Now I See: SALT's Commentary for Lent 4

Lent 4 (Year A): John 9:1-41

Check out SALT’s “Strange New World” podcast episode on this passage: “Jesus, Wendell, and Henri - Part Four: Sight.”

Big Picture:

1) This is the fourth of the six Sundays in Lent. We’ll return to Matthew on Palm Sunday — but over the next two weeks, we’ll explore stories from the Gospel of John outlining why the powers that be decide to crucify Jesus.

2) On the surface, this week’s story is about illness, healing, and sin. Since the word “pandemic” is still on many of our minds, it’s worth underscoring that the story opens with Jesus rejecting the idea that illness is punishment for sin.

3) Many scholars believe that John tells this story in a way that doubles as a symbolic account of how John’s community, decades after Jesus’ death, was expelled from the mainstream Jewish community for following Jesus. This was a painful turn of events for these early disciples, not least because they considered themselves genuinely Jewish followers of a genuinely Jewish rabbi. Underneath the surface of this story, then, is a story of “insiders,” “outsiders,” and the pain and disappointment of feeling excluded.

4) This is a healing story, but as we’ll see, it’s also a call story — and so we can listen to it with “ears to hear” what kind of community God is calling us to be in these difficult, disorienting times.

5) This is also the story from which an English slave trader, John Newton, drew inspiration for hymn lyrics describing his conversion — the song we know today as “Amazing Grace”: “was blind, but now I see” (compare “though I was blind, now I see” (John 9:25)). It’s a song worth singing this week!

Scripture:

1) The disciples ask Jesus, Is that beggar over there blind because of his own sin, or his parents’ sin? The question reflects a controversy inside scripture’s sacred library: some ancient texts speak of God punishing people for the sins of their parents, while others explicitly oppose this idea (for example, see Ex 20:5 vs. Ezekiel 18). But either way, the disciples assume the reason for the man’s blindness is somebody’s sin — and Jesus rejects this assumption out of hand. His blindness has nothing to do with sin at all, he insists. Think of it another way: not as a result of some sin in the past, but rather as an occasion for doing “God’s works” in the present and future (John 9:3).

2) OK — but what is “God’s work” in this case? We might be tempted to think it’s the physical restoration of the man’s sight (that’s certainly what the religious authorities end up focusing on!), but what Jesus is up to here is much broader and deeper than that. First, he makes mud with spittle and dirt — a clear, poetic evocation of God’s creative work in Genesis 2. Second, he sends the man to wash in the pool of “Siloam,” which means “Sent” — a clear, poetic evocation of baptism, and indeed how baptism is a form of commissioning. In other words, as we discover by the end of the story, what Jesus is doing is creatively calling the man to be an apostle (from the Greek apostolus, “person sent forth”). Better yet: he’s anointing the man as an apostle — not with precious oil, but with spittle, dirt, and municipal water.

3) What’s really going on here, then, is that Jesus is recruiting a new apostle from the ranks of the excluded and disinherited, overturning the conventional hierarchies of the day. His disciples don’t see it: as their initial question reveals, they regard the man not as a potential colleague, but rather as a pauper suffering sin’s consequences. The religious authorities don’t see it: they instantly get bogged down in questions of whether or not Jesus has violated the Sabbath by healing the man, and indeed whether or not the healing is counterfeit. In short: the one who was blind, now sees; the ones who supposedly can see, now show how oblivious they really are.

4) And just in case we missed it, John sums up the episode with these words from Jesus: “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind” (John 9:39). We can see these dynamics retrospectively: Jesus’ actions provoke supposed insiders to demonstrate their obliviousness — even as the excluded, disinherited man upstages them as the one who sees, and understands, and acts accordingly.

5) And yet it’s this new apostle, the one who “sees” and “believes” and follows Jesus, that is expelled from the mainstream religious circle by the oblivious insiders. If we listen carefully, we can hear the poignant echo of the pain felt by John’s community, the pain of feeling pushed out. Remember, the central dramatic throughline of John’s Gospel is that Jesus, God’s Word made flesh, “was in the world… yet the world did not know him” (John 1:10). “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it” — and yet, as John tells it, the light goes largely unnoticed (John 1:5).

Takeaways:

1) This is a story about many sorts of not-seeing — and at the end of the day, the question is whether we, the readers and listeners to this story, will overlook its central meanings. Will we, like the story’s religious authorities, get bogged down in questions about whether or not the physical healing is genuine? Will we, like the story’s disciples, get so distracted by questions of past sin that we miss opportunities to participate in “God’s works” here and now? At its core, this is a story about Jesus creatively, gracefully calling an excluded outsider to be an exalted apostle — and if we miss that essential storyline, we’ll miss the point. More importantly, if we misinterpret the world around us in similar ways, obsessed with inessential controversies and the supposed sins of others, we’ll miss the Way of Life.

2) Jesus declares his mission to be twofold: first, to bring sight to the blind (“was blind but now I see”), and second, to expose those religious hypocrites — we in the Christian community should say, “Christian hypocrites” — who claim to see, but actually don’t. In short, Jesus’ mission is to turn the conventional wisdom hierarchy upside down (or rather, “rightside up”!).

3) In this way, everything comes full circle. The story begins with a question about an outsider’s blindness as a supposed sign of sin in the past, and ends with Jesus’ indictment of insiders — both the disciples and the religious authorities — as the ones whose sin is hindering their vision in the present.

4) Visiting Salem, Massachusetts, a site of the infamous witch trials, we once saw a striking street mural of a man, dressed in seventeenth-century garb, sternly pointing an accusing finger off to his left, yelling, “Witch!” But on second look, we noticed that the artist had given the accuser himself a green complexion, a wicked expression, and so on. In a single image, a profound idea: it’s often the exclusionary act itself, the one that points away and accuses someone else of evil, that actually embodies what it purports to condemn. Likewise with the accusatory cry, “Sinner!” In John’s story, the very person widely thought to be “sinful” turns out to be a worthy apostle, and the very people thought to be “righteous” turn out to be captive to the contemptuous, oblivious, exclusionary ways of sin: “They answered him, ‘You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?’ And they drove him out” (John 9:34).

5) Thus the story lays a trap: if we’re listening carefully, we dare not point an accusatory finger at the Pharisees, or the disciples, or indeed those Christians who differ from us down the street. Jesus calls us to let go of blame and recrimination, and turn instead to interpreting the world — in all its beauty and hardship — as a steady stream of opportunities to participate in “God’s works” of love, healing, and reconciliation (John 9:3).

6) The shadows in this passage point to the cross. We are just a few short weeks from Good Friday, and the authorities’ resentments are gathering like a storm. But the good news of the Gospel this week is nonetheless clear: Jesus comes to give us true sight and insight; to make apostles out of ordinary, excluded, disinherited people; and to free us from the ways we blindly blame and scapegoat one another. Think of hardships in another way, Jesus says, not as results of some sins in the past, but rather as occasions for participating in “God’s works” of amazing grace here and now. You see?

Check out SALT’s “Strange New World” podcast episode on this passage: “Jesus, Wendell, and Henri - Part Four: Sight.”