Artist: El Greco (1567)
Read John 9
"One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see."
John 9:25 NRSV
There are probably few things harder in life than
transforming from blindness to vision. Our physical body proves this, as we
know that most of us begin life with perfect vision and spend the rest of our
life inching toward blindness. However, the transformation from blindness to
vision is an essential part of our faith journey as Christians. We have all
sung the beautiful line in Amazing Grace declaring, “I once was blind but now I
see,” but we also know full well that the vision with which we see is not always
clear or easy to come by.
John’s story today is a great example. A man who is
blind becomes a man with vision, while a group of Pharisees who have vision,
are truly blind because they can’t see the work of God being done right under
their noses. It is a story that should prompt all of us to stop in our tracks
and wonder: Am I missing God at work in my midst right now?
Perhaps it is like that old joke of the man who is
trapped in his house by a raging flood. The floodwaters rise and he prays for
God to save him. Soon a man in a boat comes by and tries to rescue him but he
says, “No thanks, I’m a praying man and God is going to save me.” The
floodwaters rise more, the man prays more as he climbs onto his roof. A
helicopter comes and drops down a rescue basket and yells for the man to climb
in. “No thanks,” he yells back, “I’ve prayed to God, he will save me.” The
floodwaters rise and the man is washed away to his death. When he gets to
heaven he is ANGRY. He stomps up to God and shakes his fist yelling, “What just
happened down there? I prayed for you to save me and you failed me.” To which
God replied, “Man, I sent you a boat and a helicopter, what more did you want?”
Sometimes we get so caught up in our own idea of what
God should and should not do that we are blinded to what God truly is doing.
Sometimes we get caught up in our limited understanding or experience of God
and we don’t let ourselves see God outside of what we already know. Much like the Pharisees who could only see
God as the Giver of Law, we often can’t see God as the light of the world,
because our eyes are adjusted to the dimness of our spiritual blinders.
In John’s Gospel there are really two kinds of people:
those who see and those who don’t. For John, seeing is believing and those who
can’t see the truth of Jesus are blinded by misunderstanding and sometimes
outright stubbornness. So, how do we embrace Christ in ways that transform us
spiritually from blindness to vision? How do we make sure we are the man who
once was blind, rather than the Pharisee who chooses to live in blindness?
Scripture shows us three things we need to do in our life…
The first thing we need before we can see is to HEAR.
When Tim (my husband) received his first full time
appointment as a United Methodist pastor he were in for quite the culture
shock. He was born and raised in the city of Charlotte, NC so he had very
little experience with the country life. They moved us to the middle of an
Amish community in Hamptonville, NC so you can imagine how foreign this seemed
to him.
I will never forget one day he left to take something
to one of three small churches which was down a dirt road in the middle of
nowhere. After he had been gone for a while I hear his car come screeching into
the driveway and he came running in the door yelling, “Get the girls! Hurry!
Get in the car, I’ve seen a creature you won’t believe! You have to come see
for yourself.”
Naturally I’m curious but he will not answer any
questions until we are in the car and speeding back toward the church to see
the “creature” he has discovered. So I began to question him as to what the
“creature” looked like and this is what he said, “It has the hump of a camel,
the ears of a goat, the face of a sheep, and the body of a cow.” He didn’t understand why I burst out laughing
at this description instead of having my curiosity peaked by it. The reason
was, of course, that I was a country girl and I knew exactly what he had just
described.
Tim had seen the “creature” which is own eyes but with
no knowledge of the existence of such an animal he was lost as to how to
identify it. On the other hand, I wasn’t there to SEE it, but by his
description I could hear his description and know exactly what it was. My own
eyesight only confirmed what I already knew: Tim had had his first encounter
with a Brahman.
Hearing can be a powerful witness.
Science has proven to us that those who are visually
impaired often have a heightened sense of hearing. It is the body’s way of
compensating for not being able to see danger. Even if one can’t see with their
eyes, they can often hear enough to “see” what is happening around them.
We know from the story that the man gains his vision
and goes on to be a powerful witness for Jesus. Notice, however, when he is
giving testimony he still has never seen Jesus, he has only heard him. We know
this because at the end when Jesus finds him he has to tell the man who he is.
Transforming from blindness to vision requires us to
first hear what Jesus is saying to us. In John 10:4, Jesus goes on to say he is
the shepherd and his sheep follow him because they recognize his voice. Of
course we don’t recognize a voice we have only heard from one to two times.
Recognition implies familiarity. We come to hear Jesus by spending time
listening to him and getting to know his voice.
When we read scripture daily we learn to hear his
voice in his teachings and interactions with others. When we devote ourselves
to prayer we hear his whispers of love and acceptance and his murmurs of
direction and guidance. We learn his voice when we surround ourselves with
people who also recognize the shepherds voice and can help us hear when noise
inside our own heads gets too much. We need prayer warriors and other faithful
sheep to help us hear what Jesus is saying.
Once we have heard from Jesus, the transformation
continues as we OBEY what we hear…
I would imagine that the blind beggar’s ears perked up
when he heard a large group approaching. Maybe his excitement over a possible
donation dimmed when he heard whispered of the dreaded question that had
haunted him his whole life: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that
he was born blind? (John 9:2)” It seems a ridiculous question today but then
they had little understanding of the physiology of the body, so it was often
assumed that a disability was a punishment from God. He had probably heard this
question debated hundreds of time but I bet he had never before heard a Rabbi
answer in the way of Jesus.
“Neither…he was born this way so that God’s works might
be revealed in him.” Jesus goes on to make his startling confession, “I am the
light of the world,” the one sent to do the work of God. Perhaps this is what
prompts the man to obey what Jesus tells him next, even though it seems quite
odd (John 9:6-7) – because he had never before had a Rabbi declare him innocent
of a sinful past. Or perhaps because he had never before hear ANYONE say that
he was useful for anything, but especially to be used by God.
Obediently he makes his way to the pool of Siloam and
he enters the waters to wash the spit moistened mud pie off his face and
suddenly his darkness is gone and light floods in. The man who was blind is now
the man who can see.
The man who HEARS and OBEYS can now SEE, but we learn
very quickly that those in the story we assumed could see are in fact quite
blind as to what God has been doing in their midst.
What causes their spiritual blindness? How they “see”
the man gives us a clue: To the Disciples he is the man who was born
blind, to the neighbors he is the man who used to sit and beg, to the
Pharisees he is the man who was formerly blind. Here before them stood a
miracle – a man who could now see - but all they see is the man who once
couldn’t.
Sometimes we get so caught up in the past that we
can’t see that God is doing something new and beautiful right now. Being
blinded to Jesus isn’t hard at all, we simply live looking backward – at who
we’ve always been, what we’ve always done, where we’ve always gone - and we
fail to see who God wants us to be, what God wants us to do and where God wants
us to go.
This is the reason that Spiritual vision is so vital –
we can’t live into God’s will without it. God wants us to see what we can
become, who we can become, in light of the one sent to save us. What does that
mean?
When John begins his Gospel he takes us back to the
creation story with his opening words, “In the beginning…” it is a theme he
returns to often and it is in today’s story as well. Jesus, reminiscent of God
on the newly created earth, leans down and runs his fingers through the dust,
he spits to create earthy clay and places it upon the mans eyes, from the
waters, he rises, cleansed and reborn into a new life of new vision. Where once
he could only hear Jesus, now he will see as well.
The voice of our shepherd invites us to become a whole
new creation; that we might shed our spiritual blinders and step into the light
of his healing hand to embrace a future of purpose and vision.
Hear that Jesus
is calling
Be obedient to that call
See all that God has in store for you.
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