Jesu Juva
John 9
March 19, 2023
Lent 4A
Dear saints of our Savior~
There was a man blind from birth . . . and Jesus healed him; and that man was brought to faith in Jesus. “Lord, I believe,” he said. The healing of the blind is one of those miracles that the Messiah was supposed to be doing. The Old Testament prophecies often declared that the blind receiving sight would be a surefire sign of the coming Messiah. And there’s perhaps no other miracle that Jesus performed more often, more regularly, than healing the blind—perhaps seven times or more. But in John chapter 9 we have what is undoubtedly the longest, most detailed account of a blind man being healed.
The man had always been blind—blind from birth. And in the religious world of the first century, such a terrible disability was always believed to be the result of sin. “Who sinned,” the disciples wanted to know, “this man or his parents?” Religion for them was a matter of cause and effect. Bad things (like blindness) must happen to bad people. Sin now; pay later. Crime, then punishment. There had to be a reason for this man’s blindness. Someone must’ve sinned big-time, right?
Even we enlightened, baptized children of God think that way sometimes. When tragedy strikes—when disability is diagnosed—when chronic pain becomes intense—what’s the inevitable question? What did I do to deserve this? And even if that question isn’t being asked, it’s usually because we know perfectly well all that we have done to deserve the payback we’re now receiving. Either way, this attitude is one of the devil’s most effective tools. If he can lead you to self-pity or to self-justification, the end result is the same. You’re stuck seeing yourself, instead of seeing the Savior. Your eyes are on you—not on Jesus. And there’s no salvation when your sights are squarely set on the self.
Jesus quickly demolishes all our ideas about a religion of quid pro quos—of this, then that—of cause and effect. “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents,” Jesus said, “but so that the works of God might be displayed in him.” Go figure. This man’s blindness would become a canvas on which the glory of Jesus would be painted in dazzling colors as the light of the world. It turns out that our sickness, suffering, and pain—those are the places where the Savior displays some of His very best work. Jesus’ power is made perfect in our weakness.
Do you believe that? By nature, we don’t. When tragedy strikes—when disabilities weigh heavily on our hearts—we always ask the wrong question: Why? The better question is this—faith asks: Where? Where is Jesus as the darkness closes in? Where is my Savior in the midst of my suffering? That’s the question to ask. That’s the question Jesus wants to answer.
The blind man couldn’t see Jesus, of course; but Jesus “saw” him. The
Savior’s eyes are always turned toward those who are lost and lowly, fearful and faithless. Jesus goes right to the blind man. And before even speaking one word to him, Jesus spits on the ground and makes a messy batch of clay. And Jesus applies this messy mud to the blind man’s eyes. It makes no sense, humanly speaking. The man can’t see and now he’s got mud in his eyes. Jesus makes him even blinder, in a sense. But remember, this is Jesus-mud—Messiah mud—the clay of the Christ. The same God who created man from mud in the beginning, He now applies a little bit of mud to fix what’s broken in this one man. Jesus then sends him off to wash with water in the pool of Siloam. So he went, and washed, and came back seeing. (Baptism, anyone?)
But even while this one poor man was miraculously receiving the gift of sight and the blessing of vision, there was another group of men going blind. The Pharisees were ever more tightly shutting their eyes. They turned a blind eye to the plain evidence right in front of their faces. Dozens of people could testify to the truth that the man who had always been blind as a bat was now seeing everything with 20/20 clarity—without so much as contact lenses, lasik surgery, or a pair of cheaters from CVS. The whole episode spelled out in flashing neon letters: Jesus is the Messiah.
But the Pharisees shut their eyes to all of that. What they saw—the thing that caught their eyes—was that Jesus had broken a rule. Jesus made mud on the Sabbath day—a day when no work (not even mud-making) was allowed. The Pharisees had come up with 32 different kinds of work that were forbidden on the Sabbath, including the kneading of clay, lest some pottery accidentally be created.
These men were experts in the Law of God. They were zealous for the Law of God. And let’s be clear: The Law of God—as summarized in the Ten Commandments—is good and holy. But, the Law cannot make you good and holy. It doesn’t have that power. It has the power to instruct us, to curb our sin, to mirror our sin back to us, and to guide us. But it doesn’t have the power to make a sinner holy. It can’t make a bad tree bear good fruit. Only Jesus can do that. Only the Savior can change you and make you good and holy. Only He can make saints out of sinners by washing them and healing them, in the power of His death and resurrection. But those poor Pharisees, they couldn’t see it. Or, rather, they refused to see the wonderful good news that Christ Jesus came into the world—not to add more chapters to the rule book—but to save sinners.
By nature, we are just like that man born blind. We have sinned. Our parents have sinned. Their parents have sinned, all the way back to our first parents where the business of sin began. Sin is a hereditary condition. We are born spiritually blind, steeped in sin. It takes Jesus—it takes His anointing—to heal our blindness. Not an anointing with mud . . . but with blood, and with the water and the word of holy baptism. In that cleansing splash Jesus gives forgiveness of sins, rescues from death and the devil, and gives eternal salvation. There in that washing the sacrificial death of God’s own Son is applied to you. His sinless and holy life, applied to you. His Sonship—yours.
The blindness that plagues us isn’t so much the lack of vision, but the lack of faith. In our blindness we are blind to God. We live most days as if He didn’t exist or matter. When things are going well, we’re more than willing to tout the smart strategies we’ve successfully employed. And when things aren’t going well, we see our sufferings as punishment. What have I done to deserve this? We don’t fear God, or love Him, or trust that His grace is sufficient—that His power is made perfect in our weakness—that He wants to display His mighty works in our lowly lives—that our lives are a canvass on which the lively colors of the Christ will shine forever. But by nature, we just don’t see it.
But something happened to you as you groped around in the darkness—Jesus reached out and grabbed you. He anointed you with the Holy Spirit in Baptism. Jesus reached out and gave you eyes to see Him, ears to hear Him, faith to receive His gifts with thanksgiving. You are just as much a “miracle” as the man healed in today’s text. The muddy fingerprints of Jesus are all over you. Jesus saw you and saved you. Not because you did your part. Not because you’re such a great rule-keeper. No, you were lost and Jesus found you. You were blind, but now you see. In the watery, wet Word of baptism the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, the poor hear good news, the dead are raised, sinners are justified for Jesus’s sake. In the watery, wet Word of baptism you were called out of darkness into the marvelous light of Christ. In His light, you see light.
It’s an interesting fact that, once the blind man went and washed off the mud and began to see, Jesus was nowhere to be found. He had never laid his fully-functioning eyes on Jesus. Only after the man gets excommunicated from the synagogue does Jesus go and seek Him out a second time. Jesus asks him, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” “And who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?” Notice he doesn’t believe yet. Seeing—even seeing Jesus—is not the same thing as believing. He can see Jesus just fine with his newly-healed eyes, but he doesn’t yet believe. So Jesus speaks, “You have seen him, and it is he who is speaking to you.” The Word is what makes faith. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of Christ. Not by seeing, not by miracles. By hearing. The Word of Christ is what creates and sustains faith. It’s why you’re here today.
Then, and only then, the man says to Jesus, “Lord, I believe.” And then, St. John records that the man “worshipped” Jesus. And what do you think that worship looked like? Did he stand there casually chatting? No, he knelt—he knelt down low. The word for “worship” in the gospels almost always means that bodies are moving, that knees are bending, reflecting the reality of heaven—where every knee shall bow and every tongue confess (and every eye behold) that Jesus Christ is Lord. By His death He destroyed the power of death. And by His resurrection He has opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers. One day you will see it all with new and resurrected eyes, and the sight will be glorious. But for now you hear, and you believe.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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