Sermon for the 4th Sunday of Lent - "Seeing and Believing"

Preaching Text

Imagine yourself on the operating table for major surgery. Since we’re imagining, I can ask you to imagine that you’re conscious but feeling no pain, and you can see what the doctors are doing to you. They’ve sterilized every instrument, the lights are all arranged just right, and there is an air of competence in the room. They begin. They open you up, peeling back skin and fat, muscle and tendons, suctioning away blood and fluids, until they find the source of the problem and confirm their diagnosis. Then they turn around, nod to the nurses, take off their masks and gloves and walk away.

Let us pray: Father in heaven, we are all blind in one way or another. Help us see that only You have the words of eternal life, that You alone are the source of salvation and all that is holy, that You alone can see all things as they truly are. Yet we also dare to ask that the same light with which You see might be given to us, that we might see with your compassion and grace rather than our own arrogance and close-mindedness. We are blind, Lord – open our eyes and our hearts to all that is merciful, just and good. In the name of Christ we pray, Amen.

So, would you like this operating table experience? Would you want a doctor who only diagnoses problems and does nothing to heal them? That’s the nature of what the disciples were doing with Jesus at the beginning of our gospel reading for this morning. They see a man born blind, and their reaction is to present him as a case study for theological discussion with their Rabbi – “Oooh, Professor, I think I know the answer!” It’s one thing to have a theological discussion about suffering and evil in a seminary classroom, where we can engage in the process of theodicy, the intellectual struggle between belief in an omniscient, all-powerful God and the presence of suffering and evil in the world. In fact, I had an entire course on “God, Evil and Suffering” at Luther Seminary, and it was one of the most intellectually stimulating and challenging courses I took in seminary. But the operating table is not the place for stopping at diagnosis, and the street corner where the blind man sits begging is not the place to stop at diagnosis of the nature of suffering, either. When the disciples ask, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” they are missing the point. In that moment, theology as an intellectual pursuit is meaningless Only the proclamation of God’s good news can help here, and thus Jesus moves to heal the blind – all of them.

“Surely we are not blind, are we?” One could easily move the question to the beginning of the reading. Who is blind in this tale, and who can see? The gospel devotes seven verses to the healing of physical blindness and thirty-four to what Paul Harvey calls “the rest of the story.” This is not a coincidence. We are talking about blindness, darkness and light – throughout the entire story.

If you’ve got a pencil or a pen handy, get it out and mark in your Bibles or your bulletin these words. First, in verse 11, “the man called Jesus.” Next, in verse 17, “He is a prophet.” Next, in verse 33, “from God.” Verse 35, “Son of Man.” And finally, in verse 38, “’Lord, I believe.’” And he worshiped him.” Here is a healing of blindness that takes 41 verses, several hours and excommunication from the synagogue into its expanse. The man born blind is healed of his physical blindness almost immediately, but until he sees Jesus and believes he is the Son of God, the Messiah, he is still blind. Only when he sees, believes and worships does his blindness disappear.

By way of comparison, look at the movements of those Pharisees who insisted, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” They began by pressing the blind man for the source of his healing. The Pharisees had been insulted by Jesus earlier on that Sabbath day, and they indulged their wounded pride by insisting that Jesus couldn’t be from God because healing on the Sabbath broke Sabbath rules. (In fact, the mud that Jesus used to heal the man’s blindness may have been a deliberate attempt to provoke the Pharisees, because ‘kneading’ was also not allowed on the Sabbath, and of course the use of dirt and spit doesn’t exactly sound kosher, either.) After they grew frustrated with the blind man and his simple tale of being healed by Jesus, the Pharisees interrogated his parents. Terrified by the prospect of excommunication, the parents denied knowing what happened to their son and left it on his shoulders (and we can certainly agree that sticking your head in the sand is a form of blindness!). Finally the Pharisees called the blind man back to insist that Jesus had been terribly sinful in healing the blind man. The whole time these conversations were happening, the Pharisees insisted that they knew what God wanted in the situation. But here’s the problem: if Jesus truly did heal the blind man, then the Pharisees didn’t know anything at all, did they? Only God can heal; even the Pharisees acknowledged this, and so when Jesus healed the blind man, he revealed himself as Christ, the anointed one of God. The blind man’s persistent explanation of what happened to him revealed the ignorance and blindness of the Pharisees. “All I can tell you is that I was blind, and now I can see – what more proof do you need?” said the man – and the Pharisees had no way to deny what was happening, so they cast the man out of their faith community rather than deal with the possibility that things were changing in ways they couldn’t control.

We shouldn’t be surprised at this, should we? Change is hard, sometimes, and when people get busy doing helpful things that we don’t recognize, that are out of our control, it can be difficult to believe that good is actually happening. When Jesus came to earth, he came to reframe how we look at life, sin, death and salvation, but in our blindness we couldn’t understand what he was doing. The disciples, the Pharisees, Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman; all of them, and all of us by extension, could only see partial glimpses of what was happening, and for some of us, what Jesus was doing was so threatening that we took steps to prevent the things happening that we couldn’t recognize. We saw miracles and insisted that we must be diagnosing problems.

Sometimes our discussions about “the stuff” can be a way that we avoid actually dealing with “the stuff.” I remember a seminary class where a student asked the question, “What about a woman born and raised in the wilderness in Africa? If she never hears the gospel of Christ, what will happen after she dies?” The professor’s response was both threatening and inspiring: “Well, who do you have in mind, and what are you waiting for?” Jesus did not do the work of God in a vacuum. Jesus came to heal, to bind up wounds, to forgive sins, to raise the dead – and for those of us who focus on blame and process, it can be dangerous to lose sight of the end result. The Pharisees and the disciples discussed and diagnosed the problems in this story, but they didn’t actually deal with the blind man himself when he was blind. Only Jesus spoke to him, only Jesus healed him, only Jesus brought his blindness to an end.

We must be careful not to lose the miracle of faith in the pursuit of diagnosis. We’ve seen it happen several times over the last few weeks as we’ve read from the gospel of John: people come to Jesus seeking understanding when he is far more concerned with creating faith where there was none before. But the good news is that the Pharisees among us (and I count myself as a good Pharisee now and then) can be healed of their blindness as well. Two weeks ago we sat here and heard the story of Nicodemus, a Pharisee of great respect and admiration, one who wanted to live a good and godly life, following the commandments and dedicated to serving God. Nicodemus came to Jesus in the middle of the night and left in the same darkness, not understanding what Jesus was doing – but he didn’t stay there. In John 19, after Jesus had been crucified, we read that Nicodemus joined Joseph of Arimathea in caring for Jesus’ body and placing it in the tomb. We, too, can and will be healed of our blindness throughout this life of following Jesus, for the Holy Spirit works in us to keep us in the Christian faith, even when we need others to lead the way because we cannot see it for ourselves.

The issues of seeing and believing in this reading are vast and complex, but it really comes down to this: we see Jesus rightly when we believe and worship, as the man born blind worshiped at the end of this story. Without faith and worship, we do not see Jesus as he intended to be seen, and we will continue to be blind as long as we try to see Him in any other way. One of my favorite thoughts on seeing Jesus rightly comes from C.S. Lewis in his book Mere Christianity:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would be either a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

We see Jesus rightly when we believe and worship Him. We see rightly when we see problems as opportunities for witness, when we focus more on prognosis, the way forward, than we do on diagnosis, the past Jesus wants us to leave behind. Let’s pray that all of us may find our blindness healed by the living faith of Jesus Christ, that we, too, may join the man born blind in confessing, “I believe, Lord, and I worship.” See you there. Amen.