Sermon: March 19, 2023, Fourth Sunday in Lent

Preacher: Rev Ryan Slifka

Scriptures: John 9:1-41

As Jesus is walking along with his disciples, we’re told, and he comes upon a blind man. A man who’d been born without any sight. So Jesus spits on the ground, made a little mud out of the dirt and spread it out on the guy’s eyes. He never asks for this, by the Way. Apparently Jesus is into smearing spitty dust on the eyes of strangers. I do not recommend you doing the same.

Even so, after this sort of perverse spa treatment, he sends the guy down to wash off in the Pool of Siloam, this underground spring-fed pool well-known as a spot for ritual cleansing. The guy does as he’s told, takes a little bath at Siloam, and he returns with perfect 20-20 vision. Just like that, a man who’d never seen so much as the outline of a grapefruit, is suddenly able to see the faces of his parents for the first time. The whole spectrum of colour is just pouring in. He was blind. Now he sees.

Now, you might expect a certain amount of celebration in response to this miraculous occurrence. It’s not everyday something like this happens. This radical change, however, is mostly met with skepticism.

He goes back to his neighbourhood. His neighbours can’t wrap their heads around it. They know this guy as a notorious panhandler begging on a busted curb, this this guy commenting on the colour of someone’s tie. It can’t be him, some of them say. Must be a guy who looks like him. If you’re that blind guy then how’d you get your sight back? No matter how many times he tells them Jesus shoved some mud in his eyes and told him to wash, they won’t believe it. They just can’t see it.

So then his neighbours bring him to the Pharisees, folks well-versed in the scriptures and traditions of Israel. They interview him, same response: “Jesus… mud… eyes… wash… see.” Problem is that Jesus did this thing on the Sabbath. You’re not supposed to work on the sabbath. If he doesn’t observe the sabbath it makes him a sinner. Sinners can’t do stuff like that. A guy like that doing something like this? Impossible, they say. They just can’t see it.

Others think it’s gotta be a scam. They do a little background check, go to his parents, hold up a photo: “is this your boy?” “Yes.” “Was he born blind?” “Yes.” “Well then why’s he see now?” “Don’t ask us,” they say. “He’s a big boy—he can speak for himself.”

And they do just that. Haul the man formerly known as blind in. “How’d this happen?” they ask. I’ve told you a thousand times, he says, but you just don’t get it! “Jesus… mud… eyes… wash… see.” “Look, we all know this—God doesn’t do stuff like this for villains, but he does stuff like this for people who do God’s will. Nobody’s done anything like this before. So if this guy weren’t from God then he couldn’t have cured a case of the cold, let along reversed my blindness. I can’t believe you guys can’t figure this out.”

Unfortunately, this impassioned speech doesn’t change their minds. It just makes them mad, and they chase him out of the meeting. “Who do you think you are trying to teach us?” Even though he walked them through it from A-Z. No matter what he says, or how man times they say it. They still don’t believe his explanation. They just can’t see it.

At this point you may have noticed something of a pattern here. Jesus opens this guy’s eyes for the first time, but every other explanation is offered other than that one: he’s an impostor. It’s a scam. He must be lying. It’s clear here that there isn’t only one kind of blindness. One theologian puts it like this: “The irony in John’s story […] is that the blind man receives his sight, but everyone else in the story loses theirs—not their physical condition, but their capacity to understand what they have witnessed.”[i]

Now, what exactly is going on here?

Well for starters, the issue isn’t necessarily the miracle of restored sight itself. I mean, there might be some amount of skepticism about that. But unlike most of us modern folks, they would have been a bit more open to the miraculous. Nobody’s ignorant or offended by the idea that such a thing could happen. So it’s not about a miraculous healing. The question as to whether or not miracles are possible is not the issue at play. At least not primarily.

No. One detail gives us a clue as to what’s really going on here. It’s the mode of the miracle. Look again at what he does. He spits on the ground. He squishes that spit altogether with dirt and he makes some mud, and he smacks it on the guy’s face. Then he sends him to a purification pond to wash it off. If this is God in the flesh, you’d think he’d be a bit more efficient. Like, Jesus could have waved his hand—poof—sight to the blind. Would have saved a lot of time and effort.

But there’s more going on here than meets the eye (if you’ll forgive the pun). Ambrose of Milan, who was a Bishop and theologian in the fifth century says that it all goes back to the beginning of the Bible:

“[T]he person whom Jesus touches,” he says, “receives more than just his sight. In one instant, we see both the power of [Jesus’] divinity and the strength as his holiness. As the divine light, he touched this man and enlightened him; as priest, by an action symbolizing baptism he wrought in him his work of redemption.

“The only reason for his mixing the clay with saliva,” he says. “The only reason for his mixing of the clay… is to remind you that he who restored the man to health by anointing his eyes with clay is the very one who fashioned the first man out of clay, and that this clay that is our flesh can receive the light of eternal life through baptism.”[ii]

You’ll remember that in the beginning of Bible God creates the world by bringing light out of darkness. That God’s Spirit hovers over the primordial waters that God parts to create the space for stable life. That God molds the first human being out of clay, out of the dust and breathes life into them. Ambrose says that’s what’s happening here with the blind man is actually an act of new creation. This man is not only getting his literal sight back, he’s getting his spiritual sight back. Jesus has not only cured his blindness, he’s flooded him with the light of eternal life. By same spark that ignited the big bang Jesus opened his eyes, and made him into a whole new person. In the same way that we’re washed in the waters of baptism, the old human being captive to the power of sin, death, and decay has been rinsed away, uncovering the child of God within.

What this man can see that the others can’t see isn’t simply that miracles are possible, but that Jesus has the power to bring about whole new people. The power to bring life out of death, the power to recreate us, from the inside out.

The question that Jesus confronts us with here is what kind of life, what kind of world we think is possible. Like his neighbours, like the Pharisees, man—we’re in the dark. We might think change is possible, but only if we discover the right technique or work hard enough at it. And when that doesn’t work—as it’s more than prone to—we give into despair. Last Sunday we were leading our monthly service at the chapel at the Views at St. Joseph’s. And during prayer request time, one woman simply asked us to pray for the world. When pressed she simply said “for all the bad stuff going on. We need help.”

We need help to be, and see the world differently. And the good news is that we’ve got it.

Perhaps you know the story of John Newton. Newton is best known as an author of many famous hymns, five of which are in the United Church hymn book. The most famous of which being “Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Sound,” which we’ll sing shortly.

What you may not know about Newton is that he was something of a religious skeptic at the beginning of his life. Not only that, but he was a heavy drinker, and a gambler. And not only that, but for a period of time he also made his living in the slave trade, captaining several ships carrying enslaved Africans across the dreaded “middle passage” to plantations in the West Indies.

On his way back from West Africa in 1748, Newton awoke in the middle of a terrible storm in which the ship began to sink, and he thought he’d die. He cried out “Lord have mercy.” The storm eventually died down. Whereas we disenchanted folks might have thought this a mere coincidence, Newton understood the calming of the storm as a moment of divine revelation, a disclosure of divine mercy. A God who did not want him destroyed, but saved. Through the storm, his eyes were opened to the compassion, the forgiveness, the reality of God.

Now, to be clear—his life didn’t change all at once. He actually continued to work slave ships until a stroke forced him into retirement. But he gradually his eyes were opened. He began to speak out against the slave trade, regarding it as a terrible stain on his own soul. "A confession, which,” he said, “comes too late... It will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me, that I was once an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders." Newton became an ardent abolitionist, joining the parliamentary campaign to abolish the African slave trade, which was passed in 1807. He even going so far as to say his time as a slave trader he wasn’t truly a Christian in the fullest sense of the term.

The hymn “Amazing Grace” gives story to this lifelong conversion. And guess which Biblical story it invokes? Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me/I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see.” Newton understood himself as akin to the man born blind. That his salvation in the storm had opened his eyes to the power and mercy of God, not only for himself but for others.

The mud Jesus put in his eyes may have taken decades to fully wash out, but gradually he was able to see clearly. He was blind to his own sin and complicity. He was blind to the image of God, ignorant as to the presence of Christ in the faces of enslaved Africans. He’d given up the drinkin’ and the gamblin’ yes, but the most radical transformation God wrought in him was opening his eyes to the God-given dignity of those whom he helped to buy and sell, and the possibility that this institution could come to an end. It turned a wretch like him into a true disciple of Jesus, a child of the living God. Gradually, God not only made him into a whole new person. God made him into a whole new person, and gave him a role in bringing about a whole new world.

Like Jesus opening the eyes of the blind man, Amazing Grace is a testimony to the power of God to open our eyes and to make us into new people when we never thought it possible. We not only need help doing, we need help seeing that that there is help. There’s help for me, there’s help for you. There’s help for our struggling and suffering world that is so blind to the possibility of hope. And that help has already come to us in Jesus Christ, the light of the world. Jesus opens our eyes to a whole other, hidden reality. The power of God to bring light to our darkness. The power of a God who to make all things new. One that baptism points to, one we receive by faith.

I’d like to close with this. I shared a quote from Ambrose of Milan earlier, but that was only the first half. To end, here’s the second. Like the man born blind, he says,

“Let Christ wash you, and you will then see. Come and be baptized, it is time; come quickly, and you too will be able to say, “I was blind, and now I can see.’ And, as the blind man said when his eyes began to receive the light, you too can say, ‘the night is almost over and the day is at hand.’”[iii]

May your soul be washed in the life-giving power of the Spirit. And may your eyes be opened by the light of Christ. May your soul ring with that sweet sound we call “amazing grace.”

I offer this to you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

[i] George Stroup, “John 9:1-4: Theological Perspective,” in Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Year A, Vol. 2, ed. David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010), 120.

[ii] Ambrose of Milan, Letter 67.1-6.

[iii] Ibid.