John 9:13-41

10/25/09
John 9:13-41
Hudson UMC

This is an extremely long passage to try to tackle on a Sunday morning. It is twenty-nine verses, but it is all one continuous story with one major point in mind so it really belongs together. Two weeks ago, we looked at the story of how Jesus healed a man born blind, which is one of his more astonishing miracles. After all, even some of the Old Testament prophets brought people back from the dead, but not one of them had given sight to anyone who was born blind.

When we get down to it, this passage is really not about physical blindness, though a man was indeed healed of his physical blindness. In the end, the physical healing was intended as a kind of parable to point to the fact that Jesus is the one who restores spiritual sight so that we might encounter the Lord and be transformed in our lives. This is also a wonderful story about how the people that we might think would understand the gospel, the Pharisees and Jewish leaders, didn’t get it at all while those who we might be tempted to think are beyond the scope of God’s salvation and mercy, the beggar born blind, receive it readily.

So, if this sermon is meant to be about this idea of spiritual blindness, we need to ask ourselves a few questions. The first question we need to ask ourselves is, “What is spiritual blindness?” Spiritual blindness, as bad as it is, cannot simply be identified with immorality. A person could have been immoral their entire lives, and yet, God may, in a moment, deliver them from their spiritual blindness, setting off a chain reaction that will transform them bit by bit until they have been renewed into the image of Jesus Christ. Also, it is entirely possible, like the Pharisees, to be spiritually blind and yet be perfectly “moral” as the world counts morality. Also, we cannot identify spiritual blindness with things like atheism, though atheism can certainly go along with it.

Spiritual blindness, in all its forms, is an unwillingness to believe God in favor of something else we would rather believe. This can be an intentional unwillingness, if we were to consciously refuse to listen to God and stubbornly cling to our old ways of thinking, in spite of God’s work in our lives. However, this unwillingness to believe God can be unintentional. We might be unintentionally unwilling to believe God if we simply never listen to God in the first place. If we never pray, if we never read the scriptures, if we never engage with the larger Christian tradition, we may be unintentionally blinding ourselves, spiritually. Jesus summed up the issue well when He spoke to the Pharisees. They said, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” Jesus’ response was, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.” It was because of an unwillingness to believe God that they were blind that they were never delivered from it.

Now, I want to make sure it is absolutely clear that I am not simply talking about spiritual ignorance. After all, we are finite beings and God is infinite. God is so deep, so rich, and so magnificent that we will never be able to fully comprehend all of who God is or even all of what God has done for us. However, if our ignorance is not simply because we are limited, in spite of our best efforts to be open to God, if we are ignorant because we are unwilling to be made wise, for whatever reason, it truly becomes spiritual blindness and is sin. How could it be otherwise? How could an unwillingness to know and think worthily of the God of the universe who has loved us with a love that will not let us go, and has endured indescribable suffering in order to redeem us be anything other than sin?

So, now that we have some idea of what spiritual blindness is, we need to consider who it is that are the spiritually blind. The spiritually blind are those who, like the Pharisees in this passage, make decisions about God based, not on what God has actually done, but by presupposition. The issue surrounding the Sabbath in this passage illustrates this well. The Pharisees imagine that Jesus cannot be from God because they think He has broken the Sabbath. According to their preconceived notions, God cannot do this. It turns out that the blind man, the uneducated layman, who has received no training in religion, has much clearer vision than the religious leaders. When he had an encounter with God in flesh, he took a totally different approach. God had come into his midst and brought healing to him. If this is what God has actually done, what was interpreted as a breach of God’s own law must actually be a misinterpretation. The man’s subjective experience of healing brought him face to face with the objective reality of God. In light of what God had actually done, his understanding was reinterpreted and he began to realize that, though he had been blind all his life, he had better sight than the Pharisees. “Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes.”

So, who are the spiritually blind? One group of spiritually blind people are those who rely upon and insist on their experience and their own interpretation of their experience over and against what God has done. If someone has had a hard life and concludes that God must hate them and they believe that, in spite of the fact that God has become a human being, plumbed the depths of our sinfulness and redeemed them, rescuing them from the bondage of sin and death, they are, unfortunately, spiritually blind because the truth of God’s love is placed right in front of them and yet they, like the Pharisees, cannot see it.

Another group of spiritually blind people are those who have rigid theological convictions, or ideas about God, that are not revisable in light of what God has actually done, as born witness to in scripture. You find many pastors in this boat and I can only pray that I do not slip into this, though I know I have had major struggles throughout my Christian life over this issue. The Pharisees were among this kind of people because they held so tightly to their understanding of the Sabbath, that they would not budge, even when God moved in their midst and revealed a better way.

This kind of blindness can happen both in and out of the church. Often atheists are in this boat because even atheism is a theological conviction. However, this most often happens among people who do not immerse themselves in scripture. Why them? Because, if we do not spend time in the Bible, we are not putting ourselves in the place where God is most likely to challenge us and transform us. When we put ourselves under the authority of the Word, we invite God to remove our spiritual blindness and see more clearly. When we don’t, we are refusing to hear what God has to say to us.

One of the things that we learn from the text for today, and indeed, from the Gospels in general, is that spiritual blindness is more common among the people who are called the people of God than anyone else. Over and over again, we read that the people who should understand God the most often don’t get it at all, while those who society does not pay attention to have incredible understanding. Today, in the adult Sunday School class, we will be looking at a passage where the practicing Jews think that Jesus is evil and a blasphemer while, in just the passage before, the demon possessed man understood who He was.

So, if spiritual blindness is particularly common in “the people of God,” and we are “the people of God,” the question we ought to be asking ourselves is, “Where does spiritual blindness manifest itself in our lives?” The problem with spiritual blindness is that it is not, strictly speaking, something that we do that we can point to and analyze. It is a problem with the framework we use to interact with the world. What that means is that we cannot see our blindness directly, we need to understand it “out of the corner of our eyes,” so to speak.

Spiritual blindness, to one degree or another, is in our lives whenever we allow our culture to shape the way we see God. I want to lift up some of the more dangerous ways this happens. Our culture influences us to either think that everything is predetermined in some kind of fate or that there is no order to the universe. If we allow ourselves to think this way, we either understand God as somehow different than the God we see revealed in Jesus Christ who suffers on our behalf precisely because evil is not God’s will for us, or we will imagine that there is no God or that God does not care. Another thing our culture will pressure us to do is to either make Christianity a list of rules that we must rigidly follow or face condemnation, or, on the other hand, to say that there are no rules to govern our lives. Christianity is neither the one nor the other. The law does not in any sense make God love us, but it does serve a role in guiding behavior. One last pair of ways the culture influences us cuts to the very core of our divided nation. Our culture wants us to either elevate one sin to a higher level than the others or claim that sin is an outdated concept and no longer matters. If we place something like homosexuality over other sins, like gossip which appears in the same lists that Paul makes, we will tend to look down our noses at others and never take a good look at ourselves. At the same time, we cannot pretend like sin is unimportant. Again, the sinfulness of humanity is so serious that nothing short of the second Person of the Trinity taking on our human nature, suffering, dying, being raised from the dead, and ascended to heaven could overcome the irrational power of evil.

So far, we have talked about what spiritual blindness is, who the spiritually blind are, and where spiritual blindness can often creep into our lives. The question you may be asking is, “So, what can we do about it, pastor?” After all, the picture can look pretty bleak. We are not delivered from the possibility of spiritual blindness simply because we go to church or even because we made a decision once upon a time to follow Jesus. Even though we, unlike the Pharisees, live in a culture that has been shaped, at least partially with some of the basic convictions of the Christian tradition, we still twist it this way and that and end up thinking in ways that are not commensurate with the gospel as revealed to us in Jesus Christ. How in the world do we break free from this?

I believe that the only way we can be free of our tendency toward spiritual blindness is to become radical servants of the Word of God. First, this means that we need to be servants of the written word of God contained in the Old and New Testaments. This does not mean that we need to become Biblical Scholars who know and argue about all of the critical issues at stake, but it does mean that we do need to read our Bibles, read them regularly, and place ourselves under the authority of the scriptures. We also need to pray for the Holy Spirit to guide our reading so that we might understand God’s revelation to us in ever deeper ways. If we do this, we will be placing ourselves in the place where God has promised to meet us and transform us into faithful daughters and sons of God. The more we earnestly desire for God to transform us through the scripture and the more willing we are to allow God to tear up our preconceived notions by the roots and replace them with the very truth of God, the less likely we will fall into true spiritual blindness, even if we never fully comprehend God.

More specifically, we need to become servants of the living Word, the eternal Word of God made flesh, who lived a real human life on this earth, who endured the human condition, who suffered real pain and sorrow, and who submitted Himself to the death He did not deserve. Far from reducing our reliance on the written word, it actually increases it, because the scriptures are the only witnesses that we have been given into that amazing reality that we call the Incarnation of God among us, where God not only became one of us, but also one with us, binding us to God that we might be rescued from the sin of the world and the sin in our lives. Jesus is the only one in all of history and eternity who is both fully human (so we can some real understanding of Him) and fully God (so He shows us what God is really like, even in His humanity).

Again, you may wonder, “Is this even possible?” This is a beautiful question, not only because it brings to light all of the issues that get stirred up when we think about topics like this, but because it gives us an opportunity to put this advice into practice right away. Is this kind of freedom from spiritual blindness really possible? Let us turn to the living Word through the written Word and see what we find.

In our passage, what do we see? We see that this whole issue of spiritual blindness is brought up because Jesus has just given sight to a man who was born blind. This man had never seen before in his life, yet, through the power of God in Christ, his eyes were opened and he was able to understand who Jesus was. He calls Jesus a prophet at the beginning of our passage, admits that he believes God has sent Him in the middle of the passage, and bows down, calls Jesus “Lord” and worships Him at the end of the passage. Though the Pharisees insist on remaining in their blindness, this man has been delivered both from physical and spiritual blindness.

What all this means is that, as soon as we turn to the Bible with the question, “Will God really deliver me from my spiritual blindness,” we are immediately brought face to face with a Jesus who is not only the one who restores sight to the blind, but gives it even to those who never had it. The Pharisees refused to see their need for God, so they remained blind. Just as Jesus healed this man born blind from both physical and spiritual blindness, surely He will bring healing to us, even if we have never yet seen clearly in our lives. The moment we look at the face of Christ, we see the face of God, the face of love, the face of compassion, the face of the one who endured terrible sufferings that we might be spared. And so, I declare to you, people of God, that in Jesus Christ, you are not only forgiven, but you have been utterly renewed. Your spiritual blindness has been taken away and true vision has taken its place. Let us go into the world with our eyes wide open and bring the light of the world into the world. Let us pray.

AMEN