TEXT: John Chapter 9
“ME AND MY STORIES”
Years ago, I had a secretary who was really into a couple of soap operas. She and the others in the office loved talking about what they called, “their stories.” “I love my stories!” she used to say, “Me and my stories!”
Well, this covid lockdown has given many of us a chance to get caught up on “our stories” whatever they are, but today they call it “binge watching.” When we have TV on, it’s usually news stories on Youtube, but sometimes I just feel hungry for something more story-ish, so we might watch a movie or take on a series of some kind.
The thing is, we all need our stories. There is something deeply inherent in humanity that makes us look to story/narratives in order to find meaning. Good stories feed our minds with an analogy to our own lives and help make our days sensible to us. Stories inspire. Stories heal. Jesus often taught with stories, because they scratch our souls where they itch.
When there is no story, we tend to invent stories to fill the spaces. We see that written large in America in terms of what we call NEWS—which are brief narratives of the days’ events—and remarkably in false teachings and conspiracies.
Conspiracies are stories. Someone takes five or six verifiable facts or events and then re-presents them with all the “dots connected.” They create a narrative to make the chaos look meaningful. This is no different than watching some fluffy clouds and seeing elephants, dragons, or human faces—you can see them, but only as an act of imagination. You have to compose the things that resemble an elephant and then disregard everything about the clouds that is not elephant-like, then you can say, “Oh, yes! I see it!”
Covid conspiracies are all over the map, largely because people have time on their hands and have become extremely bored and frustrated. Because we need narrative to make meaning of the world, we are much more likely to accept a bad story over just a spray of unsatisfying facts and statistics. So which is the better story? To say that this pandemic is complex, and experts around the world are still learning about it and doing their best to put together reliable treatments and finally a vaccine—so please just be patient and keep praying for the best; or to say, “Oh! That’s just what Bill Gates wants you to think! This is a coordinated attempt by people in power to control the masses and establish the New World Order!” The latter is a much more satisfying story, but it is a silly lie, and mature people should be quick to reject such idiocies.
ABOUT THIS SERIES
For the next four weeks, we are going to look at texts testifying to Jesus’ healing of the blind. There are subtle differences to all the healings, but they all have things in common as well.
A little background on these healings in general:
1. There are no healings of the blind in the Old Testament. This is part of the reason the belief was that no one could heal the blind but God.
2. There are nine accounts of Jesus healing the blind in the Gospels.
3. There are no accounts of the Apostles healing the blind—nothing else in all the New Testament.
4. The healing of the blind was in particular a sign of God’s Messiah. We find this in multiple texts—especially in Isaiah—such as 35: 4-5:
“Say to those who are of a fearful heart, “Be strong, do not fear!
Here is your God. He will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense. He will come and save you.” Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped;”
5. Jesus performs more healings of the blind than any other kind. This certainly is to testify that Jesus is indeed God’s promised messiah, but I suggest we get something else from this; namely, the pattern by which we all come to authentic faith. We, like the blind, must have our eyes opened by the miraculous touch of Jesus.
THE BLIND MAN’S STORY
There are different kinds of faith, and our desire is for mature faith. One way we can look at the text we’ve heard read is just this—the movement toward Jesus and the changing attitude of this healed blind man as he moves closer to Jesus.
Consider: at first, he knows nothing about Jesus. He doesn’t cry out to him. He doesn’t asked to be healed. Jesus doesn’t ask, “Do you know who I am?” or “Do you want to be able to see?” Jesus just sees him (which is certainly more than most people may have done—in that day, like today—people preferred to ignore beggars).
The healing is prompted by the question from the Disciples? Why was he born blind? Did he sin or did his parents sin? Old Testament Judaism clearly identifies a tie between human misery and sin. If someone suffers some form of sin, then it must be because of sin—either the man’s, or his parents. Jesus tells them that neither is true, but he was born blind (verse 3):
“so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”
From there, Jesus just heals him—unilaterally, without asking for so much as a nod from the man. Now Jesus could have just said the word to heal him, but he goes to the trouble of spitting on the ground to make mud and then rubs the mud on the man’s eyes. There are at least two reasons for this:
1. Mudding the eyes was a technique of the day that other healers used. Jesus is doing the normal thing, perhaps to disguise or veil his divine power a bit.
2. It was the sabbath, and while it is no problem to heal or save a life on the sabbath, it was considered work to mix the dirt and saliva—to make mud—and to apply to the eyes—that was all work, and therefore sinful in the eyes of the Jews.
Jesus tells him to go and wash in the pool of Siloam, which means messenger or missionary. This is significant, because as the Son is sent as a missionary to the world, so we are sent as missionaries of Christ as the Church to continue His work in the world. The man washes and is healed, but he still doesn’t have much of a clue.
When first questioned, he’s as baffled as his questioners. Verse 12:
They said to him, “Where is he?” He said, “I do not know.” When they push, he adds the simple facts: “He put mud on my eyes; now I see.”
The Pharisees are divided. Some say he has to be from God, because no one has ever healed a man born blind, but others say that he clearly broke the Sabbath, and only a sinner would do that. So the serious faculty members and administrators look to this young man and ask him: “Who do you say he is?” He says, “He is a prophet,” which is his way of saying that Jesus is clearly sent by God as God’s representative.
The Pharisees call in his parents, who totally wimp out and don’t want to answer the questions. They make their son answer for himself: “He’s been bar mitzvah’ed” which means he is old enough to speak for himself as an adult and suffer the consequences himself. They totally fumbled their parents-of-the-year nomination.
The Pharisees pull him in again and turn up the heat. “Confess! How did he do it?” Now the young man’s spine is taking on its full, rocky shape. He says, “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” and when they ask him to tell the whole story again, he says, “Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples, too?” As in “like I want to become His disciple.” This is too much for the Pharisees, because Jesus isn’t part of their club, so they kick the newly-healed young man out of the synagogue, which is what his parents feared would happen to them before they threw their son under the bus.
He has testified to who Jesus is—as best as he can reckon—has declared his desire to follow Jesus and been persecuted for following. This is all quickly producing spiritual maturity.
Once he’s kicked out of the synagogue, Jesus hears about it and seeks him out. Jesus asks him, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” This is his catechism. Jesus doesn’t say, “Do you believe in me?” but “Do you believe in the Son of Man”—that is, the personal work of God on the earth. He says, “Who is he? Tell me and I’ll believe.” What a difference from his first examination! Jesus says, “You’re talkin’ to him!” And the man says in verse 38:
“Lord, I believe.” And he worshiped him.
No Jew would ever worship a human being. Although the gospel of John is filled with instances of Jesus revealing his divinity, this is the only place where he is worshipped in the flesh. Other gospels have accounts, but in John, this is it. This is mature faith—to worship Christ as Lord and God.
From blindness to sight, from seeing to testifying, and from testifying to suffering, and from suffering to faith and worship—this is the path of the blind beggar, and it is the story of us all, for we all come to faith as by a miraculous healing. No one comes to authentic faith except by a miraculous healing of Christ.
You may be thinking, “Why do we all need a healing touch? Why isn’t it enough that I simply believe? What could be missing?”
AUTHENTIC FAITH
As we’ve said before, there are different kinds of belief—different levels of believing—and for faith to be authentic, we need to know the differences.
Popular atheist celebrity Richard Dawkins says that Christians in the west are Christians simply because they were raised that way. It’s what your parents and grandparents believed, so you believe it. It is the religion of the land, and if you had been born in China you would be a Buddhist (at least, pre-communist China), a Hindu if you were born in India, and a Muslim if born in the middle east. He’s not entirely wrong; there is a kind of faith that seeps into us by osmosis from our host culture. The easiest faith to take on is the one our loving parents built into us. If not our parents, our community, our local Christian friends, see to it that we are more likely to become Christians than anything else. This kind of faith is very shallow. It is the faith of the herd mentality. The path of least resistance; cultural faith rather than true faith.
If you simply believe because your parents believed, that is pretty thin faith. Christianity has always been the main religion of America—it still is—but that is no reason to follow Jesus, because the rest of the crowd is. Even Richard Dawkins grew up going to chapel services, singing hymns, and lowering his head to intone the prayers of the Church of England common book of prayer, but how deep was it?
Q: What are we to say to Dawkins? When he says you’re only a Christian because you grew up in a Christian culture, what is our response?
Q: How are we to know if our faith is anything more than just cultural conformity?
And if this is the truth about our faith, isn’t it mere herd mentality—the blind leading the blind—albeit in the right direction?
Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard criticized the Christianity of Denmark for this same quality. He said that everyone born in Denmark is a Christian, because everyone gets baptized and goes to the state-run Church. He criticized the shallowness of popular faith—it had such little authenticity because it was just how you followed the crowd if you were Danish. Faith amounted to little more than a herd mentality.
For faith to be authentic, it must come from someplace much deeper than happy conformity. This happy conformity was the downfall of the Pharisees—they couldn’t approve of Jesus without breaking the club rules.
Of them, Jesus says, at the end of the text, verse 41:
“If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains”
Spiritually, as sons and daughters of Adam, we are all born blind. We are incapable of seeing what is good, righteous, and holy because we simply do not have the eyes for it. Those who think they see are worse off for it.
FIND YOUR BLIND
The path to mature spirituality requires that we acknowledge our blindness before we move on. You and I must “find our blind” if we are to be healed and whole in following Christ.
How do we “find our blind”? We acknowledge our blindness and we study Scripture, attentively listening for God’s Word to speak to us, to call us, and to instruct us in our faith and practice.
We study best when we do so acknowledging our blindness. We read and study best when we do so to identify our blindspots. The Word of God challenges us—constantly—and disrupts our lives by reaching out to touch us so that we may be healed.
Be clear: there is no safe, overstuffed sofa for faithfulness. If you follow, your life and comforts will be disrupted. You will be raised up, made to see, and called to testify to the power of Christ at your cost. There’s really nothing easy-going about it.
Nor do we ever “arrive” in the sense of completing the work. The work of our conversion—the work of the Holy Spirit in us—is ongoing till the day we die, and I don’t doubt that God intends to continue our conversion once we’re face to face with Him.
11th-century Anselm of Canterbury put this into a formula:
fides quaerens intellectum
“(authentic) faith seeks understanding”
This means that when faith is authentic, it remains in process—still growing, still studying, still identifying blindspots—our whole lives. Authentic faith is that kind of shark which must keep moving forward or else it dies. Authentic faith stays hungry, curious, ever-seeking to learn more, see more, and follow Christ more closely.
Authentic faith carries within it the constant awareness of our essential blindness.
We are not activist zealots for Jesus; we are His humble followers. We are like moles—born underground—now crawling along on the surface blinded by the Light of Christ.
If you are not blinded by the light of Christ, you are not seeing the same light.
Remember Saul (who became Paul)—his conversion required literal blinding in order that God could open his eyes to Christ. He was too proud, too full of himself, too stuffed-up with Pharisaical confidence of the Jewish religion for there to be any room in his life for Christ.
Christ saved Paul—against his own will—by striking him blind in order that he might see. So how do you and I find our blind?
BLINDNESS, UNLIMITED
The world is born blind and into total blindness. Some have their eyes opened and are enabled to see and know that The Lord is God—that Jesus is the Son and Messiah—but there is no choosing this.
Jesus opens the eyes of the blind. He opens the eyes of those born blind, which is the only way any of us come to believe. We are not blind people who choose not to be blind; we are incapable of seeing or knowing our condition unless sightedness is somehow revealed to us.
Every person who comes to faith does so not by choice but by the miracle of God curing spiritual blindess. I once was blind but now I see. How? Not by my choosing it, but by the Amazing Grace of God who chose that I should see.
Every person who comes to faith is evidence of a miracle of God’s own activity.
Jesus healed those who were born blind—just as we are born blind. Some had no idea what was happening, but once they could see, they proclaimed His name.
Does God open all the eyes of all the blind? Apparently not, for we live in a world where many disbelieve entirely. They are blind; they remain blind, and they refuse to acknowledge that they are blind. We may say we have seen the Light, but they can only ask, “So what is Light?” and “You’re making all this up, aren’t you?”
It is not really a choice; the blind cannot simply choose to see. Unless God acts upon them, they will never see the Light.
Even so, some blind do ask to be healed. In Scripture, there are those who beg Jesus to heal them. There is good news here for these seekers of the world, for they can pray, “Lord, let me see! Lord, give me the gift of faith!” Jesus says, “All who seek shall find,” but it is not as simple as opening our own eyes; we must be healed of our basic blindness, and only God can do that.
“HE WORSHIPPED HIM”
The great key to the healed blindman’s transformation and maturity is that he worships Jesus. This would have been considered blasphemy by the Scribes and Pharisees, who rightly believed that God alone is worthy of worship. The man, born blind, saw something no one else—not even the Disciples—saw: that Jesus is the Son of Man, the Son of God, sent into the world to heal the blind.
The final evidence of mature, authentic faith is just this: having been given the eyes to see Jesus is The Lord, we worship Him. Of all the things we do and think of as important, none will last as long as our worship, praise, adoration, and glorification of God. It begins here and now; it ends…never.
May God grant us all the sight to see our blindesses, and may He open our eyes to see Him, that we may daily be blinded by the Light of Christ. †
QUESTIONS:
- 1.What are the significant spiritual steps the man takes between the beginning and end of chapter 9?
- 2.How are these steps similar to those of the Samaritan Woman in John chapter 4: 1-30?
- 3.In both cases, how is faith initiated? Who starts it? What is required of the “convert”?
- 4.What is the problem in saying that people who really want to be saved are more likely to be saved?
- 5.What is the virtue in owning our own blindness, albeit spiritual blindness?
- 6.What is the downside of thinking ourselves more as saints than sinners?