Healing a Blind Man
John 9: 1-41
March 16, 2025 (healing service) P is liturgist Connie
Mike: This is the sixth in a series of messages travelling through the gospel of John. I encourage you to read along at home and ask for God to speak to you through the stories and thoughts presented. We’re now up to chapter nine.
About sixty years after Jesus was crucified, a group of Jews gathered in the Greek city of Ephesus. They were Jesus followers who felt like the disciple John best exemplified what Jesus Christ meant to them. This group believed in a more heartfelt theology of love. They called themselves the John Community of Jesus followers. The Ephesian Jewish synagogue leaders chose to excommunicate this group from the synagogue in town. The rabbis and teachers of the Law claimed that the John Community was too open and affirming of Gentiles and women.
This John Community decided to write down the ways they experienced Jesus Christ. The book we have called The Gospel of John is the work of this group. This group wrote the book to help their Jewish friends in the synagogue understand the Jesus Christ they knew and loved. The John Community hoped that some of their Jewish friends would see the light and come to join them as followers of Jesus Christ.
I’ve put together an imaginary dialogue between one of the authors of this book whom I’m calling Phoebe talking with one of her Jewish friends in the synagogue I’m calling Thaddeus. I’m playing Thaddeus and Connie is playing Phoebe, one of the authors of this book.
P: Have you read the ninth chapter of our book yet?
T: You mean about Jesus healing the man born blind?
P: Yes, that story. What did you think?
T: I felt badly for that blind man. The way our Jewish leaders treated him after he was healed was sad.
P: That’s exactly how we felt when your leaders here in Ephesus told us were not allowed back into the synagogue. It devastated us. All our life, we’ve been a part of your synagogue. Most of our friends and family are in the synagogue. What did we do that was so wrong?
T: Dear friend, I wish it didn’t turn out like this. But there are so many ways you upset our leaders and challenge our traditions. First of all, you oppose Law and Order. Our Mosaic laws are clear about many things including what we can and can’t do on the Sabbath. It seems like your people flaunt the Law of God.
P: That’s not true. We follow the intent of God’s Law. At the heart of it all, we believe in the law of love. The blind man story has Jesus healing on the Sabbath. Jesus might be breaking your legalistic interpretation of the Sabbath. But we see the intent of Sabbath Law is to bring healing and help to people.
T: Well, you people don’t believe in the Judgment of a Holy God. Like it says in your story: That man was blind because either he sinned or his parents sinned. It’s clear that everything that goes wrong, all suffering, can be attributed to God’s punishment for our sins. God judged that man and punished him by sending him blindness. But in the story, you have Jesus challenging our traditional doctrines of sin and guilt and punishment.
P: It’s true. We do believe differently than you. We don’t think all suffering is caused as punishment for our sins. Most of the time, suffering is just random. It’s chance. It’s not an angry God punishing us for doing something wrong.
We believe that God works in the midst of suffering. God wants to bring healing as we find in this story. Sometimes we see people physically healed. God also stands by our side as we suffer. In a sense, God suffers with us. We follow a man of God who was crucified on a cross and knows what suffering is like.
T: That leads to another way we’re different. We are Jews. We are the true followers of Moses. We can trace our ancestry back to Moses. We are the pure and holy. God loves our people, our nation. We are the Chosen Ones.
It’s sad, but in our day, we need to defend ourselves against foreigners and outsiders who are trying to destroy us. They try to slip into our fellowship and claim to follow our ways. But we know they don’t belong there. So, we work hard to remove them from our midst. But you people… I’ve heard that you actually allow Gentiles into your group.
P: My friend, my friend. I’m so sad to hear you say this. We too are Jews, just like you.
But don’t you believe in a God of love? That’s what our group is all about: love. A love that embraces and includes all people. A love that doesn’t exclude people because of their race or their nationality.
A love that reaches out to those on the margins of our society. Like this man born blind. Or like the gentiles who live around us. Or like anyone who is considered to be unclean or an outsider.
We believe God loves them and so do we. We include them in our group because we feel like that’s what Jesus Christ and God would do. They would be open and affirming of all people.
T: But don’t you think it was right for our leaders to tell you to leave our synagogue? Your views are so different than ours. You follow this graceful, loving Jesus. We follow Moses and the Law. In your story, wasn’t it right that the leaders told the blind man he couldn’t worship in the synagogue again? He was sharing ideas that were so contrary to our traditional teachings. He didn’t belong.
That’s why our leaders had to tell you to leave our synagogue. Because you no longer believe what we’ve been taught from childhood on. You’ve left the faith. You no longer follow God’s words in our Scriptures.
P: That’s not true. We still hold on to the essence of Scripture. We still follow the words we believe God is saying to us. We still revere the main tenets of Judaism. We’ve just come to see things differently.
Jesus Christ has caused us to reconstruct our faith. The center of our faith is no longer the Temple or the nation of Israel. Instead, the center we hold onto is God’s loving presence experienced through Jesus Christ.
Like I said before, it’s all about love, not law. It’s about inclusion, not exclusion. It’s about Jesus, not Israel or any specific nation. It’s about the generosity of our hearts, not the purity of our blood or the color of our skin.
T: What happened to you? When we were younger you were different. What caused you to go down this path and join this group?
P: Let me tell you my story. Actually, it parallels the story you read in this ninth chapter about the blind man.
I was born blind. In other words, I grew up in the blindness of the Old Way, just like you. I believed everything you and the people of the synagogue believed. I believed in: a god of judgment, a god of purity. a god of legalism, a god of Israel first, a god of the chosen people, a god of the book. I followed to the letter everything I was taught, just like you.
But then my eyes were opened, just like that blind man in our story: by Jesus Christ. I attended some services at the homes of this John Community of Jesus followers. It was there I felt in my heart this Jesus Christ they were talking about. My eyes were opened and my life was changed.
I sat through message after message shared by their teachers and preachers. I learned about and experienced deep in my heart this God of love and grace. I decided to get baptized and join their group.
But that’s when the trouble started. The Jewish leaders of the synagogue contacted my parents. They asked about where I was and what had happened to me. My parents were afraid. They didn’t want to be thrown out of the synagogue themselves. They said, just like in the story: We don’t know what happened. Why don’t you ask her?
So they came to me and asked what had happened. I told them about how I had joined this John Community of Jesus followers. I told them how I felt I could see clearly now a God of love. My blindness was gone. Unfortunately, they were not excited to hear this. They told me, “You’re a sinner. Don’t ever return to our synagogue.”
I was upset. But that didn’t deter me. I still felt that I was finally seeing clearly. I could finally see and experience the love of our amazing God.
So friend, I invite you to meet the one who changed my life. I want you to meet the one who opened my eyes and allowed me to finally see. I invite you to meet this Jesus Christ.
Come and see.
Mike: That same Jesus Christ is with us this morning in Coloma. This same Jesus wants to heal whatever blindness we may still have. Jesus Christ wants us to see and experience a God of love.
