Sermons Based on the Lectionary of the Syrian Orthodox Church

Sixth Sunday in Great Lent (Samiyo/ The Blind Man)

Sermon / Homily on John 9:1-41

Dylan's Lectionary Blog on John 9:1-13 (14-27) 28-38

by Sarah Dylan Breuer

It's sensible enough: start with the idea that God is just, compassionate, and in control. Then take a look around you. There's a lot of suffering there. Think about why people suffer. There's got to be a reason for all that darkness, right?

In Jesus' culture, people thought of light as a STUFF, a substance that radiated out from itself, a kind of fire that, when present in the human body, could flow out of a person's eyes and allow them to see (props to the Social Science Commentary on John for that). Someone who couldn't see just didn't have the stuff in them; their body had darkness in it instead of light. Makes a certain kind of sense.

And how did they get that way? Surely God didn't make them like that. Had to be sin.

What if the person in question was born that way, born full of darkness? What do we do with that? Do we blame the parents? Do we blame the blind person (some people in Jesus' culture, and probably in our own, thought that in some way it was possible for a fetus to sin in the womb)?

Jesus answers that very important question of what we should do when we see human suffering that challenges the conventional ways we talk about God's goodness and the goodness of the world that God made. I think in some ways that Jesus' answer could be summarized as this:

Get back to work.

Really, I'm as intellectually curious as the next person, but that's what I hear coming across as I read this passage. It speaks to me as a person who's frequently tempted to devote energy to talking about Jesus' compassion that might be better spent extending it.

That temptation seems pretty close to the one faced by the particular Pharisees in this passage: they've spent so much energy figuring out how God's justice and God's compassion operate in the world, and through whom they operate, that they've got very little left to receive the reality when it's in front of them.

I definitely do NOT mean to condemn all Pharisees by this. When Christians use "Pharisee" as a synonym for "hypocrite" or "villain," it invariably comes across as antisemitic -- and besides, it's grossly unfair. The Pharisees were not moral bean-counters who didn't care about justice. Indeed, the prophetic books that most thoroughly informed Jesus', Paul's, and early Christians' vision of what God's justice looks like -- books like Isaiah, and Jeremiah, and Micah, and Amos -- are in our bibles largely because Pharisees saw them as inspired works that deserved to be in the canon. The Pharisees were the primary movers for placing in the canon the passages that, according to Luke 4, were central in Jesus' own sense of mission.

Luke gets that across by having Jesus quote some of the passages in question, such as Isaiah 42:1-7:

Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my spirit upon him;
he will bring forth justice to the nations.

He will not cry or lift up his voice,
or make it heard in the street;
a bruised reed he will not break,
and a dimly burning wick he will not quench;
he will faithfully bring forth justice.

He will not grow faint or be crushed
until he has established justice in the earth;
and the coastlands wait for his teaching.

Thus says God, the LORD,
who created the heavens and stretched them out,
who spread out the earth and what comes from it,
who gives breath to the people upon it
and spirit to those who walk in it:

I am the LORD, I have called you in righteousness,
I have taken you by the hand and kept you;
I have given you as a covenant to the people,
a light to the nations,
to open the eyes that are blind,
to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon,
from the prison those who sit in darkness.

This was not a passage about some singular figure who was going to come to save Israel. Isaiah's "servant of the Lord" was ALL of Israel. And in this Sunday's gospel, Jesus does far more than read or explain these words: he puts them into action. All of Israel, not just an anointed one or few, was to serve as a light to the nations, opening the eyes of those who are blind.

And so it may be that the most damning point this Sunday's gospel has against Jesus' accusers is one that we easily miss: they did not know the blind man who was healed.

He sat and begged there daily, and every day they walked by him, but when the time came, they couldn't be sure of who he was -- others had to fetch his parents before they could be sure of the identification (again, props to the Social Science Commentary on John). Or maybe they'd identified him solely by the darkness they thought was inside him, as a social problem indicative of how far society had sunk. For whatever reason, they'd never looked him in the eye or really noticed his face.

I think that globalization and the previously unimaginable -- and potentially, in some ways, very helpful -- capabilities it brings come with an equally impressive set of responsibilities: that, having been grafted into God's people, we are called to find some way to, in some sense, look people of all nations in the eye before we take their money or as we give ours, to find a face and a name where others see only columns and figures representing social problems or potential profits, symbols to use for political or financial gain, or to prop up a worldview.

Questions about how things got this way and theological questions about what God's revelation to us looks like in our community and our world have their place, but never at the expense of our call as God's servants and Jesus' followers: to bring peaceable justice -- justice that doesn't so much as bend a reed or blow out a candle, let alone issue force in explosions, but which nonetheless brings liberty not just to those most able to seize opportunity, but to the blind and the captive -- to every nation, every block, every city, every neighbor.

We cannot be light to the world until we can see that light in the eyes of beggars in our town and in our global village, welcoming that light as Christ's presence among us and receiving each bearer as a neighbor, a brother or sister with a face and a name. Jesus shows us the way, and his presence with us gives us courage to live more deeply into it.

Thanks be to God!

See Also:

Exegetical Notes on John 9.1-41
by Brian Stoffregen
Holy Textures on John 9:1-41 - Understanding the Bible in its own time and in ours
by David Ewart
First Thoughts on John 9:1-41
by William Loader, Murdoch University, Australia
Jesus and the Man Born Blind-Gospel Analysis
by Edward F. Markquart, Seattle, WA
Sermons, Bible Commentaries and Bible Analyses for 6th Sunday in Great Lent (Samiyo/ The Blind Man)

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