A Sermon preached on Lent IV March 19, 2023 at St. Augustine’s, WI and St. Christoph, MZ
1 Samuel 16:1-13, Ephesians 5:8-14, and John 9:1-41
This is the third week in succession, in which we have had a passage from John as our Gospel reading, and they have been getting successively longer! First, we had Nicodemus ‘s encounter with Jesus, then the encounter of the Samaritan woman with Jesus at Jacob’s Well, this week the story of the man born blind, and next week we will hear how Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. Why are we getting all these passages from John’s Gospel and why are they so long? Well, as we have a three-year lectionary cycle and four gospels, we have to fit John in somehow and so episodes from his account of Jesus ‘s life and teaching and of the meaning of his life and death are spread over the three years. In fact, we read about 1/3 of his Gospel each year, particularly in the Lent and Easter seasons.
And why are they so long? Johns’ gospel is the last to be written. We could call it the most literary of the gospels, the most carefully composed. By the time it was written, Christianity had begun to split off from Judaism, which is one reason for some of the problematic statements about “the Jews” that I’ll talk about more in a moment. The members of John’s community, his audience, will have known the other gospels so John does not need to cover the same ground. Instead, he takes just a few of the events from Jesus ‘s life and death and resurrection, some held in common with the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke), some unique to him, and puts them into a theological context, surrounds them with teaching. He uses them to tell his readers about God, Jesus, and the Spirit, about life and light, about word and witness. We call the first part of the Gospel the Book of Signs, as each miracle points towards a greater truth.
This Gospel is full of long speeches and monologues and other literary devices. Today’s story reminds me of a play in five acts. You might have found it easier to listen to if we had staged it as one!
In Act One, Jesus sees and heals the man blind from birth. This is important for two reasons. It makes it a very significant miracle. “Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind,” the man himself will say later (9:32) And it allows Jesus to teach that the man’s condition is not caused by sin, neither his nor his parents. God does not work or punish that way. In Act Two the neighbours bring the man to the pharisees. I expect they thought the pharisees would be pleased and amazed …. Some were, but the majority only sees a challenge to their authority. In Act Three, the man’s parents are cited to the tribunal and questioned. They confirm that he was really blind – it’s not a scam – but won’t explain why and here we get that problematic statement “His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews; for the Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue.” (John 9:22) This is a dangerous anachronism. No one was being excluded from the Jewish community during Jesus’ ministry, only much later as what we now call Christianity was no longer considered compatible with the Jewish faith. Here it is a rhetorical device that seems intended to create or reinforce fear of the Jews. And we know what that lead to.
In Act Four the man who had been blind is recalled to the tribunal and questioned again – but now in a much more hostile manner. The questioners want him to denounce Jesus as a sinner. But in a lovely little speech, full of irony, that man turns the tables on them “If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” (9:33) (see also 3:2 Nicodemus: “No one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”)
At the end of a play, in the final act, we usually have what is called the denoument in which the strands of the plot are drawn together, and matters are explained or resolved. And that is exactly what happens in the fifth and final Act. Jesus looks for and finds the man – acting just like a good shepherd. The man acknowledges Jesus not just as a prophet as he did in Act One, or as someone sent from God, as he told the pharisees in Act Four, but as God: “He said, ‘Lord, I believe.’ And he worshipped him.” (9:38) I am reminded of the episode with the 10 lepers in Luke’s Gospel (17:11-19) when only one returns praising God, to prostrate himself at Jesus’ feet and to thank him. In Act One, the man born blind had been physically healed and was able to see daylight for the first time. Now he has also been spiritually healed and sees and knows and believes in the light of the world.
For Jesus healing is always both a physical as well as a spiritual act, and a sign. The Gospel passage opened with the message that physical blindness – and other sicknesses – are not caused by sin and ends with the message that spiritual blindness, wilfully ignoring the truth, is. In the prologue to John’s Gospel, we were already told (1:9) that Jesus “the true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.” That not everyone, including some of his own people, will accept him as such. “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God,” (1:12) just like the man born blind.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus says: “We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” (9:5) And what happens then? Is the work of God no longer possible?
The Letter to the Ephesians, which further develops the theme of light and dark, gives us one answer. Christ did not take that light with him. Those who truly follow Christ live as children of light, radiating the light and love of God that is within us, and that grows in strength and power as we grow in faith. Anything we do that is good and right and true is a fruit of the light of Christ. It is only dark in the metaphorical sense of a time of evil and deceit, when we let it be dark.
Another answer comes from the Episcopal priest and author, Barbara Brown Taylor. She was uncomfortable with our tendency to associate all that is good with lightness and all that is evil and dangerous with darkness and wrote a book, “Learning to Walk in the Dark” to counteract that tendency. It reminds us that physical darkness and night are necessary, and also that God works in the night time as well, to quote:
“Even when light fades and darkness falls--as it does every single day, in every single life--God does not turn the world over to some other deity...Here is the testimony of faith; darkness is not dark to God; the night is as bright as the day.”[1]
Amen.
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