The Man Who Is No Longer Blind. Series

John 9:1-41 A man who is no longer blind.

One of the sports that I participated in as a young bloke was caving, the Nelson region has some amazing caves, and I had a few adventures with the Nelson Caving Club. Plus, we would do a few caving trips just as a group of friends. One thing that I remember vividly about caving, from my first experience is just how dark it is when you turn all the lights off, or when your carbide lamp goes out. You can’t see you hand in front of your face, you are totally blind, until a light gets turned on.

As we approach Easter in 2023 we will engage in a series of sermons that give us an understanding of Jesus as Lord and an understanding in part of his journey towards the cross. His final journey to Jerusalem.

New life in Christ, healing both physical and spiritual, what importance do we place on these? While the physical healing is a wonderful gift, it is spiritual healing that lasts...new Life in Christ what a wonderful thing!

I’d like to relate an encounter in Bible that tells us something about God’s power to heal, well actually there are a fairly good number of them but this one is about a bloke who was born blind!

There are a couple of key verses prior to this passage that I would like to refer to:

They are in John’s gospel chapter 7:1, John relates this, “After this (this being Jesus being deserted by many disciples) Jesus went around in Galilee, purposely staying away from Judea because the Jews there were waiting to take his life.”

That is the first verse but as the feast of Tabernacles approached, they went to Judea.

The other verse is this from chapter 8:12 “When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”

This man in chapter 9 , was blind, he’d been born that way, now when Jesus was asked why he’d been born blind; Jesus answer was not because of anyone’s sin “but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.” (John 9:3) You see back in the day if someone was born with an infirmity it was believed that it was due to someone’s sin. A wee bit further on in the passage, verse 5, Jesus makes a bold claim about himself, “While I am in the world, I am the light of the world” (echoing his words in John 8:12). Then he spat on the ground made a bit of mud and put it on the man’s eyes! Jesus then told the blind muddy faced man to head off to the pool of Siloam and wash the muddy salivary stuff off his face. An interesting coincidence here or is it that Siloam in English means sent. The name originates from the water beig sent through a conduit cut through rock to the pool.

The miracle may have already occurred while Jesus was with the man, but what we see is that this blind man went to the pool, washed and went home seeing!

For a person born blind to be healed involved an act of re-creation of that person’s ability to see, something that required healing of the eyes and the brain, those parts of the person that had never been used. For in the case where a person is born totally blind and who lives in darkness, the eyes that don’t see in the first few months of life will never see.

There are other accounts, I know of five, of Jesus healing the blind, some of whom were beggars. They would have had a spot where they were taken at the start of the day sat in one place and people would have dropped spare change in their beggars bowls This man was a beggar used to having what he needed come to him while he was restricted to one spot, his life was that of a beggar. He was probably regularly taken to is spot to beg by his parents, he had no prospects, or employment, he had no social status, would never marry, now this occurred, Jesus gave him a directive after he had applied the saliva and mud to his eyes…’go and wash it off!’

Was he just washing off mud and saliva? Was he washing away his blindness? He was washing away his blindness, but also washing away the restricted future that he previously had lined up for him. With the washing came complete life change, a new life story, his whole narrative changed, those things that were not available to him became available. His life would now have meaning, he now had a future. The glory of God’s healing power meant that he now had a life that could be lived in the light not the darkness.