Sermon for Lent 4

Reading: John 9:1-41

I wonder what we make of the story of a blind man receiving his sight as Jesus heals him. As I was growing up, I found myself questioning such biblical accounts. I suppose I settled on the perspective that Jesus could heal people, because he was Jesus, but you don’t find things like that happening today. Or do you? I was at college with someone who was steadily losing her sight. On leaving college, she was ordained, but she had to have service books run off for her with increasingly large typeface. She was told that there was no hope of a cure. Her optic nerve was degenerating, and she would end up totally blind. Then, one day, she was waiting in the doctors’ surgery and her sight simply returned. They could find no trace of any problem with her optic nerve. Neither could they offer any explanation for what had happened and her miraculous cure.

This raises two questions for me. Firstly, the need to believe in and to hope for the miraculous. Our limited human minds can only perceive and understand so much. We might say that the miraculous is something that goes beyond our present understanding of what is possible. Secondly, if sometimes people receive what appears to be a miraculous cure, why does this not happen for everyone? One thing is certain. As we grow older, our list of ailments increases. My wife and I have been meeting regularly for meals with two other couples for almost 40 years. We remember the days when our conversations were about the challenges of being the parents of young children. Nowadays, sharing the state of our medical complaints usually finds some place in our conversations. To put it bluntly, as we grow older, we start to fall to bits. No amount of prayer can hold back the ravages of time. The hope of the life of the Kingdom of God is not about eternal youth, but a readiness to let go of the things of this world and to embrace the new world of the eternal.

Should we pray for healing? The answer must be yes. Even if we face a terminal sickness, being supported, upheld and surrounded by prayer can make all the difference. And sometimes physical symptoms can be caused, or made worse, by inner unrest and dis-ease. Finding inner peace, through our own prayers and the prayers of others, can result in physical symptoms being cured. Prayer for healing must include the hope of new life and the expectation of the miraculous, which might include the person getting better, or finding strength to cope with what is uncurable, or even fining release and wholeness through the blessing of death.

The story of Jesus curing a blind man ought to lead us to expect new life and new hope in our own lives, yet not always the result we might expect. It points to the fact that the encounter with the risen Christ can and should be a transforming experience for us. Responding to God, who in Christ reaches out to touch our lives, brings new life and new hope, even in the face of suffering.

Why does John include this story in his Gospel? Well, we might think it was a remarkable event and that it ought to be reported. Yet this Gospel was not written like that. It is not a newspaper report. It is a story that is packed with meaning about the significance of Jesus and his message for the world. It is set in the context of the ongoing dispute between Jesus and the religious leaders of his day. Does God cause such suffering as this blindness? No – but Jesus is going to use this situation to give glory to God. Can Jesus be one sent from God? Apparently not, they decide, for he is breaking the Sabbath by healing on this day. So the point of the story become clear. Jesus is proclaiming himself to be the light of the world. He brings with him illumination and sight. And he sharply contrasts this with the blindness of the religious leaders. They have eyes, but they cannot see the truth. In their blindness, it is hidden from them.

Throughout this Lent there is a series of long passages from the John’s Gospel, which all revolve around sight. Jesus talks about being born of the Spirit. He converses with the Samaritan Woman at the well about the living water that only he can give. Now, in today’s Gospel, Jesus is contrasting darkness and light and saying that it is he who can lead us to seeing the truth. We live in a time when there is much discussion in the world-wide Church about matters of human sexuality. At the level of national churches, it has become so divisive that, at the Lambeth Conference this summer, a number of bishops will make a point of staying away. There is an issue here about how we interpret scripture and to what extent we are bound by this text or that. Surely, people argue, if a text says something, then we are bound to live by that. My problem is that Jesus often broke the letter of the law, when it came to scriptural texts. If he saw the need, he would heal on the sabbath, because PEOPLE were more important that slavishly keeping the letter of the law.

All this points to the core of Jesus’ message. He was a Jew by birth and he grew up steeped in the religious practice of his time. He knew the Hebrew Scriptures so well that, it is reported, even as a child he was able to debate with the scholars of his day. Yet living a life, which is constrained (and even stifled) by the ticking of an endless line of legal boxes and which seek to control every aspect of your life, is not the spirit-filled life of the Kingdom that Jesus came to give us.

Look! Jesus said. Open your eyes and see the life of the Kingdom all around you. Live in the expectation of the miraculous. Live with the hope that God can transform any situation and that he will lead us that are beyond our present imagination. He calls us to an attitude of life in which we open our eyes to discover God in everything around us and hear his voice speaking to us, even in situations of brokenness and suffering. Scripture points us to Jesus, and Jesus is the way into the Kingdom of Heaven. Scripture should not so much rule our lives as inspire us to open our eyes and discover the risen Christ, who walks beside us through the journey of this life. He does not make suffering go away, but he transforms human living as, continuing on the journey of life, we find ourselves already stepping into the Life of the Kingdom. "I am the light of the world", Jesus tells us. Our prayer must be that Jesus opens our eyes to see that light and, in doing so, draws us into a community that joyfully celebrates all that it means to live as Children of that light.