I Was Blind

 John 9:1-41 Lent 4 March 19, 2023

 We have a lot of characters here:

Jesus Heals the Blind Man
Brian Jekel

We have Jesus, the disciples, 

the neighbors, the Pharisees,

the man’s parents and of course, the man born blind.

The identified patient in this story.

 

We have lots of healings in the other Gospels,

we even the healing of blind man in a similar way, with mud and spit,

but here again, we have John’s gospel commenting on those healings,

and looking deeper, John’s story is asking

“what would the people around the healed say about this healing”

“How would everyone react” and

“what does this tell us about God and Jesus?”

 

One thing this story seems to say is that

The man in the story is blind in the literal sense,

but it seems like everyone else in

the story are the ones who can’t see.

 

First we have the disciples,

When they see the man born blind,

They don’t say, “Can we do anything to help this man.”

They don’t talk to the man himself who is sitting right there.

They ask, rudely, right over him, “What caused this man to be blind?

Was it has sin or his parents?” I mean he’s blind, he’s not deaf.

They are working under the assumption that prevailed at the time

that if someone is born in such an unfortunate circumstance, 

it has to be evidence of God’s displeasure with them.

They ignore the man and use him as a theological object lesson,

they can’t see the man, they don’t talk to him, they talk about him.

Jesus basically said, this man couldn’t be cursed,

he’s about to be used to reveal God’s glory.

The disciples can't see.

  

Now this blind man has certainly been

around this town his whole life

It’s the same town his parents live in.

People didn’t move around like they do today.

And his parents say he is of age, so probably 15, 18, 20 years or more.

But none of them seem to know his name.

 

And after he’s able to see,

the neighbors who have passed him every day

for the last couple of decades, hardly seem to recognize him.

Remember, towns were small, neighborhoods were small

It’s not like there were bunches of people to keep track of.

 

And yet, these neighbors can’t really say for sure

they call him, “the man who used to beg.”

They don’t believe it’s him, even though he says, “It’s me”.

They can't see.

 

They probably don’t know him because

they never actually met him before.

they probably walked over him, ignored him,

they discounted him as a sinner who was cursed by God.

They probably yelled at him for being in the way,

or having the nerve to ask for money,

But they never actually saw him. They were blind to him.

And they still can’t see him now.

 

And there’s the Pharisees, the religious leaders.

 Jesus has just healed a man – an amazing miracle –

no one should argue that.

But they can’t see the amazing miracle.

They can’t see it because it was Jesus who did it,

and they think Jesus is a bad guy because he’s 

not following their program, he healed on the Sabbath and they count that as bad.

So they ignore the man who was healed, 

and they curse the one who healed, and just argue amongst themselves.

The man tells them exactly what happened,

but they are so preoccupied with their own judgments

that they can’t see a miracle of God when it happens in front of them.

They can't see.

Then there are the man’s parents

they don’t seem very parental at all.

They don’t seem too elated that their son

has just been given his sight back.

And they keep distancing themselves from him

it says because they were afraid.

They were so afraid, that they can’t see

their own flesh and blood, and his joy

because all they can see are the problems he is causing them.

They can't see.

 

The man is the one who was called blind,

but the other people in this story are the ones who

were really blind.

They are each so convinced, so set in their ways,

that they could not see what was there in front of them.

They were blinded by their apathy, their religious convictions,

their preconceived notions, their fear, their prejudice.

 

The only person who can really see in this story

is the man who was born blind.

He sees the religious leaders for the self righteous fools they are.

He can see that Jesus healed him,

And he sees that anyone who could restore his sight

must be sent from God.

 

Jesus doesn’t just heal the man here,

through this healing Jesus shows us that

The people who think they can see,

might very well be blind,

and the ones called blind might actually see.

 

And so it is with all of us too.

Often we are so convinced,

by our religious convictions,

our rules, our traditions, our prejudices,

by what we’ve been taught in our youth,

by our fear, and by our own stubbornness that

we just can’t see what God is doing right before our eyes.

People can be converted, or claim Jesus as their lord and savior

or be raised Christian all their lives, and go to church faithfully ,

and still not see— not understand – what God is doing.

 

John Newton was born in 1725 in London.

His mother died when he was 7 and at 17,

he started to work on different ships.

 

When he was 23, he was on a ship that was going to Ireland

when a terrible storm hit and the ship was about to sink.

He prayed to God to save the ship,

and after the storm began to die down and they were saved.

He marked that event as the day that changed the rest of his life,

the day that he began his conversion to Christianity.

He started to study scripture, and he avoided

profanity, gambling and drinking.

But he said later that he still didn’t understand at that time.

He couldn't yet see.

 

That was because even after he was converted to Christianity,

he became the first mate and then captain of a slave ship.

He captained three voyages between Guinea,

the West Indies kidnapping and capturing African people

to be sold as slaves in England.

Even after he stopped being a sea captain,

he still invested in the slave trade.

He still didn’t see.

 

After he stopped being a ship’s captain,

He became ordained in the church of

England and was a pastor in London.

Eventually, through his understanding of scripture

and his work as a pastor, he began to rethink

his past and the institution of slavery.

He started to see.

 

He became repentant of his past, and eventually

started to work with English lawmakers to end the slave trade

and became a vocal leader in the abolition movement

that eventually led to the end of slavery in England in 1807.

He later wrote:  “It will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me, 

that I was, once, an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders,”

 

Normally the words of a pastor from more than 200 years ago

would be forgotten with the ages,

but the words of John Newton are remembered

because in 1779, he wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace”,

one of the most popular and familiar hymns ever written.

 

People call it John Newton’s spiritual autobiography in verse.

“Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind but now I see.”

 

John Newton became a Christian in name in 1748,

but his actual conversion took place over many decades.

He wrote: "I cannot consider myself to have been a believer in the full

sense of the word, until a considerable time afterwards."

 

Jesus doesn’t just make Christians and then leave us

to our own devices. Jesus is constantly opening our eyes.

Helping us to see and understand more about God’s will.

Christianity and the church have changed. A lot.

Change can hurt and can be hard to deal with.

But change is necessary. 

There’s no shame in changing our convictions.

 

Jesus said,

“I came into this world

so that those who do not see may see,

and those who think they can see,

will realize that they might be blind.”

  

Realizing and admitting that we are or were or could be blind,

that we might not understand everything right now is the first step.

Acknowledging that we do not know all.

That we may have been operating under false assumptions

is the first vulnerable step to our transformation in Christ.

 

God doesn’t want us to cling to our traditions,

or the way our parents did it, or what we believed

in our first years in Sunday School.

Jesus wants us to see things through new eyes every day.

 

Jesus doesn’t just heal people’s eyes.

Jesus helps us to see.

We die to our own sight, and we rise to Jesus’s sight.

 

I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind, but now I see.