LENT IV, March 6, 2005
John 9:1-41 (RCL), Walter W. Harms
(->current sermons )

WHAT DO YOU SEE?

What do you see? For instance, when you look at all those donuts, and donut holes back on the table, what do you see? You could see food. You could see and say, Yummy, yummy, yummy. You could see and say: Get behind me, temptation. You could see and say: You know I been eating properly all week. I think I’ll spoil myself, just a little today. And you could look and say, “Who wants to eat those fatty things?”

Your Present View of Jesus
So the question, what do you see, may sound a bit silly. When Jesus walked this world, he said something like this: There are those who have ears and don’t hear; there are those who have eyes, but don’t see.
I am truly not too interested in what you see when you look at donuts or their kind. But what I want to know is what do you see when you look at Jesus. What is he to you? What part does he play in your life?

The Story
In the Gospel reading, Jesus gives sight to a man born blind his sight. The man is then confronted by the church authorities of his day to determine what really went on. Apparently he had been healed on the no-no Day of the Sabbath when no one was to work . Making mud and putting it on a person’s eyes violated this God-given command of not working on the Sabbath as did the act of washing his eyes.

The Pharisees immediately concluded that this man could not be from God because of this violation. Others, of course, argued that you had to be from God to do this kind of miracle.

Now we are going to get the first insight as to what this previously blind man saw in Jesus. Jesus to him was a prophet. Prophet here means someone who conveys to man what God want man to know and to have. And, by the way, you didn’t diddle around with prophets.

So something else must be going on. This whole miracle is a hoax. The man is only pretending to have been blind from birth. They’ll get to the bottom of all this by interrogating the parents.

The parents confirm the blindness of their son, but declined to answer who had cured him on grounds that they might get expelled from the church community. They had seen others who had said some good things about Jesus get excommunicated from the synagogue. They didn’t want that to happen to them.
Back comes the blind man to the authorities for further interrogation. The blind man knows only that he was blind and now sees. A repeat of the story surely was not needed so he barbed them with the words: “You want to become his disciples, too?”

Now the blindness of the authorities is revealed. They can think of only Moses as the spokesperson for God. They threw people out of the communities of believers for being followers of Jesus, but they themselves hadn’t investigated enough to know where Jesus had come from. That is, who he was! Astounding!

But then blindness will do that to you. You can’t see the forest for the trees. You can’t see that God is bigger than our little ideas. We give up on God because we think we have understood him so well that there certainly couldn’t be anything more to learn about him!!!!

Now the eyes of the blind man are opened ever further. Now he begins to piece things together. Jesus must be from God because only someone who has the ear of God would be able to do this. He must be from God!

Again logic was not the strong suit of the authorities that day. It seldom is when you have decided the agenda ahead of time. Lots of that going around today. So they did what they had to do and threw this insightful man out.

What that means, I don’t know. I presume from the previous actions of this group that they excommunicated the man from the community. I need to remind all of you that the man couldn’t simply go down the street to a church of another denomination. It was this place to worship or non at all.

I believe that you can expect this kind of treatment when you confess the name of Jesus. I’m sure you won’t get tossed from any Lutheran church for doing this. But try to change anything for the sake of Christ and the Good News which he is, and you will find yourself on the outside looking in.

Insight and vision for the future can only be like the present or more even like the glorious past when everything was so wonderful! Any vision for the church must focus on the here and now and on the future. Not on the past.

Well, anyway you might want to argue with me on that one, but Jesus is not finished with this man who now sees. He hears about this expulsion. Jesus goes to this man (I think you need to know that Jesus is after you, if you have sight), and asked him whether he believed in the Son of Man.

Son of man has to do with God’s Son, the Savior. The man has not yet been able to see Jesus as more than a prophet, now believes that Jesus is the one who came to make God known and who will be the judge of all at the end of time. I suppose the whole theological implications of Jesus’ calling himself the Son of man was not an instant insight but as the man lived he no doubt, as all believers do, gained more and more insight into this wonderful God we have.

Some of the church authorities are there now when Jesus meets the formerly blind man. Jesus says that his mission which he has accepted is to judgment. He will give sight to the blind, and blindness who think they see all there is to know about God.

These authorities are shocked, I believe by Jesus’ words. Is Jesus lumping them with the blind? Are they aware of what he is implying?

Jesus clears up the fog. They are guilty, sinfully guilty because they claim to see the whole purpose of God clearly, but they have turned from God to what has become for them the essence of God’s will: keeping the many commands God gave to them through Moses. It was the keeping that was important to them, not God any longer.

Your Vision of Jesus Now
So now the eye charts are on the wall. When you look at Jesus, what do you see?

Do you see him coming to you, or do you have to go to him to get rid of sin and the blindness to what God is about?

Is he only a prophet? A person who speaks about God but is not God? Is he for you truly the One who is the Son of man, God’s one and only representative to us in the last times?

When we want to know about God and how he thinks of us, where do we go? Do we look at Jesus or others? Do we play the mental game of conceiving of God and then seeing him as one like us, filled with petty jealousy, arbitrary in our bestowal of favors, needing us to come to him with our proverbial tails between our legs or else we get nothing? Haughty, needing to be appeased by little presents and certain acts or else. Well, or else we are tossed out from his favor?

Do we see the Son of man as the final judge of all of us? Do we see him standing there with all the flock that was supposed to be his and having to separate out the sheep from the goats, the bragging windy chaff from the solid core wheat? He is some kind of blind grandfather who pats us on our heads and welcomes us to his house, even as we use all his assets to undermine his position?

How do we see Jesus?

Compare Your Vision of Jesus with These
Here are some items you should take into consideration when you look at Jesus.

See him going after the disenfranchised. The bum and the beggar. The whore and the cheating tax collector. The prodigal son and the woman possessed by devils. The betrayer and the denier. All those faces have names. Do you see your face in that crowd?

Do you see Jesus being gentle with all persons, exceptt those who acted as God’s judge and jury. Do you see him welcome the children and condemn as stinking graves those pretending to teach God and in reality teaching man’s commandment. See him not condemn the woman who sold her sexual favors, and run from those who wanted him only for his miracles, and not his glory on the cross. Where do you see yourself in that picture?

Do you see Jesus reliving the life that God’s people had walked from Egypt to the promised Holy Land? Do you see Jesus become the new “Israel,” the reduction to one of God’s people, so that all people might now be freed from all obligations except to “do this in remembrance of me” and “love one another? As I have loved you, so you ought to love one another.” Do you see yourself free to love and serve people or are you still following some fears and laws that someone has imposed on you? Are you serving therefore, your own appetites, regardless of how lofty they are?

Do You see Jesus’ living for us and then dying for us so that there might be peace and reconciliation between God and us? Do you see him alive after death, so that we might see the fruit on the Tree of life, and that the gate is no longer guarded by the fearsome cherubim? Do you see yourself in that picture? Do you weep for joy over what God has done and is doing for you through Jesus? Are you seen as a person exuding from your life joy and a passion for serving God by serving whom he loves?

Variety of Sight
What do you see? Sometimes, it’s just donuts. Sometimes it’s real food. Sometimes it’s a wonderful treat. Sometimes we can take or leave them. When you see Jesus, who is he in your life? Amen.

Walter W. Harms, Pastor
Austin, TX USA
Comments? waltpast@AOL.com