Jesus Heals

“As [Jesus] walked along, he saw a man blind from birth.  ² His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”  ³ Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.  ⁴ We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work.  ⁵ As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”  ⁶ When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes,  ⁷ saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see.  ⁸ The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, “Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?”  ⁹ Some were saying, “It is he.” Others were saying, “No, but it is someone like him.” He kept saying, “I am the man.”  ¹⁰ But they kept asking him, “Then how were your eyes opened?”  ¹¹ He answered, “The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’ Then I went and washed and received my sight.”  ¹² They said to him, “Where is he?” He said, “I do not know.”

^“They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind.  ¹⁴ Now it was a sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes.  ¹⁵ Then the Pharisees also began to ask him how he had received his sight. He said to them, “He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see.”  ¹⁶ Some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, for he does not observe the sabbath.” But others said, “How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?” And they were divided.  ¹⁷ So they said again to the blind man, “What do you say about him? It was your eyes he opened.” He said, “He is a prophet.”

^“The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they called the parents of the man who had received his sight  ¹⁹ and asked them, “Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?”  ²⁰ His parents answered, “We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind;  ²¹ but we do not know how it is that now he sees, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is of age. He will speak for himself.”  ²² His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews; for the Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue.  ²³ Therefore his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.”

^“So for the second time they called the man who had been blind, and they said to him, “Give glory to God! We know that this man is a sinner.”  ²⁵ He answered, “I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”  ²⁶ They said to him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?”  ²⁷ He answered them, “I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?”  ²⁸ Then they reviled him, saying, “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses.  ²⁹ We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.”  ³⁰ The man answered, “Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes.  ³¹ We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will.  ³² Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind.  ³³ If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.”  ³⁴ They answered him, “You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?” And they drove him out.

^“Jesus heard that they had driven him out, and when he found him, he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?”  ³⁶ He answered, “And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him.”  ³⁷ Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.”  ³⁸ He said, “Lord, I believe.” And he worshiped him.  ³⁹ Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.”  ⁴⁰ Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, “Surely we are not blind, are we?”  ⁴¹ Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.” – John 9:1-41

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Our reading from the gospel of John today is rich in detail, and is both a sad story and a very joyful story, and even though it happened 2000 years ago, we can relate to what’s going on here.

The story is relate-able in part because we all know what it’s like to suffer at the hands of bureaucrats. (Some things never change!) The Pharisees completely miss the point of the man being healed of blindness – and Jesus, as usual, goes straight to the heart of the matter. We also see in this story a huge difference between God’s will and human attempts at God’s will… between God’s mercy and human beliefs about right and wrong.

In this story, the man’s physical blindness in a way represents spiritual blindness. Every person on this planet is a sinner; every person on this planet is imperfect and stands in need of Jesus’ mercy and healing. And for each one of us, Jesus has come to offer healing.

But before we dig into the story, I want to back up and share some of the things the apostle John assumes we know about the Jewish religious scene. Throughout the gospels we hear about Pharisees, Sadducees, Jews, high priests, scribes, and the Sanhedrin – but who were all these people, and why were they interested in Jesus?

• The Sanhedrin met in Jerusalem and was a group of 70 judges directly reporting to the High Priest. Some were Sadducees, some were Pharisees and others were priests and clergy of various kinds.
• The Scribes started out as copyists, copying the scriptures by hand back in the days before the printing press. But over time they came to know God’s law really well and they became lawyers and also teachers.
• “The Jews” is a general term John uses in his gospel to refer to the leaders of the nation. He does not mean all Jewish people everywhere, and I want to be clear about that because he sometimes comes off sounding anti-Semitic – which he wasn’t. John was Jewish, and he loved his nation.
• The Pharisees and Sadducees were the two main parties of priestly teachers who sparred with each other constantly. (Splits within faith groups are nothing new, sadly.)
• The Sadducees roughly parallel the ‘progressives’ of the day. They rejected holy writings and prophecies except for the books of Moses (the first five books of the Bible). The Sadducees came from aristocracy; they were elite and well-educated, usually taught in Greece by Greek philosophers (who looked down on Judaism as a simple, rustic faith); they were secular in many ways even though they held power in the temple; and they did not believe in resurrection or the afterlife. (The Sadducees disappeared after the fall of Jerusalem in the year 70AD – they did not survive the overthrow of the nation of Israel.)
• The Pharisees, on the other hand, became the foundation for the system of temples and rabbis the Jewish people still have today. The Pharisees roughly parallel our modern-day evangelical movement before it became politically radicalized. (The radicals back in those days were called “Zealots”.) Pharisees usually came from working-class families, they were held in high esteem by the people because they were devoted to the faith, they believed in the Oral Law given by Moses – the Talmud – not just the written law. They believed in resurrection, and the afterlife, and in the coming Messiah, and in prayer, and in regular worship in synagogue. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? And some of the Pharisees liked Jesus: Nicodemus, and Gamaliel (the great teacher we meet in Acts chapter 5) whose star student became the apostle Paul (who was also a Pharisee).

So the Pharisees got a lot right. But if they got so much right, why were they always having arguments with Jesus? There were basically two issues, two sticking points – which then branched out into many other debates – but when you boil it down, basically two issues: the first was the Pharisees had an extremely literal and detailed interpretation of the Law of Moses; and the second was they had an unhealthy need to define and assert authority. Jesus once commented that the Pharisees “strained out gnats and swallowed camels” – that, for example, they would tithe 10% of everything they owned to the temple, right down to the spices in their kitchens, but overlooked important things like mercy and compassion.

And on the authority question, the Pharisees once asked Jesus where he got his authority, and Jesus replied by asking them: “where did John the Baptist get his authority?” The Pharisees then talked among themselves and said, if we say ‘from God’ he will ask ‘why didn’t you believe him?’ but if we say ‘from men’ the people will stone us because they believe John is from God.’ So they said to Jesus “we don’t know.” (Which was a totally bogus answer.)  And Jesus said “I won’t tell you where I get my authority either.”

Jesus would not play the Pharisees’ games or honor their rules. In fact Jesus taught that faith was about having a relationship with God, not memorizing a rule-book, and the Pharisees couldn’t handle that.

Which brings us to our story for today.

As John begins, we meet a man who was born blind. We don’t know his name (I wish we did). But Jesus and the disciples see this man by the side of the road as they’re walking, and Jesus points out that the man has been blind since birth – which is a miracle in itself: how did Jesus know this?

The disciples ask Jesus whose fault it is that this man was born blind? It was assumed in ancient Israel that birth defects like blindness were the result of sin. But Jesus said: no one sinned; this blindness happened so God could work through this man and show glory in the life of this man. The man was no worse a sinner than anyone else.

Jesus warns the disciples that we must work while we have the light of day, because there’s a darkness coming when no one will be able to work. This is both a metaphorical darkness, like a spiritual darkness; and it’s also quite literal darkness. We only have so many years on this planet, and when those years are gone, our work is over whether we’re done or not.  But Jesus adds, “as long as I’m here, I am the light of the world.”

Jesus then turns to the blind man, makes mud out of dirt and spit, and puts this mixture on the man’s eyes. The Greek word for what Jesus did is epicrisen which means ‘to christen’ – as in baptism. Jesus then sends him to a pool to wash off the mud, just as baptism washes the dirt off our souls.

While the blind man is washing, Jesus and the disciples continue on their way. Meanwhile the blind man’s friends have taken his hands and guided him to the pool, helped him get in, and watched as he washed the mud off.

Imagine what it would be like to be this man: having always depended on other people to guide you to places, and to help you find the things you need every day. Now he’s standing in the pool, washing his face, and as he does, he begins to see: first the water, and his hands, then maybe some trees nearby… and then he turns, and for the first time in his life, he looks into the faces of his friends. Imagine the joy and the tears and the celebration! Guys are pounding each other on the back and whooping and jumping up and down and crying out to everybody who passes by.

They go back to the place where the blind man used to sit – to pick up his stuff? – and the people passing by say “Hey! Isn’t that the blind man who used to sit here and beg?” And they start arguing among each other: “Yeah, it’s him!” “No, that’s impossible!” “It sure looks like him.” “No really it’s the guy!”

The formerly blind man says to them all: “a man named Jesus made mud, and put it on my eyes, and told me to wash, and I washed, and I received my sight.” And the crowd asks: “where is this Jesus?” but the man doesn’t know. (Keep in mind as this story moves forward this man has never seen Jesus. He has heard Jesus’ voice, but he doesn’t know what Jesus looks like.)

The crowd takes this man to the Pharisees – which was not an unusual thing to do. The Law of Moses said that people who were cured of certain incurable diseases (like leprosy for example) were supposed to show themselves to the priests to be declared healed, and as a testimony to them. Of course healing someone from blindness was not something anyone had ever done before! But they brought him to the priests anyway.

At this point we discover that the miracle took place on the Sabbath. The people hadn’t thought anything of it, but the Pharisees had a problem with this. First off, it was not the first time Jesus had healed someone on the Sabbath. In fact he was starting to do it with alarming frequency. On a previous Sabbath, Jesus had confronted some Pharisees in a synagogue about healing on the Sabbath. On that day there had been a man present with a withered hand. Jesus asked the Pharisees: “What is permitted on the Sabbath, to do evil or to do good, to harm or to heal?” And Jesus healed the man right in front of them. The Pharisees then went out and talked amongst themselves about how to kill Jesus (they had this conversation on the Sabbath!)

One of these days I would like to do a sermon series on the Sabbath because it really is important in the life of faith. The whole point of Sabbath is to rest: to escape the rat race, to get off the treadmill of life, and enjoy God and God’s creation and our families and friends. Sabbath is the day we are free to say “no” to the demands of the world – all the demands of the world. It’s a day God gave us for our benefit, to remind us of what freedom feels like.

But the way the Pharisees practiced it, Sabbath didn’t feel like freedom. It felt like one more demand from the world that the people had to obey. Jesus said “the Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath” but the Pharisees missed the point. They made the day that was supposed to be about freedom, into the most oppressive day of the week.

Jesus also taught it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath. In this particular case the only thing Jesus did was make mud – but that qualified as work and was therefore forbidden in the eyes of the Pharisees. They decided to investigate and make an example of Jesus. (Notice the Pharisees didn’t stop to ask themselves “is it lawful to hold an investigation on the Sabbath?” But I digress…)

The Pharisees took this incredibly joyful occasion and made it into a day of pain and fear for the man and his family. They gathered together almost like a court of law and began to question the man. And at first the Pharisees are divided: some felt Jesus had broken the Sabbath; others felt no-one who is a sinner could do such a miracle.

They asked this man to repeat his story yet again: and we notice the story has gotten shorter this time. The man says: “he put clay on my eyes and I washed and I saw.” The shorter version eliminates the making of mud, so it no longer sounds like Jesus was working.

The Pharisees still don’t believe it, so they call in the man’s parents to question them: “Is this your son? Was he really born blind? How is it that he can see?”

And they answer yes, yes, and you’ll have to ask him.

They’re afraid to answer the questions because the Pharisees have said that anyone who believes in Jesus will be thrown out of the synagogue – and back then this was worse than being tossed out of church; it was essentially being banished from the community.

So they bring in the man again and say “give glory to God” (which was the ancient way of saying “put your hand on the Bible and swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”) They said, “we know this man is a sinner.”

The formerly blind man, who was now beyond exasperated, said, “I don’t know! All I know is that I was blind and now I see.”

~Side Note~

These words – “I was blind but now I see” – inspired the writing of the hymn Amazing Grace. This hymn was written because of a different kind of healing: a spiritual healing. The man who wrote it, John Newton, was an Englishman, and as a young man he was the captain of a slave ship that carried human cargo across the Atlantic. One day in 1748 he was on board ship off the coast of Ireland when the ship was caught in a storm and was about to sink. He prayed for God’s mercy, and the storm passed, and soon after he was converted to Christianity and became an abolitionist. He knew John Wesley personally, and he worked with John and other friends like William Wilberforce to fight against slavery. He lived just long enough to see slavery made illegal in England. Amazing Grace was written to tell the story of a man whose heart was completely changed by Jesus: “I once was lost, but now am found… was blind but now I see.”

~end of side note~

So our formerly blind man, who can now see, stands before the religious leaders and the Pharisees and speaks the truth: and it’s a truth they don’t want to hear. The Pharisees want to condemn Jesus. This man says, “He opened my eyes… and never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God he could do nothing.”

Which is still true today. With all of our medical advancements and technology, giving sight to someone who was born blind is something we still can’t do. But Jesus can.

The Pharisees accused this man of great sin and threw him out.

Jesus, meanwhile, has heard what happened, and Jesus goes and looks for the man and finds him. He asks: “do you believe in the son of man?”

The man answers, “Who is he, sir?” And Jesus says: “the person speaking to you now is the one.”

The man’s next word in Greek is “kyrie”– like in kyrie eleison – which means “Lord” – Lord, I believe. And he worships.

Jesus shares with him good news: “for judgement I have come into the world, so that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.”

Some Pharisees overhear this and they say, “you talkin’ about us?”  And Jesus answers, “if you were blind you would be without sin, but since you say that you can see, your sin remains.”

And there the story ends.

So what does this story hold for us today?

First, doing God’s will isn’t always as clear-cut as we think. People today still quote Scripture to try to tell others what should and shouldn’t be done, and how people should and shouldn’t live. Yes, it’s important to know God’s word, and it’s important to do it – but we also need to have God’s heart of compassion: because without kindness, truth is a cold blade.

Secondly, today, as it was back then, we have the progressives and the conservatives battling things out in public, in politics, in the news; and both sides miss the mark where Jesus is concerned. Jesus does not violate Sabbath law; Jesus says “the Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath.”  God’s word is given for our benefit: not for harm, not to cause difficulty, not to lord over other people, not to decide who belongs and who doesn’t.

God’s law boils down to this: we are to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love others as ourselves. When we look at the issues, when we go to vote: are we loving others as we love ourselves? Are we loving the homeless as we love ourselves? Are we loving veterans as we love ourselves? Are we loving refugees as we love ourselves? God loves everyone, not just the people we feel comfortable with.

Faith in God is not, and never has been, about keeping rules. Faith in God makes us generous, caring, and compassionate. The Christian faith is about a relationship with the living God, through the Holy Spirit. With the presence of the Holy Spirit we are able to share in the joy of the man born blind.

And if and when we find ourselves in a jam like the one this young man was in, his story comforts us with the knowledge that Jesus knows where we are, and what’s going on in our lives; and Jesus cares; and Jesus will come looking for us; and Jesus will bring us to a place of worship – a place of peace and joy and fulfillment and rest, which is the true definition of Sabbath.

May God bless each of us here today with heavenly sight and heavenly healing. AMEN.

Preached at Fairhaven United Methodist Church and Spencer United Methodist Church, 3/27/23

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