2026-03-15 Lent 4

Scripture Readings

Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our Father and our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen!

Most of the time, when people think about Religion or the church, it often drifts into morality. I need to be a ‘good person.’ Or I’ll put my kid in Catholic or Christian School so they learn some good morals. And this is because our sinful and fallen human nature instinctively wants to work with works. Maybe I’ve been bad, therefore I really need to be good. Or I know I’m going to heaven because I’m a good person: I pay my taxes. I return my library books on time. I recycle my cardboard. Or, the ultimate test of true Christian character: I return my shopping cart to the cart corral in the parking lot - even if there’s no coin involved! There’s a special place in hell for people who leave their carts at large, free to dent doors and ding bumpers!

But we all by nature think along these lines. Bad things have befallen me, therefore I must have done something to make God mad. I’m being punished for this sin or that transgression because I am suffering with a broken leg or a disease or a condition. And this kind of thinking is much like the Eastern notions of karma. But the Bible doesn’t teach us this. In fact it is quite to the contrary of both karma and the way we naturally think about these things.

Enter: the man born blind in John’s Gospel. He is our guy for the 4th Sunday in Lent. Just look at how this passage starts out. “As [Jesus] passed by, He saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked Him,”Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?“ (9:1-2). Somebody did something wrong somewhere, Jesus! Who is at fault here!? So even Jesus’ disciples had this kind of thinking. Their karma just ran over their dogma! They should have known better, but alas, they didn’t. So the Lord Jesus lets the dogma maul the karma! “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him” (9:3).

Huh! Who’da thunk that. Jesus just turned the Disciples’ thinking completely upside down. It’s not about who did this or that, but rather it’s about the natural condition. Blindness. Not being able to see from birth. The man in the miracle represents all of humanity. We’re all born this way. Blind. Or to quote St. Paul “at one time you were darkness” - note that he doesn’t say you were in darkness no no no, you were darkness. You were completely enveloped by sin, death and the works of the devil.

This of course takes us back to the Garden, to the fall into sin and the embracing of death rather than life with God. All people now live with the consequences and fall out from Eve and Adam’s decision to listen to the snake rather than the Word of God. And so our problem isn’t that we need to be ‘good people’ to try to make things right. It’s that we cannot be good people because we are all born in darkness and spiritual blindness. You can’t shape up and fly right and decide to see if you’re born blind! Neither can a dead person decide to live. All a dead person can do is stink!

Instead, we need a miracle. We need a sign and a wonder. We need the works of God to be displayed in us. We need a Messiah to do this for us. And thanks be to God, we just happen to have one of those in stock! The Prophet Isaiah spoke of Jesus when he wrote “I will lead the blind in a way that they do not know, in paths that they have not known I will guide them. I will turn the darkness before them into light, the rough places into level ground. These are the things I do, and I do not forsake them” (42:16).

Jesus will do these things. He is the one who does the Messiah stuff. It’s not up to us because we can’t do the things that He does. Through His life, death and resurrection, Jesus alone makes the blind see and the dead live. For He is the light of the world. “Having said these things, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva. Then he anointed the man’s eyes with the mud and said to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). So he went and washed and came back seeing. …“ (JN 9:6-7).

Wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles, the man born blind can now see! The miracle seems a bit … odd. Perhaps maybe a tad on the gross side even. It we think about Genesis though, it starts to make more sense. It’s a flash back to creation. Way back in Genesis 2:7 “then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” Jesus uses the same dust of creation and the spittle from His mouth much like the breath God breathed into Adam. He is re-creating His fallen creation with the mud on the blind man’s eyes.

Right after this Jesus sends him to the pool of Siloam. And the connection to Holy Baptism is here undeniable. When you think about it, of all seven signs in John’s Gospel, the lions share of them center on water. Water into wine at Cana, Healing the Parayltic at the pool by the Sheep Gate, Jesus walking on water and the man born blind washing to regain his sight. And then there’s Nicodemus being told to be born again by water and the spirit, St. Photini, the woman at the well from last Sunday with the living water, the blood and water that poured from the riven side of our Lord on the cross. Do you think that St. John is trying to tell us something about Baptism here?! Darn tootin’ he is! You’d have to be blind not to see it!

And that’s the other side of the coin in this passage. The Pharisees. The God-guys on campus. They of all people, who read the scriptures and knew them backwards and forwards. They of all people should have connected the dots about Jesus fulfilling the prophecies that Isaiah proclaimed. They should have seen this with eyes wide open! But how do they respond to the miracle? “This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath” (JN 9:16). The people who should have had 20/20 vision when it comes to God are the blindest deadbeats on planet earth!

So the Lenten nugget for us in all of this is simply to recognize that we are all in the same spiritually blind boat before God. We all need to be recreated by the Word of God and the washing and regeneration of Holy Baptism. We need to repent of our blindness - both the kind that we have from birth by nature and when we actively shut our eyes to the truth. We need to hear St. Paul quoting the ancient baptismal hymn of the early church: “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you” (Eph 5:14).

This story shows two trajectories: the blind man’s eyes (and heart) open wider and wider; the Pharisees’ eyes are completely blind and their hearts grow harder. The reading from John 9 ends with this last little spur: “Jesus said, “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind”“ (41). The blind man started in total darkness (literally and spiritually) and he ended worshipping Jesus. The Pharisees started out confident in their vision and ended up dwelling in the darkness. So it is a lesson in humility and repentance for us all. Christians who think they’ve “arrived” spiritually are in the most danger of falling into the darkness of pride like the Pharisees. Heed the words of St. Paul with every step of your Lenten journey to the cross: “for at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light (for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true)” (Eph 5:8-9). Amen!