Light of the World

John 9:1-12

The Question

Jesus and his disciples are walking in Jerusalem and see a man “blind from birth.”  But before they say anything to the blind man, a debate unfolds about why the man is blind.  “Who sinned - this man or his parents?”  It’s probably not polite to have a conversation on the causes of blindness in the presence of a blind person.  You probably wouldn’t pause near a homeless person to have a conversation with a friend about he causes of homelessness -- “Statistically speaking, why do you suppose this chap is homeless?”

The story begins with a question: How do we explain this man’s blindness?  The disciples make an assumption that blindness, like all other disabilities, disappointments and disasters, are caused by someone’s sin.  Surely mishaps and suffering are evidence of divine punishment.  So who is God punishing - his sin or the sin of his parents?  Do you think this a crazy question?  It’s not.  It’s alive and well in our culture.

When something bad happens, we want to know: did God cause this?  What is God trying to tell us?  This particular story is about a man blind from birth.  But there are all kinds of disabilities and deformities that raise the same question.  In her book For the Time Being, Annie Dillard admits that she’s been thumbing through the standard manual of human birth defects.  She comes across a picture of a 6 year old boy and his 3 year old sister.  Both are bird headed dwarfs.  They are both tiny, the size of newborn infants.  They have large eyes, a receding forehead, and almost no jaw.  They are mentally deficient, with a faulty cerebellum.  Their legs are permanently drawn up because their hips don’t work.  


Dillard writes, “If you gave birth to two bird-headed dwarfs, as these children’s mother did - you could carry them both everywhere, all their lives, in your arms or in a basket, and they would never leave you, not even to go to college” (5).  But I want to ask, “Who sinned, these two bird-headed dwarfs or their mother?”

I wonder about parents of children who are stillborn, or born with terminal diseases, do they ask themselves this question?  What about the people in New Orleans who lost everything to Hurricane Katrina?  Or the people in Haiti who live on a devastated island?  Or the people in Japan who were attacked by the sea because the earth buckled?  What about people who live with depression because the body doesn’t get the brain chemical right?  I wonder if in the last few years people who’ve lost jobs or homes ask themselves this question, “I wonder what I did wrong?  I wonder why I’m being punished?”  And there is no shortage of religious people willing to explain these events as a kind of divine punishment.  Surely someone sinned.  God must be angry with us.  

Well, the blind beggar is still sitting there, listening in.  “Who sinned - this man or his parents?”  Jesus always refuses to answer bad questions.  The whole question is framed the wrong way.  Jesus says, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him” (v. 3).  Jesus says as clearly as he can: this man isn’t blind because God made him that way.  This blindness isn’t punishment for sin.  God isn’t in the business of causing blindness.  God’s in the business of healing, of giving sight, and that’s what I’m going to show you.

Jesus is NOT saying, “God purposefully caused this man’s blindness as a kind of stage so that I could perform this miracle.”  There is a syndrome - Munschausen by Proxy - where parents purposefully make their children sick so that they can care for them and nurse them back to health.  I find no reason to believe that this was Jesus’ view of God the Father.  

Jesus’ point is that God’s work of healing is going to be displayed in this man’s life.  And Jesus presses the point further by claiming: I am the light of the world.  I am the light that illumines the darkness.  I am the light that enables the blind to see.  

I like sleeping in hotels because it’s dark.  Really dark.  Not kind of dark light my apartment bedroom, where the light bleeds through the thin shades and bends in around the edges.  You need those thick, heavy drapes to make it really dark.  I just sleep better when it’s that dark.  The king-sized bed helps too.  But in my own apartment, I can stay half-asleep in the middle of the night and feel my way to the bathroom and back to bed.  In a hotel, I almost always incur an injury - a stubbed toe, a bruised shin, something.  Dark is good for sleeping.  Not so good for navigating from here to there.  If you want to see, you need light.

The Healing

After Jesus silences the debate about blindness, we come to the actual healing scene.  Jesus spits on the ground and uses his fingers to stir it into the dirt, making mud.  Then he takes the mud and wipes it on the blind man’s eyes.  Such a physical and messy way to heal - why do it this way?  Why the spit and mud and touching?  Is he acting out the Genesis scene where God breathes the life into the dust of Adam, but substituting spit for breath?  Jesus tells him to go wash in pool of Siloam.  I don’t know why Jesus did it this way.  Perhaps he thought it a good thing if the man, a passive beggar, were invited to participate in his own healing.  “He want and washed and came back able to see” (v. 7).  But he still hasn’t seen the man who healed him.

The Neighbors

So he walks back home, staring in wonder at his own hands, gawking at every little flower and snot nosed kid like it were some amazing mystery.  And his neighbors can’t decide if it’s him or not.  He was blind, and a beggar, seated in one spot, his whole life.  And this man is walking confidently, and smiling.  Some said, Yep, it’s him.  Others said, No, just someone who looks like him.  We get used to one another.  Change something in your life -- your haircut, your clothing, your disposition -- and those who have grown familiar with you will notice.  Is that you!?  

When they finally conclude that this is their formerly blind neighbor, their question is a fair one: “How were your eyes opened?”  How did you get your sight?  This is the first time the man is asked to describe what happened.  “The man they call Jesus (he had only heard his name) made mud and put it on my eyes and told me to wash at Siloam.  I went and washed and then I could see.”  Of course we can never fully describe when something powerful happens to us: falling in love, coming to a fresh discovery or insight, or in this case, a powerful experience of being healed, of receiving sight.  This is all quite impossible to explain.  We can only lay out a few meager details about our experience.  

The Pharisees

The neighbors don’t like what they’ve heard so far.  So they take the man to the Pharisees.  The Pharisees believed that you prove your religious seriousness by keeping the Sabbath.  You don’t work on the Sabbath.  It is one of the Ten Commandments you know.  And Jesus performed this healing on the Sabbath.  He did many of his miraculous healings on the Sabbath day.  So now for the second time, the man is asked how he received his sight - this time by the Pharisees.  He answers but only by shortening the answer.  You can hear the exasperation: “He put mud on my eyes, and I washed, and now I see” (v. 15).  

This report leaves the Pharisees a little divided and unsure how to proceed.  How do you argue with a healing?  How do you argue with someone who says, “This man Jesus changed my life”?  It’s not really an argument.  It’s a report of a powerful experience.  Some Pharisees stick with their familiar script: this Jesus can’t be from God, he’s obviously working on the Sabbath.  Others weren’t so sure: But if he’s not from God, how does he have this healing power?  In frustration they turn back to the newly sighted man, “What do you have to say about him?  You’re the one who got healed.  Should we punish him for working on the Sabbath or conclude he works with God’s power?”  They’re hoping the man will say, “He’s guilty of working on the Sabbath.”  But instead the man responds, “I think he’s a prophet.”  

So they call his parents.  Get the parents in here.  This might be one big hoax.  Maybe this guy was never blind in the first place.  They rifle three questions before the parents can get a word in:

Is this your Son?

Was he really born blind?

How can he see now?  

The parents gulp, not sure what’s more befuddling - that their blind son can see or that they’re being interrogated for it like it’s their fault.  Their response is hilariously understated, dumb answers to dumb questions: “Yes, he’s our son.  Yes, he was born blind.  But how he can see now, or who opened his eyes, we have no idea.  He is a grown man after all, ask him” (v. 20-21).  The parents aren’t inclined to be of much help.  The narrator tells us that the parents were afraid of being put out of synagogue if they were to acknowledge Jesus as Messiah.  By the late first century when John’s gospel was written, this was a real threat.  If you’re a Jesus follower, you’re excluded from the synagogue.

The parents are no help, so they go back to work on the newly sighted man.  “Give glory to God.  We know this man is a sinner” (v. 24).  The man answers in a way that is both snarky and honest:  “I don’t know whether he’s a sinner.  What I know is that I was blind but now I see.”  I don’t have any theological arguments, he says.  But I can tell you about my experience.  I can tell you what life used to feel like and what it feels like now.

When the Pharisees ask the man, now for the third time in this story, he’s had enough.  “What did he do to you?  How did he open your eyes?”  Now he refuses to play along.  “I’ve already been through this twice,” he says.  “You seem really interested in this story.  Are you wanting to become his disciples too?”  They don’t appreciate the comic routine from the man who’s seeing clearly now.  So they write him off , “You were steeped in sin at birth.”  And they expel him from the synagogue.  

Jesus and the Excommunicated Man

Jesus hears what happened and goes and finds the man.  Of course, he doesn’t recognize Jesus because he’s never seen him.  Jesus asks what could be a rousing, climactic scene in a play, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?”  The plot line should have the man exclaiming: “Yes of course I do, thank you for giving me sight.”  Instead, the man peeks around sheepishly and asks, “Who is he?”  So Jesus has to say, “You’re looking at him, it’s me, I’m the one talking to you.”  A little late, the man says, “Lord, I believe,” and he worshiped him.  

Recently I had an animated conversation with a new friend.  He is an atheist, and an energetic one.  It may not surprise you to find out that he grew up in a very conservative Christian community.  I don’t say that to try to explain away his arguments.  He has good arguments for his energetic atheism.  But the older I get, the more damage I see that’s done by fundamentalist forms of religion.  Some of our brightest intellectuals, scientists, and atheists are driven by a passion that comes from an experience of being harmed, or boxed in, or manipulated by unhealthy religious communities.

He laid out why it is intellectually indefensible to be a Christian.  Then he asked me why I’m a Christian.  So it was sort of like the “have you stopped beating your wife?” question.  I knew already my answer wasn’t going to help much.  But I have a strange fondness for conversations that aren’t going anywhere.  I started by saying that “why” I am a Christian isn’t a very interesting story: I was born into a family that went to church.  The more interesting question is why I have remained a Christian, and more than that, a Christian willing to recommend this life to others as energizing, beautiful, meaningful, and true.  

I belong to a community of people who organize their lives around the truth of the story told in the gospels.  First, he wanted to talk about the resurrection of the dead Jesus.  Do I “literally” believe it.  I’ve never been a big fan of the word “literally.”  I said, poking back, that I have no memory of the term “literally” being a part of the gospel stories, but that we believe this story to be true: Jesus died on a cross, and God raised him from the dead (and admitted that this story is told with great nuance and complexity in the four gospels themselves -- the resurrected Jesus both eats fish and walks through walls).  

He was flabbergasted that I could not see that the resurrection is a ludicrous and superstitious thing for educated persons to believe.  He asked me for all this mularkey.  I told him I didn’t have many philosophical arguments.  I’m part of a community that lives by stories.  I told him about this experience I have had, repeatedly and over the course of a lifetime, that Jesus Christ is a lively presence in our lives.  I told him that reading Scripture together with a community of people confirms for me that this is all true, that the risen Christ is present to us in Scripture, in the meal, and in the faces of others.  

When we tell others that we’ve had an experience of being loved, healed, energized by the powerful presence of Jesus Christ, we will often face resistance.  Perhaps even some forms of exclusion.  We might be asked to tell our stories two or three times.  Sometimes all we can say in conversation with friends, with the wider world, is this: once I was blind but now I see.  I don’t have a bundle of fancy theories about how it happened or who Jesus is.  I don’t have a list of proofs that God is real.  But in Jesus Christ God is more real, more alive than the trees and rocks and streets and buildings and people around me.  

Jesus is the light that enables us to see.  Now go and wash the mud from your eyes.