Lent 4A
Grace Lutheran Church
Lakeland, FL
March 19, 2023
1 Samuel 16:1-13
Psalm 23
Ephesians 5:8-14
John 9:1-41
Grace to you and peace from God and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Please pray with me. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Over the past few Sundays in Lent, our Gospel readings have been found in the Gospel of John. This Gospel is unique in many respects and one of them is how the gospel-writer uses the theme of light and dark. Three weeks ago Nicodemus came to Jesus in the dark of the night, not wanting to be seen by any of his fellows from the synagogue. His mind was in darkness as he tried to make sense of what Jesus was telling him about the need to be born from above of the Spirit. He wouldn’t comprehend these words from Jesus. And so it was that Jesus pronounced – light has come into the world and people loved darkness more than the light. And then Nicodemus fades from the story.
Last week we met the Samaritan woman who came to the well and had an encounter with Jesus in the searing light of the noon of the day. She too puzzled over some of Jesus’ words to her in this conversation, one of the longest that Jesus has with anyone in the Gospel and then finally things seem to sink in and she rushes off to her friends and neighbors and they come back to Jesus to see if what she said could be true. And they came to believe because of what they heard for themselves – they believed that Jesus was the Savior of the world – that is, the Cosmos – all that has been created.
And today we learn of the Man Born Blind. Many of us, when asked would say that our sight is the most important of all of our senses; the one we would most want to preserve; the one that if lost would change our lives the most. And so as we hear of this miracle, this sign, of Jesus we can only imagine what our reaction would be if we had been born blind and after decades of that darkness -- one day someone we don’t know comes to us, mixes up spit and dirt to make mud, smears it on our eyes, and tells us to go wash it off. Note that Jesus didn’t even offer the promise of giving the blind man his sight. Yet, the man did as Jesus said. And amazingly, God’s works were revealed in this man as his sight was given him.
But the many around him could not see past who the man used to be – the man born blind who used to beg on the street corner – to see who he was now – a man who had been given sight by Jesus’ hand. One group after another comes to question him, to ask him how this happened, to find out who did this. No less than six times he repeats the story and the result – I was blind, he put mud on my eyes and told me to go wash. I did. Then I could see.
But this is not the climax of the story. The climax happens a short time later. Because the blind man was given his sight by this one named Jesus and because he didn’t recant from this explanation, he was excommunicated from the synagogue. Jesus heard about this, went in search of the man, found him, and said, “Do you BELIEVE in the Son of Man?” And the man said, “Tell me who is SO THAT I can believe.” Jesus said, “The one who is talking with you now is he.” And the man said, “Lord, I believe.” That is the climax of this story. A man who was the recipient of the gift of sight because of a wondrous sign, a man who believed and worshiped even though (or perhaps, because) this was something beyond his own rational understanding. He moved from physical darkness to physical light to spiritual belief.
Helen Keller wrote this:
We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled in the other the word “water,” first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.
I can’t imagine the awakening of that moment for this young woman who couldn’t see and couldn’t hear and couldn’t speak. Suddenly to have light and hope never before experienced.
Lent is a time for us to consider our own blindness,
To consider that there are things we are not able to see
Or perhaps those things from which we have turned our eyes for one reason or another
Maybe there is something Jesus asks of us that we simply cannot understand and so we feel justified in turning away from it
And we hang out in the darkness because we are apprehensive about what the light might reveal.
But just as Helen Keller’s teacher taught her the word “water” as the well-water poured generously over her hand and just as the blind man went to the Pool of Siloam to wash and splash generously in its waters, so we too recall our baptismal waters. We too splash in them, cool, cleansing, refreshing waters and pray that God removes our blindness so that with the man formerly blind we might say “Lord, I believe,” that we might bow down and worship Jesus, and that we then go and tell others, “I once was blind but now I see.”
Amen. May it be so.
