I ONCE WAS BLIND BUT NOW I SEE…
JOHN 9:6-16 & 35-41
INTRODUCTION:
God our Father has made all things depend on faith so that whoever has faith will have everything, and whoever does not have faith will have nothing.
Martin Luther.
This was true in the 16th and 17th centuries, and it is as true, if not more so, in the 21st century.
Richard Rohr once wrote, “There will always be a need for religion… it gets us started on the spiritual path, and keeps prodding us with relevant question along the way. It creates the container, keeps the edges hot, offers the invitation and creates satisfying rituals and boundary setting commandments. It lures many people onto an initial spiritual path. It is very good and even necessary.”
However, there are few things that are as conducive to personal and spiritual stagnation as religion, or at least the misuse of it. When we become overly focused on the religion of Christianity, we will be stifled in our search for God. Again, Rohr writes, “We confuse the maintenance for this container with the contents themselves. We confuse the rituals with the realities that they point to.” This is becoming more and more evident in Churches all over the world, and it is for this reason, I believe, that God has called us to look again, in a fresh way, at our faith and the way in which we experience and express our faith in God.
One night a house caught fire and a young boy was forced to flee to the roof. The father stood on the ground below with outstretched arms, calling to his son, "Jump! I’ll catch you." He knew the boy had to jump to save his life. All the boy could see, however, was flame, smoke, and blackness. As can be imagined, he was afraid to leave the roof. His father kept shouting: "Jump! I’ll catch you." But the boy protested, "Daddy, I can’t see you." The father replied, "But I can see you and that’s all that matters."
This is often the kind of faith that we are called to have, and it is this kind of faith that I would like us to look at this evening. Our passage is one that sheds much light on this in that the blind man - like the boy – was unable to see Jesus, but Jesus – like the dad – was able to see him, and that’s all that mattered.
We would do well to sketch some background to this passage in order to help us understand it better. The first thing that would strike us is the peculiar means by which Jesus healed the man, the method of the miracle, as William Barclay once put it.
There are two miracles in which Jesus is said to have used spit to effect a cure. The other is the miracle of the deaf stammerer in Mark 7. Now, to the modern reader, the use of spit would seem strange, repulsive and even unhygienic; but in the ancient world this was not the case. Spit, and especially that of a distinguished person, was thought to have certain curative qualities.
The Greek historian, Tacitus, tells of how two diseased men, one blind and the other with a cripple hand, came to see the Emperor Vespasian in request for him to heal them with his spittle. Vespasian was very unwilling to do so but was eventually persuaded by the visitors’ desperation. Tacitus writes, “The hand immediately recovered its power and the blind man saw once more.”
Pliny, the famous Roman collector of scientific information, has a whole chapter on the use of spittle in curing such ailments as leprous spots, epilepsy and, wait for it… loss of sight!
See friends, this was no strange act, Jesus took the methods and the customs of his time and applied them to the situation. William Barclay suggests that, in this case, Jesus was a wise physician, gaining the confidence of his patient by doing what the blind man would have expected a doctor to do.
After moistening the mans eyes with clay made from spittle, Jesus sent him to wash it off in the pool of Siloam. The passage tells us that the man obeyed Jesus and the result was that he saw.
Now this is where the trouble comes in, or, as the proverbial saying goes, “where the paw-paw strikes the fan!”. It was the Sabbath day, and so Jesus broke the law. In fact, as the Scribes had worked it out, Jesus was guilty of breaking no less than three laws.
I. By making clay Jesus was guilty of work – yes, ridiculous as this might sound, making clay with spittle was regarded as work! To do even the simplest tasks on the Sabbath was to be guilty of doing work. Here are is but one example of those things forbidden by the law; “A man may not go out on the Sabbath with sandals shod with nails.” As the nails would be of enough weight to constitute a burden. A person was not even allowed to cut their finger nails on the Sabbath. Obviously, in the eyes of such a law, to make clay was to work.
II. It was forbidden to heal a person on the Sabbath. Medical attention could only be given if one’s life was in actual danger. And even then it must only be to keep the patient from getting worse and not to improve his situation. The law states, “If a man’s hand or foot is dislocated he may not pour cold water on it.”
III. An interesting point to consider is that the law even states explicitly, “As to fasting spittle, it is not lawful to put it so much as upon the eyelids.”
It was by observation of these petty rules that the Pharisees sought to worship God; yet to Jesus, these rules were abused and irrelevant; therefore, in their eyes, Jesus was guilty of breaking the Sabbath. And so the investigations began.
They brought the man who had been healed before the council and examined him. When he was asked what his opinion of Jesus was, he gave it without hesitation and stoutly maintained the miracle that Jesus had brought about in his life. One thing is true of this man – whatever else he was, he was a brave man -. He knew quite well hat the Pharisees thought of Jesus and what would happen to him should he be seen as a follower of Jesus. But he made his statement and took his stand. It was as if he said, “I am bound to believe in Him, I am bound to take my stand by Him because of all that He has done for me.” In this, I believe he becomes a great example for us all.
Let’s look closely now at verses 35-41.
This section brings across two great and precious spiritual truths. Both of which will be of much worth to us if we could only take hold of it.
1. Jesus looked for the man…
Jesus never leaves any man to bear His name alone. When we are called to testify for the name of Christ, we can be assured that he will never leave us to do so by ourselves. And this was the case with this man also – when the Pharisees cast him from the synagogue, Jesus went to go look for him. The early Church father, John Chrysostom, puts it this way, “The Jews cast him out of the Temple; the Lord of the Temple found him.”
It is true that if our Christian-witness had to separate us from our friends, it would only bring us closer to God. In fact, William Barclay writes, “When a man is cast out from men because of his fidelity to Christ, it brings him closer to Christ than ever he was before.”
Jesus is always true to the person who is true to him. And this brings us to our second truth held in this passage.
2. To this man there was made the great revelation that Jesus is the Son of God. Here is a tremendous truth, and I borrow this thought from William Barclay in saying that, “Loyalty brings revelation.”
It is to the man that fully commits himself to Jesus and strives to live a life of fidelity to Christ’s Kingdom that God reveals himself. We have seen from the world around us that the penalty of loyalty to Jesus might well be persecution and ridicule; but the reward of loyalty is a closer walk with God and an increasing appreciation of his grace and majesty.
Receiving Sight…
I would like us to consider, carefully, the process that was at work in this blind man’s life… for there is a sense in which all men are blind to some degree and we need the presence of Christ to gain true sight. If we should read this chapter of John from start to finish we will become aware of a certain ‘progression’ in the blind man’s perspective of Jesus. We see that the blind man’s view of Jesus goes through three stages, each one higher than the last.
i) Firstly, he begins by calling Jesus a man. “in verse 11 we read “a man that is called Jesus opened my eyes”. He began by thinking of Jesus as a great man – most of us begin at that same place as well. This man had never come across anyone like Jesus and thus began by thinking of him as supreme among men.
We will do well to think of the sheer magnificence of the manhood of Jesus, at times. In any gallery of the world’s heroes Jesus must find a place. In any anthology of the greatest lives ever lived, Jesus would have to be included. Shakespeare writes, “His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him that nature might stand up and say to all the world, ‘this was a man’.”
Whatever else may be in doubt, this can always be sure, Jesus was a man among men.
ii) Later on the man goes on to call Jesus a prophet. In verse 17 we read the man’s response to the question posed by the Pharisees, of who he would say that Jesus is. His answer, a clear and resounding one, “He is a prophet”.
Friends, in the Jewish understanding, a prophet is a man who brings God’s message to men, a man who lives close to God, and in fact, has been allowed into the inner councils of God Himself. When we read the words of Jesus and are taught about the works he performed we cannot but agree with this man that Jesus is a prophet – a prophet like no other!
Someone once wrote, “If ever any man had the right to be called prophet, who spoke to men with the voice of God, Jesus had”.
iii) Finally, the blind man came to a place where he could confess that Jesus was not only a man, not only a prophet, but truly, he is the Son of God!
He came to see that human categories are not adequate to describe Jesus. He came to see that Jesus did things which were beyond human power and knew things that were beyond human knowledge.
Napoleon was once in company with a number of skeptics who dismissed Jesus as a great man and nothing more.
“Gentlemen,” said Napoleon, “I know men, and Jesus Christ was more than a man.”
“If Jesus Christ is a man, and only a man - I say, that of all mankind I cleave to him and to him I will cleave always. If Jesus Christ is a god – and the only God – I swear, I will follow him through heaven and hell, the earth, the sea, and the air!”
CONCLUSION:
In conclusion, I would like to say this:
The tremendous thing about Jesus Christ is the more we know Him, the greater He becomes. The trouble with human relationships is that it so often happens, that the better we know a person, the more we become aware of his weakness and feet of clay; but the more we know Jesus, the greater the wonder becomes. This will be true, not only in the present time, but also in eternity.
This is the nature of faith, it is a process by which Jesus Christ opens our eyes to see more of Him and be drawn to Him. The result of this faith is that we can only say – in unity with the blind man of our text –
“I once was blind but now I see”
AMEN!
