Beyond Omnipotence
John 9: 1-11
April 7, 2024
Who’s responsible for your health and healing?
Why is your health the way it is right now?
Who is in charge of the healing you need?
These are the questions that the disciples of Jesus are struggling to find answers.
What do you think?
Who’s in control in issues related to our health and healing?
Why are some people healthier than others?
Why does healing come to some and not to others?
Who is responsible for our health and healing?
Jesus responds to these questions and concerns in our Scripture today. Let’s discover what Jesus says and does… Maybe it will make a difference in our lives. The message will conclude with an invitation for you to come forward for a time of anointing for healing.
Jesus is walking along the dusty road from one town to the next. His closest disciples are with him. They are hungry to learn from him. So they ask him questions.
Jesus and the disciples pass a man who is using a stick to find his way around. Many of the disciples know this man. They grew up together. The man has been blind all his life. He’s never been able to see a thing.
This man has struggled his entire life with this blindness.
Jesus’ disciples ask the question that they asked their parents when they were all just children – Why? Why is this man blind?
But now they frame the question a little differently. The answer they’ve been given in the past is this – This man is blind because his parents must have sinned. His parents must have done something so bad that God punished their child with blindness.
Since then, they’ve heard another answer. This man is blind because he must have done something wrong. Blindness and bad health are a result of the punishment of God for this man’s sin.
So they asked the question this way: Who sinned and caused this blindness? Was it his parent’s sin or this man’s sin?
This last understanding of blindness and bad things and our personal responsibility related to all that is prevalent in our day.
I would call it personal omnipotence. Omnipotence means all-powerful. Personal omnipotence means we believe that we are all powerful. We are totally responsible for our own healing and health.
This is the assumption of everything I read about health these days. You can find health and healing if only you do this…. It’s up to you to decide. It’s because of decisions you’ve made. If we eat this and don’t eat that. If we take this medicine and don’t take that. If we do this practice and don’t do that.
It’s all about us. We have the power. We are personally omnipotent.
This sounds like it might be good news. But it’s not. Because we fail and we feel guilty. Because we have bad health outcomes and we blame ourselves.
Our failure leads to guilt which leads to depression.
I’m sure all of us can tell stories from our lives or from the lives of our family and friends. Someone with cancer wondering why they got it or why it came back. Feeling like they must have done something wrong. Guilt and shame often come along with our sickness and suffering and ill health.
Another adaptation of this understanding goes like this: You will be healed and find good health if you pray enough or pray in the right way or believe strongly enough. You can be healed if you trust God enough. Just have faith and all will be well.
It’s because we believe we are personally omnipotent. We are totally responsible for our health and healing.
A second answer I hear many Christians use is one that also involves omnipotence. This answer is divine omnipotence. God is all powerful. God is in control. God is totally responsible for our health and healing and all that happens to us.
It’s implicit in the question of the disciples to Jesus. The belief that God must have caused this man’s blindness because God is in charge of everything that happens.
We hear references to divine omnipotence often when bad things happen to good people. We hear: “God had a purpose for this to happen – this untimely death of a young person.” “It must have been God’s will.” “God needed them in heaven.” “God must be teaching me a lesson.” “God would never give me a burden I couldn’t carry.” “God must be testing me.”
The belief is that sickness and suffering and death come from the hand of an omnipotent God – someone who controls everything that happens. Therefore, God is totally responsible for our health and healing.
The disciples ask the question: Why? And we ask similar questions.
Who’s responsible for our health and healing?
Why is our health the way it is right now?
Who is in charge of the healing we need?
What do you think?
Who’s in control in issues related to our health and healing?
Why are some people healthier than others?
Why does healing come to some and not to others?
Who is responsible for our health and healing?
Is it personal omnipotence – I’m totally responsible?
Or is it divine omnipotence – God is totally responsible?
The specific question the disciples ask is this: Who sinned and caused this man’s blindness?
Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned.”
In other words, the man is not totally responsible for this blindness, neither are his parents. The implicit assumption is that neither is God. God is not punishing this person and causing the blindness.
We are not personally omnipotent.
God is not divinely omnipotent.
Healing and health are not simply about what we do.
Healing and health are not simply about what God does.
What I believe is this: healing and health are a result of a web of relationships and events and factors. It includes the presence of God, our present decisions, past personal history, human freedom, social conditions, genetic inheritance, and even random occurrences.
It’s not a simplistic cause and effect – because of this, we see that. There’s not a simple explanation for everything including health and healing. It’s not simply because of us. It’s not simply because of God. It’s a partnership and a complex web of other factors.
In the midst of it all, Jesus says these words to the disciples and to all of us today: “You will see God at work.”
In the midst of the messiness, God is at work.
In the midst of our sickness, God is at work.
In the midst of our troubles, God is at work.
(Why don’t you respond with me…)
In the midst of our health challenges, God is at work.
In the midst of whatever we face today, God is at work.
In the midst of the mud of our lives, God is at work.
Jesus spit on the ground. The spittle and the dirt became a little pool of mud. Then Jesus reached down and took some of that mud in his fingers.
How disgusting…
Jesus took the mud in his fingers and smeared it on the man’s eyes.
What a powerful analogy – God using the mud, the messiness, the troubles.
Jesus smeared it on the man’s eyes and said, “Go and wash off the mud in the Pool of Siloam.”
The man does exactly what Jesus told him to do. He goes to the Pool of Siloam. He reaches down into the water.
It’s a bit like a baptism.
It’s also like an anointing with oil.
God uses something very earthy to bring healing.
For after the man washed the mud off his eyes, he could see. He screamed out, “I can see. Thank God. I can see now.”
At the beginning of this story, Jesus is asked by his disciples to teach about health and healing. Jesus chooses not to teach or explain.
Instead, Jesus chooses to do something. Jesus chooses to bring God’s healing.
Jesus’ example shows that it’s not simply personal omnipotence. This man nor his parents caused his blindness or could heal him of his blindness.
Jesus’ example shows that it’s not simply divine omnipotence. God did not cause his blindness and God didn’t magically and automatically make him see.
Instead, Jesus’ example shows that it is a complex web of relationships and factors that causes health and brings healing.
Jesus’ example shows that:
In the midst of the messiness, God is at work.
In the midst of our sickness, God is at work.
In the midst of our troubles, God is at work.
(Why don’t you respond with me…)
In the midst of our health challenges, God is at work.
In the midst of whatever we face today, God is at work.
The tool that God used to bring healing for this man was some mud formed by spittle. A tool that the early church used to bring healing was oil for anointing.
We find a service for this in our UCC Book of Worship. Let me read from the introduction to that service:
