4th Sunday in Lent
March 19, 2023
St. Peter Lutheran Church, Cornwall, CT
1As [Jesus] walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. 2His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” 3Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. 4We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. 5As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” 6When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, 7saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see. 8The 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?” 9Some were saying, “It is he.” Others were saying, “No, but it is someone like him.” He kept saying, “I am the man.” 10But they kept asking him, “Then how were your eyes opened?” 11He 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.” 12They said to him, “Where is he?” He said, “I do not know.”
13They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. 14Now it was a sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. 15Then 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.” 16Some 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. 17So 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.”
18The 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 19and asked them, “Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?” 20His parents answered, “We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind; 21but 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.” 22His 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. 23Therefore his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.”
24So 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.” 25He answered, “I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” 26They said to him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” 27He 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?” 28Then they reviled him, saying, “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. 29We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.” 30The man answered, “Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. 31We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will. 32Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. 33If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” 34They answered him, “You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?” And they drove him out.
35Jesus heard that they had driven him out, and when he found him, he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” 36He answered, “And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him.” 37Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.” 38He said, “Lord, I believe.” And he worshiped him. 39Jesus 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.” 40Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” 41Jesus 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
I invite you to think for a moment about all the incredible technology at our disposal in this moment in time. Probably many of you are carrying right now in your pockets a device that sends information to and from space in order to access all the knowledge of the world at the swipe of a finger. Now Imagine traveling back 100 years ago with just such a smartphone – even without the internet and cell service to connect it, people would be baffled by its capacity and at the time they would have had a hard time even imagining it as a concept much less a reality.
Or think about 1000 years ago when many still believed the earth to be flat, despite early Greek philosophers having more or less proven that the earth was round. Today we would laugh at their notions as backward or silly because we’ve not only sailed and flown around the globe but been able to view it from space. All of which would have been merely a fanciful dream to someone in the Middle Ages.
And that makes me wonder – what is it that I believe now that will become a relic of the past in 50 years or 100 years or 1000 years? What sort of limitations do I assume are inherent in the world that will become obsolete in the future? Where does my imagination fail in picturing what is possible?
I think that question is at the root of today’s story of Jesus and the man born blind. Think about all the assumptions embedded in the story:
The people assume that the blindness of this man and other physical ailments were a result of particular sins. Today we might mostly laugh at this notion, and yet we blame all sorts of misfortune, poverty, ailments, and the like on people’s bad choices whether they really were choices or not and ignoring the social context the exacerbates so much suffering.
The particular religious leaders in this story fail to imagine a broader interpretation of the Sabbath day, even though Jewish traditions already had many ways of interpreting the gift of the day of rest. We might judge them for judging Jesus’ healing on the Sabbath as if they were backward folk. But we continue often to have a traditional view of what ought to happen on our day of religious observance and resist disruptions to that.
The man himself probably dreamed of what it was like to see, but likely considered it nothing more than a fantasy that he could one day have sight given to his eyes. For years he navigated a world in which his blindness was an obstacle to participation in the community. Though today we have made strides in welcoming people with visual impairment, we sighted folks still often consider them in need of help or, worse, pity. I wonder that as much as we still don’t have a way to change many kinds of visual impairment, we also still need our imaginations broadened to welcome people whose bodies function differently than the prevailing cultural norm.
There are always assumptions that we operate within. We may look back on other times or look at other cultures and make judgments about the assumptions they make, but we, too, assume certain things that may one day be disproven. We have come to assume the existence of hunger, poverty, and inequality in our world. We have come to assume certain systems of governance and economics. We have come to assume that the world as we know it will continue more or less as it is.
While that can sometimes be comforting, we’ve also made peace with the reality of certain things in our lives. We carry grief, for those who have died, for hopes never realized. We carry regrets and shame. We live with bodies that are prone to diseases and traumas. And we have, in some ways, made a certain uneasy peace with all that as it is. Even when we hope and pray for things to change, we have a certain awareness that even as some situations will be relieved, in general our world is one that operates with grief, regret, and disease. Things will always be that way.
And in the church we have a lot of assumptions about how things will be, often that they will be very much like what we have always known. There will be church buildings with pews (an invention only of recent centuries), there will be formally trained clergy at every congregation (something that’s been inconsistent at best across the history of the Christian church), and that worship, fellowship, learning, and the like will be much as we recognize them from our own background. We assume things will be as they are.
But this story of Jesus and the blind man upends all the assumptions. The man’s assumption his body would always work in the way it had, the crowd’s assumption that ailments were a result of misdeeds, and the religious leader’s assumptions about what the Sabbath is really for.
Often we assume we can just celebrate the transformation of the man born blind and dismiss the others as somehow out of touch with the glory of the transformation. But I don’t think it’s quite that simple. The restoration of sight alleviates one major challenge for the man but suddenly makes him the center of a community controversy. And the rest expend a considerable amount of energy trying to restore the order they’re familiar with. This transformation is disruptive!
That’s what Jesus does. Disrupts the way things are. Yes, he comforts, heals, feeds and teaches. But that’s disruptive in its own way, challenging the economics and politics of the day, challenging the institutional expressions of religion, challenging people to a new way of life that lets go of a lot of assumptions they’ve made. Ultimately, it’s what gets him killed. These are the lengths to which we will sometimes go to keep things stable even if they aren’t good. And if that were the end of the story, it would be a great commentary on how difficult it is to transform the world.
But even in Lent we know the story does not end there. In the end Jesus disrupts even the thing we think is absolute and final – death itself. Resurrection is a disruption to our world’s sense of order.
We are weary of disruption. I know. COVID lingers and continues to interfere with our lives. We have collectively endured three years this week of total disruption to our lives. We live in a time of rapidly changing technology, pendulum swings in political leadership, and an economy that bounces up and down in ways the experts can’t even seem to predict. And our lives are full of their own individual disruptions and roller coasters. And so we may not always welcome Jesus inviting us in to something new.
That’s part of why the New England Synod is making this fundamental concept of our faith its theme for this year. Because we are in a time of upheaval as the church. What we have known is in many ways shifting and changing. Some remnant of what we have known will remain and yet, but Jesus is disrupting something. I have deep faith that God is at work in the world and faith is growing in places we don’t even imagine, but we may not always jump at the chance to have our worldview challenged and to have what is familiar threatened, even if the world as we know it isn’t what we want it to be.
Death and resurrection is one giant disruption that is at the heart of faith, one that even after Jesus we still sometimes struggle to believe. It’s the equivalent of a renaissance poet trying to make sense of a smartphone. It’s so contrary to our expectations of the way things will be that we sometimes struggle to even imagine it. But do not be afraid, even when we aren’t ready, Jesus breaks into our lives and raises us to new life. Disrupting our brokenness, our pain, disrupting our entrenched inequality, disrupting our grief and shame, and, yes, even disrupting death itself.
-Pastor Steven Wilco