Seeing Jesus
Sermon
To The Cross and Beyond
Cycle A Gospel Sermons for Lent and Easter
Object:
Josiah Harlan was the first American to enter Afghanistan. He did so as a doctor with British Forces. We're not talking about the 1990s, but the 1830s. Harlan was a brilliant, self-absorbed adventurer who'd read a few medical books and passed a cursory exam to be an army surgeon. He later attempted to become an Afghan prince, leading his own army.
No matter his extreme self-importance and self-centeredness, Harlan's abilities as a primitive doctor helped a lot of people. An elderly Afghan woman heard he was a surgeon and approached to ask if he'd operate on her cataracts that had blinded her. He proceeded in the painful surgery and she was instantly able to see. He was about to apply the dressings, but she resisted. She said, "Let me first look upon the face of my deliverer to whom I owe a second creation."1
She wanted to see the person who'd given her sight. The man born blind in John nine wants to understand the person who gave him sight.
Since at the end of John 8 Jesus was near the temple, this whole event with Jesus and the man born blind probably takes place around Jerusalem's temple precincts -- about 35 acres that surrounded the actual temple, which itself was a building the size of a gymnasium. The area around the temple was like a small town in that everyone knew everyone else. Today maybe we'd say it had the community of a mall, where most of the regulars can identify the blind beggar. And he, instead of Jesus, becomes the person we hear most about in this incident.
Everyone else recorded here responds to the blind man, starting with Jesus' students. They and the Pharisees accept the popular theology that says that if you're suffering, someone sinned. People around us still mouth such sub-Christian idiocy. A tornado levels a town and the TV crew interviews a devout survivor who asserts for all the world to hear, "God must have a reason." As though God kills people... or causes them to be born blind. People who say such things are basically doing what the Pharisees thought they were doing. They're trying to save God's reputation. Their solution for why people suffer is because they've sinned. Nice and neat and no problem for them about innocent suffering. With that kind of calculation there's no such thing as innocent suffering.
The rest of us are a little more squeamish when blaming God for suffering, but we certainly wonder about it. Why do the innocent suffer? Tiny children, babes who've never even had a conscious thought (good or bad), are swept away in a tsunami, blasted by a hurricane, smashed in an earthquake, or slowly starved in a famine -- they sinned?
We'd be less than human if we didn't ask why such suffering. But look at what Jesus does while his pious students are inquiring about who sinned to produce this suffering. Jesus, instead, acts. This is a real person who's suffering for crying out loud, and Jesus isn't going to lounge around, chewing over theories, or spouting explanations for suffering. Basically Jesus says, "God's going to work even here." Then he heals the man's eyes in a way the man can understand -- spittle was believed to be medicinal. Others mill around chatting about the cause of misery, and Jesus cures it.
We can imagine what the experience was like for this man -- a dark world all his life -- suddenly coming to light. Voices he'd always heard he can now attach to faces. Maybe he'd even heard what others speculated about the cause of his blindness, heard Jesus' words and then saw, first thing, Jesus' face.
That's where he starts to learn about Jesus. And his learning grows. The man often speaks of not knowing enough about Jesus. He says he doesn't know where Jesus is. He doesn't know if Jesus is a sinner. He doesn't know who the Son of Man is. But throughout he's understanding more about Jesus.
He didn't go looking for healing. Jesus simply seeks him out and heals him. Later Jesus comes looking for him again. So, it didn't start with the blind man's initiative. He was asking for coins, not miracles; but, he's now got something to say about what happened to him and his strained and changing thoughts about Jesus are enough.
A horrible lot of Christians think that in order to share their faith, they need a master's degree in theology or something. Seldom is that necessary. I could almost say (not quite, but almost) that when it comes to sharing your faith, seldom is a master's degree in theology helpful. People who don't know a lot of details about the Christian faith can share what they do know, and like this man, they can share what they've experienced.
Think of musicians. Many musicians, while taking music lessons themselves, also give lessons. You can teach what you know, and you don't have to know a lot more than the person you teach. When it comes to faith, if you have a relationship with God and another person doesn't, you have something to share. When he's interrogated by the religious authorities, the ex-blind man is unsure of himself but states what he knows. Finally they sputter back at him, "Are you trying to teach us?" Well, yes, and so can we with what little or much that we know and experience of Jesus.
Now, first of all we need, as does this man, to be as smart as possible in talking about Jesus. For the sake of our Lord we must think carefully about what we say for him. Often popular religion simply equates feelings with faith. That can be a real problem. If faith can be reduced just to feelings, then the question isn't "Is Jesus the clearest revelation of God in all creation?" but "How do you feel today?"
Our feelings, as a church educator used to say, are friendly. They're part of how God created us. They're just not enough, consistently, to base faith upon. I can feel rotten, sometimes even when I'm serving God in an important way (like informing parents that their child was killed in a car accident), but that doesn't mean God's not with me and helping me do what's difficult.
That said there's a great deal we can say about our knowledge and experience of God. As tragically silly as some Christians are, defining the God of the universe by the momentary state of their digestion, more Christians nowadays seem tongue-tied to offer any word on God's behalf, as though they have nothing to utter that could help others to faith. We, like the man born blind, can offer the assessment of what God has been doing in our lives. There's more to say about God than that but at least the man born blind is the expert on his life. We're the experts on our life. We have something to say. An old gospel song summarizes today's Bible text and what we can express in our own words about Jesus, "Once I was blind, but now I can see: The Light of the world is Jesus!"
For every person who pooh-poohs faith and says, "Oh, it's all psychological," there's another person waiting to hear an honest appraisal of how God through all our ups and downs has affected our lives. For every person who says that believers merely look at the sky and wish there was a God, another person needs to hear us say that such reasoning can turn the other direction. Maybe, instead, non-believers look at the sky and wish there wasn't a God!
We each have something we can say -- as fragmented as it might be -- to help others grow in faith. We get to see the ex-blind man grow in faith and understanding until finally he realizes that Jesus is God's ultimate representative, the Son of Man, and he worships Jesus.
That's the big shift in the story. It's from the man's eyesight to his insight. The whole event is about "seeing" Jesus in two different ways: simple, physical sight and then being able to see what Jesus means.
With the woman Josiah Harlan performed cataract surgery on: She wanted to see the face of the one who cured her. With Jesus we need to discover who he really is. He's not a scoundrel like Harlan who wants to establish his own little kingdom. Jesus expends all his love and energy for God and others and, in John 8, especially for the blind man.
The blind man in his helplessness and confusion is found by Jesus and thus his former suffering puts him a step ahead in understanding Jesus. His suffering wasn't good, but in the end God could use even that for the faith of others. He begins to figure out that Jesus is more than he first appears. He starts to see who Jesus really is.
Jesus grants us the ability to see that life is about living with God for the sake of others. When we look at what Jesus does and listen to what he says, we see God's intention for the world. Consequently, our painful questions about suffering find some relief when Jesus comes on the scene. We know that, since Jesus is God's perfect expression on earth, God doesn't strike humans with suffering; although, life itself usually makes us pay in this world for our mistakes.
Look at the man born blind. When his suffering meets Jesus' compassion it results in God's glory, which means it boosts God's reputation. Jesus, showing us God, doesn't afflict people with pains to match their sins. He heals people and restores us into a new life with God.
Remember how this story begins. Everyone except Jesus crowds around debating "why" a person's suffering. When you've suffered, maybe others have wondered about your sin.... Maybe you've asked yourself if God has struck you in punishment.... In the midst of our suffering, however, Jesus does something about it -- outside of us or inside of us. Jesus does something. His questions aren't about why. He asks "What"? What can I do even with this suffering?
In Jesus we won't see God's path crisscrossing roughshod through human suffering. Instead, in Jesus we gaze upon the clearest view of God's heart ever seen.
We won't understand everything about suffering -- our personal suffering or others' suffering. We'll still ask our questions. But we'll trust that Jesus has come right out of nowhere to find us and heal us -- maybe our body and soul or maybe just our soul for now.
Then Jesus helps us understand enough about God that we can tell others the precious little we know. For it is precious -- whether we share it in small towns, big cities, or a mall. And in every human difficulty we can now look and say, "What can we do about this?" When we do, we're imitating God who looks at Jesus crucified outside of old Jerusalem's walls. I imagine it this way. God sadly ponders Jesus'lifeless body and says, "What can I do even with this?"
Communion
If you trust that even with a blind man in Jerusalem Jesus brought sight, if you believe that God even used the horrible miscarriage of justice of Jesus' death for our benefit, then come to the Lord's table and see what God can do with this cup and this bread. Amen.
__________
1. Ben Macintyre, Josiah the Great: The True Story of the Man Who Would Be King (London: HarperCollins, 2004), pp. 67-68.
No matter his extreme self-importance and self-centeredness, Harlan's abilities as a primitive doctor helped a lot of people. An elderly Afghan woman heard he was a surgeon and approached to ask if he'd operate on her cataracts that had blinded her. He proceeded in the painful surgery and she was instantly able to see. He was about to apply the dressings, but she resisted. She said, "Let me first look upon the face of my deliverer to whom I owe a second creation."1
She wanted to see the person who'd given her sight. The man born blind in John nine wants to understand the person who gave him sight.
Since at the end of John 8 Jesus was near the temple, this whole event with Jesus and the man born blind probably takes place around Jerusalem's temple precincts -- about 35 acres that surrounded the actual temple, which itself was a building the size of a gymnasium. The area around the temple was like a small town in that everyone knew everyone else. Today maybe we'd say it had the community of a mall, where most of the regulars can identify the blind beggar. And he, instead of Jesus, becomes the person we hear most about in this incident.
Everyone else recorded here responds to the blind man, starting with Jesus' students. They and the Pharisees accept the popular theology that says that if you're suffering, someone sinned. People around us still mouth such sub-Christian idiocy. A tornado levels a town and the TV crew interviews a devout survivor who asserts for all the world to hear, "God must have a reason." As though God kills people... or causes them to be born blind. People who say such things are basically doing what the Pharisees thought they were doing. They're trying to save God's reputation. Their solution for why people suffer is because they've sinned. Nice and neat and no problem for them about innocent suffering. With that kind of calculation there's no such thing as innocent suffering.
The rest of us are a little more squeamish when blaming God for suffering, but we certainly wonder about it. Why do the innocent suffer? Tiny children, babes who've never even had a conscious thought (good or bad), are swept away in a tsunami, blasted by a hurricane, smashed in an earthquake, or slowly starved in a famine -- they sinned?
We'd be less than human if we didn't ask why such suffering. But look at what Jesus does while his pious students are inquiring about who sinned to produce this suffering. Jesus, instead, acts. This is a real person who's suffering for crying out loud, and Jesus isn't going to lounge around, chewing over theories, or spouting explanations for suffering. Basically Jesus says, "God's going to work even here." Then he heals the man's eyes in a way the man can understand -- spittle was believed to be medicinal. Others mill around chatting about the cause of misery, and Jesus cures it.
We can imagine what the experience was like for this man -- a dark world all his life -- suddenly coming to light. Voices he'd always heard he can now attach to faces. Maybe he'd even heard what others speculated about the cause of his blindness, heard Jesus' words and then saw, first thing, Jesus' face.
That's where he starts to learn about Jesus. And his learning grows. The man often speaks of not knowing enough about Jesus. He says he doesn't know where Jesus is. He doesn't know if Jesus is a sinner. He doesn't know who the Son of Man is. But throughout he's understanding more about Jesus.
He didn't go looking for healing. Jesus simply seeks him out and heals him. Later Jesus comes looking for him again. So, it didn't start with the blind man's initiative. He was asking for coins, not miracles; but, he's now got something to say about what happened to him and his strained and changing thoughts about Jesus are enough.
A horrible lot of Christians think that in order to share their faith, they need a master's degree in theology or something. Seldom is that necessary. I could almost say (not quite, but almost) that when it comes to sharing your faith, seldom is a master's degree in theology helpful. People who don't know a lot of details about the Christian faith can share what they do know, and like this man, they can share what they've experienced.
Think of musicians. Many musicians, while taking music lessons themselves, also give lessons. You can teach what you know, and you don't have to know a lot more than the person you teach. When it comes to faith, if you have a relationship with God and another person doesn't, you have something to share. When he's interrogated by the religious authorities, the ex-blind man is unsure of himself but states what he knows. Finally they sputter back at him, "Are you trying to teach us?" Well, yes, and so can we with what little or much that we know and experience of Jesus.
Now, first of all we need, as does this man, to be as smart as possible in talking about Jesus. For the sake of our Lord we must think carefully about what we say for him. Often popular religion simply equates feelings with faith. That can be a real problem. If faith can be reduced just to feelings, then the question isn't "Is Jesus the clearest revelation of God in all creation?" but "How do you feel today?"
Our feelings, as a church educator used to say, are friendly. They're part of how God created us. They're just not enough, consistently, to base faith upon. I can feel rotten, sometimes even when I'm serving God in an important way (like informing parents that their child was killed in a car accident), but that doesn't mean God's not with me and helping me do what's difficult.
That said there's a great deal we can say about our knowledge and experience of God. As tragically silly as some Christians are, defining the God of the universe by the momentary state of their digestion, more Christians nowadays seem tongue-tied to offer any word on God's behalf, as though they have nothing to utter that could help others to faith. We, like the man born blind, can offer the assessment of what God has been doing in our lives. There's more to say about God than that but at least the man born blind is the expert on his life. We're the experts on our life. We have something to say. An old gospel song summarizes today's Bible text and what we can express in our own words about Jesus, "Once I was blind, but now I can see: The Light of the world is Jesus!"
For every person who pooh-poohs faith and says, "Oh, it's all psychological," there's another person waiting to hear an honest appraisal of how God through all our ups and downs has affected our lives. For every person who says that believers merely look at the sky and wish there was a God, another person needs to hear us say that such reasoning can turn the other direction. Maybe, instead, non-believers look at the sky and wish there wasn't a God!
We each have something we can say -- as fragmented as it might be -- to help others grow in faith. We get to see the ex-blind man grow in faith and understanding until finally he realizes that Jesus is God's ultimate representative, the Son of Man, and he worships Jesus.
That's the big shift in the story. It's from the man's eyesight to his insight. The whole event is about "seeing" Jesus in two different ways: simple, physical sight and then being able to see what Jesus means.
With the woman Josiah Harlan performed cataract surgery on: She wanted to see the face of the one who cured her. With Jesus we need to discover who he really is. He's not a scoundrel like Harlan who wants to establish his own little kingdom. Jesus expends all his love and energy for God and others and, in John 8, especially for the blind man.
The blind man in his helplessness and confusion is found by Jesus and thus his former suffering puts him a step ahead in understanding Jesus. His suffering wasn't good, but in the end God could use even that for the faith of others. He begins to figure out that Jesus is more than he first appears. He starts to see who Jesus really is.
Jesus grants us the ability to see that life is about living with God for the sake of others. When we look at what Jesus does and listen to what he says, we see God's intention for the world. Consequently, our painful questions about suffering find some relief when Jesus comes on the scene. We know that, since Jesus is God's perfect expression on earth, God doesn't strike humans with suffering; although, life itself usually makes us pay in this world for our mistakes.
Look at the man born blind. When his suffering meets Jesus' compassion it results in God's glory, which means it boosts God's reputation. Jesus, showing us God, doesn't afflict people with pains to match their sins. He heals people and restores us into a new life with God.
Remember how this story begins. Everyone except Jesus crowds around debating "why" a person's suffering. When you've suffered, maybe others have wondered about your sin.... Maybe you've asked yourself if God has struck you in punishment.... In the midst of our suffering, however, Jesus does something about it -- outside of us or inside of us. Jesus does something. His questions aren't about why. He asks "What"? What can I do even with this suffering?
In Jesus we won't see God's path crisscrossing roughshod through human suffering. Instead, in Jesus we gaze upon the clearest view of God's heart ever seen.
We won't understand everything about suffering -- our personal suffering or others' suffering. We'll still ask our questions. But we'll trust that Jesus has come right out of nowhere to find us and heal us -- maybe our body and soul or maybe just our soul for now.
Then Jesus helps us understand enough about God that we can tell others the precious little we know. For it is precious -- whether we share it in small towns, big cities, or a mall. And in every human difficulty we can now look and say, "What can we do about this?" When we do, we're imitating God who looks at Jesus crucified outside of old Jerusalem's walls. I imagine it this way. God sadly ponders Jesus'lifeless body and says, "What can I do even with this?"
Communion
If you trust that even with a blind man in Jerusalem Jesus brought sight, if you believe that God even used the horrible miscarriage of justice of Jesus' death for our benefit, then come to the Lord's table and see what God can do with this cup and this bread. Amen.
__________
1. Ben Macintyre, Josiah the Great: The True Story of the Man Who Would Be King (London: HarperCollins, 2004), pp. 67-68.
