1 Samuel 16:1-13; John 9:1-12; 35-41
Through the screens that surround our lives we can see more than ever before. Missiles hitting their targets across the Middle East. Photos of people caught up in scandals of abuse. Apparently perfect lives of celebrities chronicled on social media.
But there is still much we cannot see — or perhaps choose not to see. The impact of such violence on human life across the Middle East. The suffering of victims of abuse whose faces in photos have been covered with a black square. The mental health challenges of celebrities constantly trying to keep up appearances. Indeed, sometimes it seems we cannot see the reality that is staring us in the face.
Our gospel reading this morning tells the story of two very different journeys: a man who moves from blindness to sight, and a group of religious leaders who move from sight to blindness.
These middle four Sundays in Lent we are reading the accounts in John’s gospel of four encounters which Jesus had – with Nicodemus the Pharisee, a Samaritan woman, a man born blind, and Lazarus – encounters where John explores simple and yet profound truths about life, and light and hope.
Today the theme is sight with a man born blind receiving physical healing from Jesus through mud being spread on his eyes . And yet the man’s journey to sight does not end with physical sight; he also grows in spiritual sight, or insight, a capacity of sight which Samuel had exhibited as the sons of Jesse had filed past him hundreds of years before in Bethlehem. A deeper level of understanding that what can be physically seen.
Back in Jerusalem, this man’s journey of spiritual sight revolves around the person of Jesus Christ, from not knowing who or where he is to an end point of confessing and worshipping him as Lord. ‘Lord, I believe’, he says before the one who has said he is the light of the world.
This man’s journey is mirrored by an opposite journey of the Pharisees who always had their physical sight and could see what was in front of them, but show themselves to be blind to the deeper truth of who Jesus is, hampered by their expectations of how the Lord would be revealed. They finish the story walking in darkness.
The contrast is striking. As the American biblical scholar Gail O’Day has noted
‘The man born blind...has nothing to lose in the encounter with Jesus and so is open to who Jesus is and what Jesus offers. The Pharisees, in contrast, have much to lose and therefore much to protect, and they…fight to maintain their known world.’
John tells the stories of these two responses to enable us his readers to focus on what for him is the key question: what do we think of Jesus Christ? Later he will sum up the aim of his gospel as ‘so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name’ (John 20:31). To confess Christ as Lord, as the man does, is to encounter the one is the source of light and life; to reject Christ, as the Pharisees do, is to choose darkness.
We might reflect that John wrote his gospel in simpler times. A world less complicated than ours. We have questions to address – about peace, about suffering, about climate change, about AI – that he could not have known. Such a single-minded focus on the identity and work of Jesus is surely misplaced.
But that would be a patronising approach to a gospel writer who lived in demanding times of political instability, human fragility and existential uncertainty. By the time he wrote this gospel the other disciples had died, according to tradition many of them a martyr’s death. Yet for John there was one question which was pre-eminent, and it was the question Jesus asked the man he had healed: do you believe in the Son of Man?
I don’t know if we have considered saying the Creed, as we are invited to do each Sunday at our Eucharist, as an act of defiance, but I think it is. Our various screens are full of news which demands our attention and fuels our anxiety; the problems facing our country and our world are legion – and they cloud the present and the future. Yet in a moment we will stand to confess and affirm our faith in what the man born blind came to see that day, that the Jesus who put his spit on the Jerusalem ground is nothing other than the only Son of God, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God. We stand here and confess Jesus as Lord.
To make this confession is not to say we do not see what is going on in the world around us, but it is to affirm the most important thing we have come to see, that life in all its fullness does not come from solving every human problem but from the one through whom all things were made. To confess Christ as Lord, to find life in his name, is not withdraw from the world but to enter into that world with that light that only he can bring.
It is a joy at the moment here at the Cathedral to be preparing a group of people for confirmation on Easter Day. These are adults who will be invited to affirm publicly their faith in Jesus Christ, a confession just as real and just as meaningful as the man made to Jesus that day in Jerusalem. Each of our candidates has gone on a journey growing in spiritual sight, and we pray for them with joy.
And all of us are invited to look afresh to Christ in this period of Lent, to attend more carefully to the one who is on the way to the cross, to seek to grasp more his love, his compassion, his sacrifice, that we might reflect them to a world of need. Whether it is through our Lent Course, a daily pattern of prayer, focussed meditation, receiving the sacrament of Holy Communion, we can make it our prayer that we will see Jesus more clearly in the days to come, that we will not be blinded by our expectations but open to see him in new and deeper ways. For as St Richard of Chichester recognised in his famous prayer, seeing and knowing Jesus more clearly enables us to love him more, and in loving him more we are better able to follow him in the world. So let us pray.
Thanks be to you, our Lord Jesus Christ,
for all the benefits which you have given us,
for all the pains and insults which you have borne for us.
Most merciful Redeemer, Friend and Brother,
may we know you more clearly,
love you more dearly,
and follow you more nearly,
day by day. Amen