I feel moderately daft, but there isn’t a last paragraph for this one. One of these days we’ll actually get to the point where we have audio, but we don’t have the equipment.
John 9:1-41; Ephesians 5:8-14; Psalm 23; 1 Samuel 16:1-13
Jesus picks some fairly odd ways of healing people sometimes. I mean, spitting on the ground then rubbing the mud on the guy’s eyes? Ew! It’s so odd that someone who can raise people from the dead by yelling into a tomb (which by the way we’ll read about next week) is going to use such an, umm, odd method.
Oh wait, that’s not what’s important here is it. But, still, Jesus healed a lot of blind people. He even used all kinds of different methods to do it. Why would healing the blind be such a big deal, though? I mean sure, it’s a rather miraculous thing, but you’d think raising the dead, changing water into win, feeding five thousand, and things like that would be just as interesting.
Well, in the book of Isaiah, we read a lot about what the “servant of the Lord” will do. In the Jewish interpretation of the day, and even still the way we read those passages today, the “servant of the Lord” is the Messiah, or as we know him Jesus Christ. One of the things the Messiah will do is open the eyes of the blind. The thinking was, it’s something that only the Messiah could do. So, while the logic here is somewhat flawed, the thought was that if only the Messiah can open the eyes of the blind, and Jesus opened the eyes of the blind, then Jesus is the Messiah.
Of course, it wasn’t nearly that clean cut either. The formerly blind man went before the synagogue’s leaders because they had likely heard some rumors about this healing and wanted to check it out. They split into two factions: one group who was convinced that Jesus can’t be from God, because he doesn’t follow their interpretation of the law, and the other group who thought that Jesus couldn’t be from anyone but God to do such miraculous things.
Sadly, the real loser in the Pharisee’s discussion was the formerly blind man, as the Pharisee’s pride and stubbornness got in the way of what God was doing, and they ended up kicking the man out of the synagogue, which was almost a sad kind of inevitable after the man asked if they wanted to become Jesus’ disciples, too.
Yet there is a happy ending here after all, the formerly blind man and Jesus met up again, and the man immediately believed in and worshipped Jesus. Then something cute happens. Jesus says, “For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.” This of course made the Pharisees who had overheard it quite unhappy, but Jesus continued saying, “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains.”
It’s an interesting thing to say, really. “If you were blind, you wouldn’t be guilty of sin, but since you claim you can see, you are guilty.” In our legal system, ignorance of the law is no excuse. Just because you didn’t know something was illegal doesn’t mean you can get away with it. I remember a Star Trek: TNG episode where Wesley Crusher was hanging out on a random planet, and happened to step on some grass he shouldn’t have. Small offense, and he didn’t know it was a problem, but he was still going to be punished for it. Wow, my geek started showing again didn’t it?
That’s just the way it works in our world — ignorance is no excuse. But what Jesus seems to be saying here is that ignorance can be an excuse when it comes to sin. Let me say this more clearly. First off, when I say “sin”, in this context, I mean following our own way instead of God’s way. So, if you’re not in a relationship with Jesus Christ, you can’t not sin. This makes sense; if I don’t know God, of course I’ll be following my own way instead of God’s way, because I don’t know Him. When we come to know God, through the Holy Spirit we have the ability not to sin — we can follow God instead of going our own way. When before we were blind to God because of sin, our eyes are now opened to God.
But what about the other half, if we claim to see but really don’t. The Pharisee’s claim was that they had no sin. As we hear every Sunday, from John’s first letter, “if we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.” A bit later the same letter says, “If we claim we have not sinned, we make [God] out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives.” In a way, they intentionally blinded themselves to God, because they wanted nothing to do with the work of His Son.