John 9:1-12

10/11/09
John 9:1-12
Hudson UMC

Today, we move on from the long debate that Jesus had with the various Jews and leaders and read once more about a miracle that happens while He is walking on His way somewhere. Every once in a while, we need to be reminded that Christianity, despite the fact that we tend to associate it with Western culture, is actually an Eastern religion. We could look at any number of different things to illustrate the difference between Eastern and Western thought, but the one that makes the most sense for our passage today is the difference in how we view travel. In the West, we are obsessed with destinations. We want to know how things will end, we want to know the conclusion, we want to get where we are going as quickly and as directly as possible. The Eastern way of thinking is a bit different. The Eastern mind is much more concerned with the journey, rather than the destination. Where you are going is not as important as the journey you take to get there. Now, we could push this further than our text and faith allow, but I think that we can learn something from how the Gospels tell their stories. Most of the teaching and stories don’t happen because Jesus planned them out and advertised for them, but just happened “on the way.” He was willing to stop His travels to show mercy on a poor man, blind since birth, while we often go our merry way, not looking either to the right or to the left until we reach our destination. Maybe we can learn from the way Jesus did things.

Our passage is part one of a story where Jesus heals a man who has been blind since birth. This week, we will talk about the miracle itself; in two weeks, we will look at how the people reacted both to Jesus and the blind man.

I want to start by looking at the way the disciples approach the situation. “Rabbi,” they say, “who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” I think that this is incredibly contemporary. After all, when something bad happens, we want to ask, “Why?” We want to know who is to blame, who is at fault. If a disaster happens, we want to know why God allowed it to happen; when another tragedy happens, we wonder if we could have done anything to prevent it. I think this question of the disciples reflects our own intense desire to place blame, which I believe is nothing more than our desire to have full understanding of the universe. Much of the modern era has been characterized by a desire to probe to the depths of the world around us and explain how everything works. For centuries, we hoped to boil down everything to the microscopic level and show that everything happens because of a strict chain of cause and effect. Though natural science is beginning to have serious doubts about this way of thinking, most of us still want to be able to find a “cause” for everything that happens. It is as if we think that, if we can just understand “why” something happened, we will be able to deal with it.

What is amazing is how Jesus deals with this question. “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” Now, Jesus is not saying, as I once thought, that all sickness is caused by one of three things, our sin, the sin of others, or so that God’s works might be revealed in us. The point that I think He is trying to make is that, despite how much we may want to have nice and neat explanations for things that happen, God has no interest in doing that for us. Indeed, sometimes sickness, tragedy and evil happen, not for a particular purpose, but because our world has been so tainted by evil, it is so broken and fallen, that things contrary to the perfect will of God happen. In the midst of such problems, our God does not stand off, aloof. No, God has dealt decisively and finally with the problem of evil in the world by taking our evil upon Himself, nailing it to the cross in His own flesh, that we might be delivered. Now, this defeat of evil has not yet played itself out fully in the drama of history, but there will come a day when sin and death are finally totally done away with.

At this point, Jesus does something amazing. He spits on the ground. We usually think that people who spit on the ground, especially around other people in the middle of town are rude, or else a little rough around the edges; and yet, here is Jesus, the Son of God, God in the flesh, God with us, spitting on the ground. He spits on the ground enough to make some mud and apply it to the eyes of the man. Jesus tells the man to go to the pool of Siloam (which means Sent); he does so, and comes back able to see.

Now, some people throughout the years have written about how much they don’t like the fact that Jesus made mud and put it on the man’s eyes, not because it was dirty or impolite, but because it makes it look a bit like it was magic. Surely Jesus could have worked this miracle without making it look like the mud had any kind of magical properties; He does it in the other Gospels, after all. I will share some of what makes the mud and washing so significant in a moment, but I want to turn for a minute and talk about how people reacted to the miracle.

The text says, “The 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?’ Some were saying, ‘It is he.’ Others were saying, ‘No, but it is someone like him.’” This strikes me as absolutely amazing. It seems that there were people who thought it was more likely that this person who stood before them was actually an unknown, long-lost identical twin, than that the man who was blind since birth had been healed. Why are we so skeptical? Why do we demand proof for the littlest thing? It even gets worse. The man kept saying, “Hey everybody, it’s me. I am the same person who used to sit here and beg.” In spite of the fact that he looked the same and sounded the same, they were still skeptical. “Then how were your eyes opened?” He 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.”

Now, this is the kind of response we would expect from people who do not believe in Jesus, who do not think that He is God in our midst, so we cannot be totally surprised that the people responded in this way. After all, what mere human being can open the eyes of the blind? And yet, our modern society still has its doubts. So many people in America claim to be Christians that many people would say that we are a “Christian Nation.” Now, you have all heard my own opinion about that, so I won’t bore you by going off on a tangent, but, if this is really the case, if there are really so many people who acknowledge Jesus as the Son of God, how come we are still slow to believe that He is healing people, physically, emotionally, spiritually, and every other way? If the Incarnation proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that God loves us so much that He will enter into our world and interact with us; if Pentecost proves that God will even enter into our own lives and empower us from the inside and take up residence inside of us, how can we live our lives as if God does not radically transform lives?

I think we always need to be reminded of the basic points of the Gospel. We need to always remind ourselves and others that Jesus is so much more than merely a teacher who said some nice things. We need to remember that Jesus is nothing less than God walking around on the earth, confronting humanity, not only in His interactions with the people, but even within His very person. God, by entering into humanity, amplified humanity’s resistance and rebellion to God and overcame it. When God enters into the world, the world is challenged, it is changed, and it is overthrown. Jesus did not come to make us feel warm and fuzzy, but to radically overturn our way of life. Jesus did not come to make us good secular citizens, but people who are already living as the people of the kingdom of God, which is decidedly set against the kingdoms of people. We talk about Jesus as the meek and mild shepherd who cares for His sheep, and this is indeed true, but Jesus is also a subversive, a guerilla warrior who makes calculated attacks on the strongholds of evil in the world. We must always remember that Jesus was crucified and crucifixion was a mode of execution that was reserved only for political criminals, especially for those who tried to overthrow the government. Jesus came to overthrow the rule of evil, the rule of a humanity that is estranged from God, and to replace it with God’s own kingdom.

Jesus was an invader from another kingdom. Over and over again in the Gospel of John, Jesus says that He is the one who is sent. He, though fully God in Himself, has been sent by God as this kind of secret agent, who looks just like everyone else, but who is a revolutionary. And, you know, we might think it would be enough to just have Jesus do His thing. We sometimes want to say, “Go, Jesus, Go. Take out evil, overcome our sin, renew us into your image!” but there is more to it than that. Jesus is not the only one who is sent. That is one of the things that is so significant about Jesus sending the man to go wash his eyes. Jesus says that we all need to be doing the deeds of the one who sent Him. He then goes on to send the blind man, but he does not just send him, he sends him to a particular pool which is called “sent,” or, more particularly, “one who is sent.” It seems like sending is a major theme in this passage.

Much of the early church looked at this passage as a major text to help us understand baptism of all things. They emphasized that the man’s cleansing was only complete when he went and was washed in the water that Jesus directed him to. And yet, when we think about how Jesus, the sent one, sends us out, too, we begin to realize a deeper meaning for our lives.

Today, we receive new members into the life of the congregation. I have said over and over again throughout the new member process that I have no intention of sugar-coating anything. I don’t want to make anything seem like something other than it really is. And so, with that in mind, I want to make sure you realize that you are not simply joining a church today, you are joining a revolutionary club. You are joining a body of people who are to be dedicated to the overthrowing of the ways of the world that stand against the will of God and overcome them. You are joining a group of people who, if we are being faithful, will provoke those who hate God to hate us as well. You are setting yourself up against the kingdom of the devil and the strongholds of human sin. You are reaffirming your baptism, by which you were set apart for the grace of God and became His servants. Joining a church is not something to do because your neighbors are doing it, nor because society says it is the right thing to do. By joining a church, you are proclaiming, “the world is not as it should be and I am joining, by grace, in God’s activity to overthrow evil, first and foremost in my own life.”

However, though that is what we as a church ought to be about, sometimes, we lose our way; sometimes, we forget that this is our business. Sometimes, we even begin to believe that this is finally our church; that it exists primarily for our own social concerns, that we have the final say as to what goes on in and out of its doors. Sometimes, because we are all human beings who are not yet fully renewed into the image of Christ, the church begins to look a little more like the world outside than it should. And so it is that today, as we receive new members, that we remind ourselves of what it means to be the church, to be the agents of God in the world, filled with the Holy Spirit and under the direction of our Lord Jesus Christ. We use this joyous opportunity of officially welcoming new people into our fellowship to repent of our own shortcomings and to leave this building with new dedication to be what God has made us to be, subversives and revolutionaries, overthrowing the status quo and participating in the ministry of Christ in our community. Indeed, we ask these new members to not only join us in our task, but even to lead us in it. Remind us by your example what it means to be the church.

The people in the story could not believe that God would really move in their midst. Let us not make the same mistake. Let us never forget that God is so driven by love for us that He gave up everything, even being willing to be born as a helpless baby, face the scorn of the world, and die on the cross. A God that loves us that much is worth following. Jesus says, “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” We, as the church, are the body of Christ. By the power of the Holy Spirit, Christ is indeed here. The light of the world is in here; let it be out there, and let us be a part of that mighty work of God. Let us pray.

AMEN