2.15.26 – Sermon written and preached by Leigh Rachal @ FPC Abbeville, LA

Sometimes we oversimplify things.

Light is good. Darkness is bad.

We think we want to step into the light and leave the darkness behind.

But scripture is not so clear-cut.

Genesis opens in darkness,

with the Spirit of God already hovering over the deep.

God exists in the darkness.

And creation begins before light is spoken into being.

Even now, seeds germinate in dark soil.

And children form in the darkness of the womb.

Darkness seems to be necessary for growth.

And even for seeing.

We cannot see the stars without the night.

Too much artificial light, and even the heavens disappear.

As Amy-Jill Levine reminds her readers,

we are just as unable to see in total darkness as we are in blinding brightness. Bruce Springsteen sang this warning for us in his song, Blinded by the Light…

Anyway. My point is that when we turn on a light, our eyes need time to adjust.

Light and dark exists along a spectrum.

Sometimes we need light.

Sometimes we need darkness.

And either extreme can be too much for us.

That matters when we come to John 9 - a story that on its surface seems to be about sight vs blindness.

But like light and dark, sight and blindness exist on a continuum.

And perhaps we can be both sighted and blind at the same time. 

This story doesn’t start with a healing miracle, but rather, with Jesus seeing “a man blind from birth.”

Before the blind man sees Jesus, Jesus sees him.

He is not invisible.

Not overlooked.

Not reduced to his condition.

Jesus simply sees him.

This is a beautiful piece of good news:

Even when we cannot see Jesus clearly, we are seen by him.

The disciples, however, look at this man and see a theological puzzle. “Who sinned?” They ask. And they want a clean explanation. A cause. A way to keep the world orderly.

Jesus refuses their framework.

He does not assign blame for the man’s blindness.

He speaks instead of God’s works being revealed.

Then he kneels, makes mud, presses it into the man’s eyes, and sends him to wash.

He could have healed with a word.

He has healed before by just proclaiming someone healed.

But instead, Jesus makes mud. On the Sabbath.

It is almost deliberately provocative.

When the man returns seeing, we might expect applause. Celebration. Awe.

Instead, we get a lot of questions.

The neighbors are unsure. “Is this the man?” Some say yes. Some say no. 

As a sighted person, he is no longer sitting and begging.

And this makes him hard to recognize.

I can’t imagine his appearance changed so significantly.

Perhaps the issue is that his neighbors never really looked at this man.

They saw him as his role: Beggar.

Or his disability: Blind.

But they never really saw him. 

But now the man keeps insisting, “I am he.”

In Greek, it is simply “I am” - ego eimi.

The same phrase God uses with Moses to name Gods self. 

No longer “the blind man” or “the beggar.”

This man names his own existence. I Am.

Of course, the blind man is not God or Jesus.

But he now stands as a witness to him.

He now participates in the work Jesus said must be done.

Now he understands his own identity in relationship to the One who has healed and sent him. 

But the religious leaders examine the event like investigators reviewing evidence.

When they discover that it happened on the Sabbath,

that detail troubles them

more than the healing delights them.

And we should pause here before turning the Pharisees into villains.

Because what they are experiencing is destabilizing.

If this healing is legitimate, then their interpretation of the Sabbath must expand.

If their interpretation expands, then their authority shifts.

If their authority shifts, the whole system might crumble.

It is not easy to adjust to new light.

Sometimes we resist new understandings not because we are malicious, but because we are afraid of what change will cost.

Especially if we are in charge of maintaining the current system, like the Pharisees.

Then there are the man’s parents.

John gives them a quiet but heartbreaking role.

They confirm he is their son.

They confirm he was born blind.

But when asked how it happened, they step back.

“He is of age. Ask him.”

They essentially wash their hands of responsibility for him. 

John tells us they were afraid. Afraid of being put out of the synagogue.

And here is the ache: as a blind beggar, their son fits within the system.

His blindness made theological sense in the old way of understanding disability as being the result of sinfulness.

But his healing disrupts everything.

If they embrace his new sight too boldly,

they risk losing their own sense of belonging as well.

We often imagine courage as dramatic and loud.

But sometimes the struggle to accept new light is quieter.

It happens at kitchen tables.

In everyday conversations.

Courage is lived in the tension between loving someone,

and fearing the consequences of standing beside them.

The man’s parents are not cruel. They are cautious.

And their caution reveals how costly new sight can be.

Even the man who receives new sight does not seem to have a single moment of spiritual new sight – what we might call, insight -  but a gradual deepening of his understanding.

When first asked about who healed him,

the man simply says it was, “The man called Jesus.”

Pressed further, he says, “He is a prophet.”

Later he proclaims, “If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.”

And finally, when Jesus finds him again and asks him about his beliefs, he says, “Lord, I believe.” And he worships.

His physical sight was restored immediately.

But his spiritual sight unfolds step by step.

His insight grows under pressure.

Through questioning. And yes, even through his experience of rejection and exclusion.

Meanwhile, the religious leaders move in almost the opposite direction.

They begin certain and end up hardened in their viewpoint.

They claim clarity right from the start,

and their certainty narrows their vision of what is even possible.

Perhaps the most dangerous blindness in this story is not a lack of information

but the refusal to reconsider what we think we already know.

There are moments in life when our understanding shifts gradually, almost imperceptibly.

And there are moments after which nothing feels the same.

I remember being powerfully aware that life would never be the same after my father’s death when I was 12.

And I had the same sensation of world-altering reality after I saw the pregnancy test show up positive for the first time.

Some moments are like this. A birth. A death. A diagnosis.

After which:

The room is the same. The world is the same.

But our perception or our very identity has changed.

We cannot return to the way we once saw things.

Our whole identity shifts.

These shifts are not usually all good or all bad.

And they very often take us a while to sort out how we feel about them as we learn to live our new roles. 

For this man, who was born in the dark, light now floods in.

Faces come into focus.

Depth and distance appear.

But so does resistance.

So does conflict.

So does the painful realization that his new sight will cost him.

Strangely enough, as a blind beggar, he had a family and community into which he fit.

By the end of the chapter, as one who now identifies as someone who has been healed and sent by Christ, he is expelled from his community.

And yet he is not abandoned.

Jesus seeks him out again.

The one who once was blind….

The one who now sees…

is the one who is found.

The story ends in reversal.

The man who once sat and begged now bends in worship.

The one who was blind now sees.

The ones who claimed to see are exposed in their blindness.

This is not just a story about switching from darkness to light. It is a story about adjusting to the light. About learning to live in the new light of Christ’s healing. About letting our understanding of what that means widen gradually.

We know that we cannot live in constant bright lights.

That is actually a form of torture. 

We need times of light and times of darkness. 

That’s because light reveals what is there - from within the darkness.

So perhaps the prayer for us is not that all our questions be answered in a flash of certainty.

Perhaps the prayer is for the humility to keep adjusting our eyes.

To admit that we do not yet see fully.

To allow our understanding to grow.

And to resist the temptation to defend old scripts when new light unsettles them.

Jesus still sees us before we see him.

And that may be the deepest comfort of all.

We are seen. Known. Called forward.

Not into blinding brightness, but into a steady widening of sight.

We were blind.

And we are still learning to see.

May we have the courage and faith to keep adjusting our eyes,

to release the comfort of certainty,

and to walk gently into whatever new light Christ reveals. Amen.