(John 9)
Note: the video begins with a dramatic reading of John 9 and concludes with the Lord’s Supper, with the words of institution; the sermon begins around 5:56.
The lectionary this morning brings us to John 9, in a season when we are looking at God’s word through the lens of calling and mission. Left to my own devices I would probably never have put these two things together; but I was not left to my own devices. It’s a great gift to have good colleagues, and this year I’ve been pondering the words of one of the wise pastors I know. Those words were in the back of my mind as I began preparing this message, and they quickly became my guide to see John 9 from a new angle. Let me show you:
[play sermon snippet, Emily Cash, VSF, 1/29/23]
When we talk about the ways God calls us to be and do what he wills, we have to face the fact that his calling is rarely obvious or explicitly spelled out. Given that reality, there are two profoundly important truths in Emily’s words.
The first, I’m sure you saw: when we think and talk about the ways God calls and leads us, as individuals and as his body, we must do so humbly. This is a balance, because there are equal and opposite errors here. One is to believe we don’t need God to speak to us anymore. We have the four sources of truth John Wesley identified—Scripture, reason, tradition, and experience—and it’s our job to figure out what we should believe and what we’re supposed to do. The other is to make far too much of God speaking to us—which really means making far too much of ourselves. This is the Corinthian error (or one of them), and it leads to spiritual pride. It also leads to factionalism, as people compete to prove that “no, God spoke to me, not you, and we need to do what I say.” We can see Paul dealing with that in his letters to the Corinthians.
Different as they may be, both of these are closed postures—one closed to the possibility of God speaking, the other closed tight around our preferred understanding of what or how God has spoken to us. In direct contrast is the posture Emily modeled of facing God with open hands, letting his gifts flow freely across our palms and out between our fingers, cupping them like cool water on a hot, dry day. We should hold to the expectation that God is with us and speaking to us, calling us to each next step in our journey—but we should hold it lightly, not tightly.
So that’s the first truth I want to highlight in Emily’s words. The second is probably less obvious: how God calls and leads us isn’t about how he calls and leads us, it’s about how we listen and follow. Now, hear me carefully on this. I’m not saying that means it’s all about us, or that it’s up to us to make anything happen. That’s the exact backwards of the truth. The point is this: God knows us, better than we know ourselves. He knows our wavelengths, and he knows how we operate. He calls and leads each of us as a specific particular individual, tuned to the particular and specific ways we think and act. The same is true of churches. A Presbyterian church of street people meeting under the Hot Metal Bridge in Pittsburgh—and yes, that’s a real thing—has little but Jesus in common with Valley Springs, and God speaks to us accordingly. He calls and leads each church not as generic congregation but as that particular congregation in that particular place, time, and culture.
As we reflect on John’s story of this extraordinary man whose eyes Jesus opened, keep these two insights in mind. We are watching the calling of a remarkable disciple; here we see the process unfold from start to finish.
Now, for this congregation in particular, it’s especially worth noting that this story follows closely on the Feast of Booths, which is the model for our annual Harvest celebration. In verse 5, Jesus once again declares himself the light of the world; in the rest of the chapter, he shows us what happens when the light shines. Those who are blind are given their sight, while those who are certain they see clearly are blinded.
We aren’t told how the disciples knew this man had been born blind, so presumably it doesn’t matter. What does matter is their assumption, straight out of the culture of their day, that if he was born blind, it must have been a judgment on sin, either his or his parents’. Jesus makes clear that the man was born blind not to punish him but to prepare him for his calling. Jesus opened his physical eyes to open his spiritual eyes, and sent him to the Pharisees to drive them further into their blindness. That’s the significance of Siloam—Shiloaḥ, in the Hebrew. For one thing, as John tells us, Shiloaḥ means “sent”; but it has additional significance. In Isaiah 8, the Lord declares, “Because this people has refused the gently flowing waters of Shiloaḥ . . . the Lord is bringing up against them the waters of the River, mighty and many, the king of Assyria and all his glory.” Jesus, who promised rivers of living water, sends the blind man to Shiloaḥ; Shiloaḥ sends him to bear witness to the Pharisees, and the Pharisees reject his testimony.
Of course, that doesn’t happen right away. First, the man return to the neighborhood where he begged, throwing the community into complete confusion. Some people are open enough to miracle to be able to see what they’re actually seeing; others would rather believe the blind beggar has a doppelgänger who is exactly like him in every respect except of course for the minor detail of not being blind. In the middle of it all is the ex-blind man trying eagerly to prove he is in fact himself. For a while, it seems, he’s ignored, as his neighbors would rather argue with each other about him than listen to him; but eventually someone asks the obvious question: “If you’re the blind man, how come you can see?”
Now, Jesus hadn’t exactly left his business card, but the blind man has figured out who healed his blindness. Here we have his first level of testimony: “I know who healed me and how he did it.”
The neighbors are befuddled. They want someone to tell them what they’re supposed to think, so they go to the authorities they trust and respect: the Pharisees. Their trust and respect were well-founded, for two reasons. One was competence, as most trained scholars and teachers of the Scriptures were Pharisees. The other was integrity, for the Pharisees had a well-earned (and well-advertised) reputation for living out their faith. Of course the people of the community took the man born blind to the Pharisees. Where else could they have gone?
Their arrival (on the Sabbath, no less) set the cat among the pigeons. The Pharisees’ oral tradition, which they taught had also given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai, forbade healing on the Sabbath except when someone’s life was in danger—and obviously the blind beggar had been doing well enough by himself. In addition, the “oral Torah” also prohibited kneading on the Sabbath, which is why they were so focused on asking the ex-blind man how Jesus had healed him: they had to figure out if what Jesus had done counted as kneading so they knew whether he was guilty of two Sabbath violations or just one.
All the same, the Pharisees were divided amongst themselves, just like the crowds at the Feast of Booths. For some, their interpretation of the Sabbath law outweighed miracle. They could not possibly be wrong; if Jesus’ actions conflicted with their understanding of God’s word, then Jesus couldn’t be on God’s side in any way, no matter what miracles he did. Here we see the fatal arrogance of the tight-fisted; as New Testament scholar D. A. Carson dryly observes, “In religious matters there are none so blind as those who are always certain that they see.” Others, however, were able to fight free of their own understanding enough to see what they were actually seeing, and to recognize that it had to be God’s work. If Jesus had healed the man’s blindness by the power of God, then their understanding of the Sabbath law had to be wrong, at least in part. At least for a moment, they had the humility to accept the possibility.
At an impasse, the Pharisees made a tactical mistake: they tried to resolve their situation by asking the ex-blind man what he thought. The question forced him to choose a side, and he chose Jesus’ side without hesitation. Here we have his second level of testimony as he moves from reporting the facts to interpreting them: “He’s a prophet.” His eyes are opening further and he’s seeing things more clearly, and so he recognizes God’s work when he sees it. Unfortunately for him, his judges’ eyes are clouded by their theological commitments (and their emotional commitment to their theology), and they really don’t like his answer. Rather than taking his words seriously, they go after him.
They call in his parents to try to prove he’s a fraud, but it doesn’t work; his parents are frightened enough of them to throw their son under the bus, but too self-protective in their fear to give the Pharisees anything to work with. In their furious frustration, they haul the ex-beggar back in to interrogate him further. Their frustrated fury has driven them to close ranks against the threat: Jesus cannot be God’s servant, he must be a sinner, and so the man born blind must give testimony that will support the conclusion they require.
Literally, their opening injunction to him is “Give glory to God!” It seems innocuous enough, but it shouldn’t be taken literally. Maybe the best way to render it, if you remember the old Dukes of Hazzard, would be Rosco P. Coltrane’s catchphrase “Tell the truth, shame the devil!” That phrasing would be out of character for the Pharisees, though; “Tell the truth, give God the credit” could stand to be stronger, but it gets the point across well enough. In any case, first they order the ex-blind man to tell the truth, then they tell him what they will accept as truth: “We know this man is a fraud and a sinner.”
At first, the man born blind sticks to his level of competence. “I don’t know theological stuff—you’re the experts, not me,” he says. “I do know my life story, though, and I won’t lie about that: I was blind, and now I can see.” When the Pharisees, their fury and frustration at his refusal to follow their script continuing to build, start the questioning all over again, he realizes he’s testifying before a kangaroo court. He stops playing along and, showing remarkable wisdom and insight, starts playing with them. He mocks them with mock innocence, asking, “Do you want to be his disciples too?” (That “too” is telling, isn’t it?)
By this point, the Pharisees are losing it. They try to crush the ex-beggar with their authority: “Moses spoke for God, and we are disciples of Moses, therefore we speak for God. Therefore, anyone who disagrees with us cannot speak for God. We know this fellow doesn’t come from God. We don’t know where he does come from, but we know he’s not from God.”
The healed man sees the ridiculousness of their unbelief. Healing of the blind was an extremely rare miracle, and one which Isaiah includes as a sign of the dawning of the messianic age. “I thought you guys were the experts,” he declares, “and I was prepared to defer to you, but you’ve just proven you don’t know what you’re talking about. Forget what I said earlier: I know this man isn’t an enemy of God because God doesn’t answer the prayers of his enemies—he only answers the prayers of those who worship and obey him. This is not a miracle a sinner could perform.” Having gone that far, he asserts the obvious conclusion, taking his testimony to another level: “This man must be God’s servant.”
The Pharisees, now elementally enraged, hurl the ex-blind man bodily out of the building; the only grace they offer him is opening the door first. Jesus reappears and asks him, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” Having realized the official religious authorities are bankrupt, the man born blind is eager: “Just tell me who he is!” When Jesus says, “I am he,” the man responds by offering the highest testimony possible: he worships Jesus as Lord.
So what can we learn about the call of God from John 9? Certainly the importance of humility is blazingly obvious in the contrast between the man born blind and the hard-line Pharisees. In addition, though, I think the idea that God calls us according to how we hear and leads us in the way in which we follow is also borne out in this passage.
For one thing, when Jesus calls the blind man, his calling is not generic. Jesus calls him in a way which is specific and organic to him, his life, and his story. We should expect no less from the one who in the very next chapter will say, “I am the good shepherd . . . and my sheep know my voice.” We don’t need to fit ourselves into someone else’s mold of “how God works.” I don’t need to learn how God speaks to others and try to do the same things they do. I just need to pay attention, to watch and listen, to learn how he speaks to me and how he leads and guides me. I don’t need to be afraid of getting it wrong, because that’s essentially the fear that I can be stupid enough that not even God could get through to me—and however stupid or foolish I may be at times, God is smarter than my stupid. He’s smarter than all of our stupid put together.
Along with this, when Jesus calls the man born blind, it isn’t all at once—he doesn’t expect the man to get all the way to faith in one long jump. Rather, Jesus leads him step by step until he’s ready. Now, that might seem like a strange thing to say—Jesus leads him? Where’s that in the text? I grant you it isn’t in this text. It’s a theological commitment. If God is truly sovereign over all creation at every point in time and truly at work in all of it, then Jesus didn’t just happen to heal this man at that particular point when everything else would happen the way it did. None of it was accidental. Jesus knew what would happen and how the ex-blind man would respond; Jesus knew the steadily mounting questioning, first from the neighbors and then from the Pharisees, would move the man born blind from simple gratitude to devoted worship.
Finally, note that the ex-blind man clearly feels out of his depth when the Pharisees first call him in. He reminds me a little of one of our elders in Winona who drove a truck for a vending-machine company. When he spoke in our meetings, he often prefaced his comment with, “I know I’m not very smart, but . . .” I learned quickly that those words usually introduced the wisest and most perceptive thing anyone would say on that subject. In much the same way, the ex-beggar doesn’t have the education or the credentials, but just being who he is is enough to outface and show up the learned professionals.
God’s calling on each of our lives is not about our perceptions of ourselves and our capabilities. It’s not about knowing all the answers or being able to do all the things. It’s really just doing the same thing the ex-blind man did: going where we’re sent (because to be called is to be sent) and being ourselves when we get there. If it were just us, it wouldn’t be enough—but it isn’t just us. It’s never just us, because God is in control, and his Spirit is with us.
Of course, that’s easier to say than to hang on to, because it can be hard to see and harder to touch. We’re physical beings, we need more than just abstract faith—as the story says, we need Jesus with skin on. That’s why we need this table, as a visible, tangible sign and seal that we belong to Jesus and he is with us. Here we physically re-enact and move in this spiritual reality, participating in three dimensions at once: past, present, and future; remembrance, communion, and hope.