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November 19, 2006
Jesus, the Sight-Giver
Isaiah 35: 1-10
John 9: 1-17
November 19th, 2006
This morning we have read about one of Jesus’ loving acts of healing that reminded early Christians of the prophecy of Isaiah. “When our God comes then the eyes of the blind will be opened.” Jesus was not equally successful in healing all kinds of blindness.
There is more than one kind of blindness. This story is about our God’s encounter with two kinds of blindness. Jesus did not always heal physical blindness in the same way. Sometimes He spoke a word and a blind person could see. In one instance he spat on a man’s eyes and he gradually began to see. He needed another dose of Jesus’ touch to see clearly. Maybe Jesus healed this man gradually as an illustration of how gradually we are healed of spiritual blindness.
Physical blindness is not as harmful as spiritual blindness. A person whose eyes don’t see is not destructive. A blind person often has other senses that become sharper making up for the loss of eye-sight. Part of the charm of Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles and the glorious Italian tenor, Andrea Bocelli, blinded at age twelve, is that they sing from their hearts in a way that reaches deep inside us all.
Not so with a person who will not “see,” whose heart is hard, who is locked in a bias, a prejudice, a habit of mind. This kind of person will not admit to being blind. “I see things right,” such a person insists. Jesus came to heal this kind of blindness too. A physically blind person lives with her uncertainty as a fact of life. A spiritually blind person may not be lacking in certainty. “Maybe wrong, but never in doubt,” we poke fun uneasily at such a person.
Unfortunately with the best intentions things we “see” we may see in error. Honestly we may be dead wrong, imagining that we see. This is our predicament when it comes to things of God. As Paul reminds us in Romans 1, there are those who worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator, often unwittingly I think. Blindness, after all, is a problem of not being able to see.
In our story this morning both physical and spiritual blindness are spread before us. The man was blind from birth. The religious leaders whose eyes worked just fine, grew more blind as they refused to accept the obvious, that Jesus healed the man born blind. Their trouble in “seeing” had to do with their confusion as to the purpose of the Sabbath Day. How could Jesus be from God if He healed on the Sabbath? Did God not command Israel to do no work on the Sabbath?
I don’t think the purpose of this story was so that Christians should forever poke fun at Jewish Pharisees for being so blind as not to recognize that Jesus did the work of God. Indeed, the Pharisees had a point. They raised a question interesting in itself.
Behind the question that seems so obviously answered to us they dithered with the question, “If a man’s work is that of a “faith-healer,” shouldn’t He refrain from this work on the Sabbath the way a carpenter should?”
Why did it bother them so much that Jesus healed people on the Sabbath? Was it just a passion for keeping God’s law? Is there not a scale of values, so that routinely keeping the Sabbath Day holy can be interrupted when there is the opportunity to do good? All sorts of exceptions find their way into the Jewish oral law. It’s the intention that matters.
Sure Jesus could have waited till the following day, but He was here now where and as there was a need. Was their concern for the Sabbath a smokescreen “principle” hiding jealousy, or some other human smallness? We wonder, but we should not presume on them ill motives.
Some religious kinds of refusal to see seem obvious to us but not to others. How can the Muslim Al-Qaida terrorists fail to see the evil of their deeds? We call them terrorists; but they call themselves defenders of God’s true way.
Otherwise devout Christians in the Union of South Africa and in our country were blind to their sin of racial prejudice. They claimed they merely accepted the curse God placed on Noah’s son Ham—the father of all the dark-skinned races.
Abusive husbands and fathers are customarily blind to their ill behavior. Christian husbands believe they are merely exercising their headship in the home as they grow impatient when their commands fall on deaf ears. Thus they may become emotionally or even physically abusive to enforce God’s law as they perceive it. The list could go on and on of blindnesses that affect us all.
Thus we knowingly quote Robert Burns’ poem with regard to other people, “Wad some power the gift to give us, to see ourselves as others see us. It would from many a blunder free us.” It’s remarkable how we think others should heed Burns’ poem.
Let us come back to the story again. The man in the Gospel story this morning was born blind. Unlike the other blind folk who may have been blinded by disease or accident, this man’s blindness was perceived as God’s punishment for sin--maybe his own, maybe his parents’.
The religious leaders who challenged Jesus believed that if God was punishing this man for sin it was wrong to interrupt the judgment of God—particularly on the Sabbath. But Jesus said this man was not blind because of anyone’s sin.
A friend of mine of years ago became a Christian after reading this story. Dr. Purushotman Krishna was a professor of Oriental philosophy at Durban University in South Africa. Christian students in house to house visitation left him a copy of the New Testament. Some time afterward he picked it up, opened to John 9, and read this story. The penny dropped; the light went on in his mind. We are not punished in future lives for sins in previous lives. It melted his heart and he trusted in Jesus.
Perhaps this awareness was one purpose of this story. But another purpose is that we should stoop beneath the load of people with handicaps of any sort. Jesus said the divine reason for the man being born blind it was that the works of God might be made manifest in Him. The work of God was to restore his sight.
We draw inferences from this about other hard things in our lives and in the lives of others. Romans 8: 28 tells us “All things work together for good to those who love God, who are the called according to His purpose.” “All things?” Mike Bergmann and I spoke of this truth to young folk in the Work Release Jail this past Tuesday. Even the Holocaust? Even Saddam Hussein’s genocides? Even 9/11? It’s hard to think this. Certainly the immediate good is hard to see in the wake of great evil. But looking for good that God may bring, brings immediate healing effects inside us.
I look for the good that God will bring out of the “evil” He sends my way. Simply thinking this softens me inside. It is an antidote to bitterness. It makes you and me possible sources of blessing we would not be otherwise. God has to use strong medicine to cure the hardness of the human heart. When my hard heart is softened so that I can become of use to God, I may well look back and thank God for the hard things that came my way. I realize this does not satisfy us in trying to imagine the good that can come from immense evils.
What Jesus did in this story targeted in particular the blindness of religious people. We might say that for religious reasons these spiritual leaders took issue with Jesus. I think of this and realize that we who have strong beliefs may not realize how God needs to heal us.
I see how this story asks us religious folk to open the eyes of our hearts to areas of our own blindness. Andrew Sullivan has called attention in a recent book to how the great tension between Muslims in the East and we in West is due to the certainty on both sides that we know the will of God for sure. He writes that the fervor and fanaticism that grips millions across the Muslim world is because they know the will of God regarding us in the West. Thus a suicide bomber may go to her violent death with a smile on her face, in total calm—knowing God willed her to. You and I read this and we are appalled.
The natural response to this is to develop a counter-weight of fervor and fanaticism, or, lacking that, of force. Let’s fight the fanatic enemy with greater force. In the West we have a problem; few of us take matters of faith as seriously as do many Musims. A faith that does not regulate our lives is not a very strong force against an enemy that takes extremes for granted. We see they are blind to reason and decency. They see that we are blind to truth; indeed that we tolerate great evil in our materialistic society. They see how listless is our devotion, while they bow their foreheads to the ground five times a day towards Mecca in prayer, wherever they are.
I see a glimpse of Jesus speaking to us in this story. Jesus did not engage the Pharisees who challenged His healing on the Sabbath by arguing about the Law of Moses as a lawyer might do. He did not stand up to them and say, “I’m right.” He did not exercise the force He might have used. He quietly did what was the right thing to do.
He healed the man.
And we may suspect that if one of the Pharisees had been afflicted with a stroke as He stood pointing a finger at Jesus on that Sabbath Day, Jesus would have healed the man—just as he replaced the ear of the High Priest’s soldier in the Garden of Gethsemane after Peter whacked it off.
How do the eyes of our hearts need changing? Are we open to the question? Isaiah said, “When our God comes, then the eyes of the blind will be opened.” Indeed, we should acknowledge that Jesus was God and worship Him.
But seeing that Jesus indeed healed this man is not enough. Physical blindness was not the only kind of blindness Jesus came to heal. The deeper and more difficult healing is the blindness inside of us. To acknowledge that we may not see is the first step in God giving us the gift of sight.
Maybe if you and I will concede there may be a need for this, the Holy Spirit may open this squinting observation so that our eyes may open still wider, till we take vigorous stock of ourselves. I often remember that Scripture tells us that God looks for humble and contrite hearts for His residence. Humility and reticence hardly seem virtues in a day of religious conflict. But they are still needed for God to be at home in our hearts.
What blindness do I need to see in myself? It is a good question. God can heal us of our blindness—through Jesus Christ our Lord, who still opens the eyes of the blind.
Let us pray: O Lord, thank you that Jesus healed people whose eyes didn’t work. Grant that He may heal us of our blindness too. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at November 19, 2006 09:30 AM