March 2nd, 2008 , The Fourth Sunday of Lent, Sermon notes from the Dean of Saskatchewan,
                                                                         The Very Rev’d Michael Hawkins 

“Dost thou believe on the Son of God?”

I want you to close your eyes for a moment, now imagine that I am telling you a warm and funny story thus endearing myself to you.  OK now I’ve saved us all five minutes and I can get on with the Sermon.

One thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see.  (John 9.25)
John Newton echoes that verse in Amazing Grace as he describes his own experience of receiving sight from Jesus Christ,

I once was lost but now am found
Was blind but now I see.

Newton doesn’t tell us what exactly he came to see but we may assume that he came to see himself a sinner redeemed by grace and all men potentially and some happily actually his brothers and sisters, but all this because he had come to see the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the son of God, and himself and all others in that light.

The gospel before us is about darkness and light, blindness and sight, all in the context of an argument about sin. 

Who sinned, this man or his parents?

Who did sin?  We might want to answer the disciples’ question, All have sinned.  More, their question makes us think of our own sins, what we call actual sins, as well as the sin of our first parents, original sin.  The Christian doctrine of original and actual sin affirms that in humanity there is no distinction, all have sinned, and our moral distinctions can only say that this or that person is a better sinner than others.

 The disciples are seeking to understand the justice in a case where someone is born blind, how can his ill fortune be explained if God is just.  Someone must be to blame for this, him or his parents.  Many of you may know something of this struggle to make sense of sickness and impairment in your own lives and those of your children and the emotional and spiritual dangers of this blame game.  Bishop Ryle comments, “There are few notions that men seem to cling to so naturally, as the notion that bodily sufferings, and all affliction, are the direct consequences of sin, and that a diseased or afflicted person must necessarily be a very wicked man.  This was precisely the short-sighted view that Job’s three friends took up…”

 It is this idea of a direct connection between this man’s affliction and his or his parents’ sin that Jesus denies.   The disciples short sighted mistake is quite often ours.  We come to hideous and reprehensible conclusions about ourselves and others by this worldly and short sighted view.  Job’s three friends told him, you and your children got what was coming to you.  Listen to Eliphaz, Who ever perished, being innocent?  Or where were the righteous cut off?  Even as I have seen, they that plow iniquity, and sow wickedness, reap the same.  Job 4.7-8

The underlying assumption is that in this life we always reap what we sow and is frequently supported by misquoting Saint Paul, Galatians 6.7 Be not deceived; God is not mocked: whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.    We shall reap, Paul writes, pointing us to a justice and reward to come. 

 Now Jesus doesn’t go into the question of the cause of evil and suffering, though he does deny the common conclusion made about the man born blind, rather, he moves us to consider the purpose of suffering in the good will of God.  To show what God can do!

We desperately need this Christian view of suffering to help us make sense of and endure our own experiences of brokenness and injustice. Those who say, Who ever perished being innocent? Have never been to the cross.

 So our Lord says that this man’s blindness will be the very means by which the works of God are manifest in him.  Jesus will speak the same way of Lazarus’ death, that it was “for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified thereby (John 11.14).”

So your brokenness, you see, your suffering, your cross,  may be in your life the very means by which God’s glory is revealed.

 Paul begged God three times to relieve him from an affliction in his body and the answer came, “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness (2Cor. 12.9).”  It is worth noting that many people guess that Paul’s affliction was in fact physical blindness.  So whether in the healing of blindness or in the strength to bear it, God’s all sufficient grace is given and revealed. 

 So the first question of John 9 is, Who did sin – the second question, at the end of the chapter just after our reading is this, Are we blind also?

 I’ve come all the way from Saskatchewan to tell you the answers to these two questions,

 Who sinned, you and I, Are we blind also, Yes!

 Both of these questions come out of a self-righteousness, which exaggerates the sins of others and denies our own.  Are we blind also?

 Blindness is one of the results of sin, but we need to understand that throughout the gospel we are speaking of a twofold blindness and twofold vision, one of sense, another of understanding, one of the body, another of the mind. 

 Are we blind also?

In the Gospel story just as the blind man grows in sight and light, the Pharisees descend further into blindness and darkness.  Is this the sin against the holy Ghost, to attribute the healing of a blind man to evil?  Is there here such a willful blindness that cannot be healed because it will not be healed? Blinded eyes and hardened hearts that will not be converted and healed John calls these, quoting Isaiah. 

You know of all the things that the physically blind cannot see, we often forget that they are deprived of a vision of themselves.  This is also true of the spiritually blind, they cannot see themselves. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.  We flee the light of Christ like cockroaches because we do not want to be seen.  Men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 

We need to recognize our blindness if we are to receive sight, our sin if we are to be forgiven, our weakness if we are to be made strong. 

Now if we are blind also then we ought to follow this man and the first thing we must notice is how Christ takes the initiative, his grace reaches out to the man first and then how in simple straightforward obedience  to Jesus and his words the man is healed.  But as well see how his inner vision, his insight grows.  For he is doubly healed and blessed.  Seeing is not believing, rather believing is a kind of interior vision, an insight into things unseen.  In John 9 the blind man confesses Jesus in turn as

A man that is called Jesus
A Prophet
A Man of God
The Son of God.

Do you recognize the progress in faith and understanding, culminating in his confession and worship of Jesus Christ the Son of God?

 Are we blind also?  Yes, and God would heal the blindness of our hearts, restore our insight.

 For God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. (2Cor. 4.6)

Faith our outward sense befriending Makes the inner vision clear, we sing,

and that is true of that blind man who in both senses saw and heard the Jesus Christ the Son of God.  Thou hast both seen him, and it is he that talketh with thee.  For those who would open their eyes and ears in faith, Christ may be seen and heard, especially in the audible and visible word brought before you today.  So it may be fulfilled in you, blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears for they hear.

 The Gospel is the forgiveness of sins in Jesus name and it is told today in terms of darkness and light, blindness and sight.  John quotes Zechariah when he tells of Jesus’ death on the cross, They shall look on him whom they pierced.  And in that sight, offered to us in this Eucharistic representation of his death, we may apprehend forgiveness and eternal life in Jesus Christ the Son of God. 

Our hope, in the end, is the perfect and perfecting vision of God in Christ, when we shall be like him for we shall see him as he is.  The Light of god has both an intellectual and a moral quality to it, and it is this moral quality that Paul draws out in our Epistle, calling us to live in and by the light we have received. 

John 9 stands before the last miracle of our Lord, the raising of Lazarus and just after the account of the woman caught in adultery and the pronouncing of her pardon, Neither do I condemn thee.  The Light of Jesus Christ brings forgiveness to sinners, sight to the blind and eternal life to mortals.  This is good news for you and for me, if we recognize the truth about ourselves. 

He gives us a similar simple command, do this, and in obedience to him we too may come to see, to see the Light and everything in that hew light. 

 So let us come to receive that light, into our hearts, by faith with thanksgiving, let us come to him and say with that blind man, Lord I believe, and let us too worship him, to whom with the Father and the Holy Ghost be all praise now and for evermore. Amen.