the gospels, sin isn’t primarily defined as an action. Sin isn’t something that we do. Sin is defined as a failure to recognize who Jesus is. Jesus doesn’t like the Pharisees’ actions towards the man born blind. But the problem comes from their failure to recognize Jesus and his teachings. It is, in fact, their inability to see Jesus for who he is that is the source of their problem.

The final new way this text invites us to see is in relationship to what we might call holy rules.  One of these holy rules was around the sabbath. The third of the ten commandments is, “Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy.”  By Jesus’ time that fairly straightforward commandment had developed into an elaborate set of rules about what was allowed on the sabbath. Throughout the gospels, Jesus and his followers get crosswise with some of the religious leaders for doing things on the sabbath that these elaborate rules prohibited.  In this passage, Jesus does three things that break the sabbath laws. He made a paste of mud, then he smeared it on the man’s eyes, and then he healed him. 

There’s a moment in Mark’s gospel (2:27), when Jesus is criticized because he and his disciples pluck some grain to eat on the sabbath. Jesus responds by saying, “The sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the sabbath.”  In this teaching from Mark’s gospel, and every time Jesus speaks about the sabbath, he is inviting the disciples, the Pharisees, and us to act in ways that prioritize people over religious rules and laws.  When Jesus heals the man born blind, he changes that man’s life. He’s been homeless and marginalized by his blindness. Because Jesus heals him, he will no longer forced to beg. He’s restored to his community, at least until the Pharisees kick him out. After that happens, he chooses to follow Jesus and is brought into a new community of disciples. 

This portion of the text invites us to ask: What beliefs are we holding on to in a rigid way? Are we placing more emphasis on following a rule than we are on loving our neighbor? Who is excluded by our beliefs? 

This gospel text is a long and complicated. There are some important things for us to remember as we take this story with us today. It tells the story of a man born blind. It invites each of us to see a number to things. We are called to see how Jesus and his ministry turns the world upside down. We are invited to let go of our preconceived notions about sin and causation. We are invited to see Jesus and what he has to teach us. And finally, we are invited to see how religious rules or structures might cause us to exclude or limit others, and to let those go.  In the end, this is a story about how Jesus opens faith and belief, welcoming and inviting everyone to see him and draw closer to him. We are invited to use the man born blind as our model and our guide. Amen.