Learning to Actually See

Transcript

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[0:00] So we're continuing from John 9 and picking up where Steve left off for our sermon text. So we're picking up in verse 18. The Jewish leaders still refused to believe that the man had been blind and could now see. So they called in his parents. They asked them, is this your son? Was he born blind? If so, how can he now see? His parents replied, we know this is our son and that he was born blind, but we don't know how he can see or who healed him. Ask him. He's old enough to speak for himself.

[0:44] His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jewish leaders who had announced that anyone saying Jesus was the Messiah would be expelled from the synagogue. That is why they said, he is old enough. Ask him. So for the second time, they called in the man who had been blind and told him, God should get the glory for this because we know this man is a sinner. I don't know whether he is a sinner, the man replied, but I know this. I was blind and now I can see. But what did he do, they asked. How did he heal you? Look, the man exclaimed. I told you once. Didn't you listen? Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples too? Then they cursed him and said, you are his disciples, his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. We know God spoke to Moses, but we don't even know where this man comes from.

[1:50] Why, that's very strange, the man replied. He healed my eyes and yet you don't know where he comes from. We know. We know that God doesn't listen to sinners, but he is ready to hear those who worship him and do his will. Ever since the world began, no one has been able to open the eyes of someone born blind. If this man were not from God, he couldn't have done it.

[2:18] You were born a total sinner, they answered. Are you trying to teach us? And they threw him out of the synagogue. When Jesus heard what had happened, he found the man and asked, do you believe in the son of man? The man answered, who is he, sir? I want to believe in him.

[2:38] You have seen him, Jesus said, and he is speaking to you. Yes, Lord, I believe, the man said, and he worshiped Jesus. Then Jesus told him, I entered this world to render judgment, to give sight to the blind, and to show those who, think they see, that they are blind.

[3:02] Some Pharisees who were standing nearby heard him and asked, are you saying we're blind? If you were blind, you wouldn't be guilty, Jesus replied. But you remain guilty because you claim you can see. Let's pray.

[3:20] Our God, we thank you for your word. We ask for your blessing over it. God, would you prepare us? Bear our hearts and minds this morning. These things we pray in Jesus name. Amen. So there was a famous test that was done in 1999 called the invisible gorilla. How many have heard of it?

[3:45] Excellent. That's actually that's about what I guessed would that's actually who I guessed would have heard of it too. So maybe you've seen the video but audiences were told to watch a video. Of people passing basketballs. There are two teams three players wear white shirts and three players wear black shirts. The audience is told to count how many times the players in the white shirts pass the ball. They pass the ball 15 times.

[4:19] But then the audience is told. And how many gorillas did you see? Gorilla? What gorilla? Then the same video is shown again. And this time the audience watches for a gorilla instead of watching the passes. And sure enough a person in a gorilla suit casually walks on screen stops in the middle of the basketball players beats its chest and proceeds to walk off camera.

[4:48] So he was noticeable. He wasn't just invisible. The test demonstrates the phenomenon of inattentional blindness. It has to do with our ability to perceive unexpected stimuli. Inattentional blindness has nothing to do with your physical ability to see.

[5:12] It has to do with your mental ability to pay attention to something unexpected. If you're entirely focused on one task. It's entirely possible that you'll completely fail to see. The unexpected situation that's happening.

[5:33] Even if it's right in front of you. Sometimes we can't see things that are plainly right in front of us. Our story this morning deals with a man born blind. But he's not the only person suffering from blindness. There's a whole lot of unintentional blindness going on.

[5:54] The story begins in the streets of Jerusalem. Jesus and his disciples encounter this man who was blind since birth. Right away the disciples themselves, not just the Pharisees, but the actual disciples, suffer from a perceptual blindness.

[6:15] They overlook the man in all of his humanity. All they can focus on is sin. In their minds, this man suffers from blindness. So he must be suffering a punishment for some sort of sin. Someone sinned. The disciples' mindset was trained to think that if someone suffers from a physical malady, or if something catastrophic falls on an individual, it's because they or someone close to them have sinned. It's divine judgment.

[6:57] And we can't be too hard on the disciples, because this was a very common understanding in their culture. And it's actually the premise behind the story of Job. Job was a very devout man of God. But after a conversation between God and Satan, one curse after another falls over Job. His children and his livestock are all killed in horrible accidents. Then Job's own health just takes a nosedive. And so Job's friends come and pay him this well-intentioned visit. But each of them reaches the same conclusion.

[7:36] Job, you've obviously done something really bad. What you need to do is confess to God and your lot will improve. And Job spends most of the book of Job vigorously denying that he's done anything wrong. And his friends spend most of the book of Job telling him, yeah, you have.

[8:01] Jesus' disciples draw the same conclusion as Job's friends. Somebody somewhere must have sinned. But did the man himself sin while he was still in his mother's womb? Or was it his parents who have sinned?

[8:20] Do we ever do this? Do we ever focus more on judgment than we do on compassion? When we see someone struggling or someone working through a situation, do we look upon them with the eye of judgment like they had it coming?

[8:41] Or do we simply see their plight and say, what can I do to help? Does this diminish our ability to see compassion? The young woman who is pregnant outside of marriage, the neighbor who gets their third DUI, the impulsive kid down the street who makes a bad choice, what do we see? Do we overlook the person? And are we unable to understand who the person is and only search for their faults?

[9:16] Jesus tells us, judge not lest you be judged. The disciples focus on the sin. And they completely overlook the man and his suffering. And so Jesus points out to them that sin has absolutely nothing to do with this situation. This man's suffering is not the result of sin. But Jesus will use it to shed light on God's glory. Jesus sees the whole man and he sees God at work. So Jesus applies mud to the man's eyes and gives him instructions. The man does exactly what Jesus said. And when he washes away the mud, he can see for the very first time in his life. What a marvelous thing! And then we see not his blindness, but we see more situational blindness. The man's own neighbors didn't recognize him. Hey, is this the blind beggar? He looks like him, but it can't be him.

[10:30] Some say yes, some say no. Some say it's a case of mistaken identity. They've lived next to him their whole lives. They've passed him by in the streets for goodness knows how long. And they're not even sure who he is. How many of you, if your neighbor was walking down the street, you would recognize who they were? Your next door neighbor? Right?

[10:59] But they've turned their own blind eye on this blind man. They don't want to be associated with him because of his alleged sin. They don't have compassion on him. They don't see him. So not only was he blind, but he's spent his life not being seen.

[11:24] They had him pigeonholed in their own limited view. They didn't know what to make of him once he didn't fit into their preconceived notion, their mold that they made of him in their mind. And in a similar way, we can overlook others too. We think we've got them figured out, but we really don't know anything about them. We don't know nothing but reduce them to a two dimensional figure.

[11:52] It's like we look at them through a tiny pinhole. And we appreciate maybe one small aspect of who we are. We see someone as a reckless teen or an old lady. We see a woman wearing a hijab and we think, Muslim, I've got it all figured out.

[12:14] We see people with the personal, with all the notions that we personally carry about them. But in this limited vision, we become blind to the one thing that really matters about them, and that is their humanity.

[12:32] We miss their aspirations and their talents. We overlook their courage and their daily challenges. We need our spiritual eyes to be opened. We need to see our neighbors in the fullness that Christ does. Next in our story, we meet the Pharisees. The Pharisees don't know what to do about the blind man. They've already made up their minds about Jesus. That's done.

[13:04] He's a troublemaker, plain and simple, and something needs to be done about him. But now, what to do about this blind man? There's this miraculous healing on a scale never before seen, and it challenges their understanding. It doesn't compute. Like I told the kids earlier, there's no light bulb going off over their head. It doesn't synchronize with their worldview. So they end up excommunicating the formerly blind man as a sinner and a heretic.

[13:42] Here's an interesting thing. The blind man's own parents didn't see what was really going on, and they sent their son to be excommunicated. Now, in our day and age, if we at the Church of the Deacons got together and said, this person needs to be removed from our community, it would be a difficult thing for our church, and for the individual.

[14:10] But that individual would move on. They might find another church. They might not. But they would not lose their job. They would not lose their family. They would not lose their social circle. Being excommunicated as a heretic back in Jesus' day was a whole other ballgame. They would lose everything that was important to them. They would lose everything that was important to them. They would lose their livelihood. They would not even be able to beg for food, because they would be excommunicated.

[14:48] People wouldn't want to associate with them. And they certainly wouldn't want to be seen helping them. So Jesus steps up, and he challenges the faith of the Pharisees. The Pharisees are ignorant to Jesus' true reality. So just like nobody saw, or truly saw, who this blind beggar was all his life, these Pharisees don't truly see who Jesus is. They look at him, and they see a troublemaker. They see somebody who doesn't follow the rules of the Sabbath.

[15:26] Here, a miraculous healing has just occurred in their midst. Something to celebrate, something to be in awe of. A healing like they've never understood. A healing like they've never understood before, like no one has ever understood before.

[15:41] And they are blind to who Jesus is. We use the phrase, blind faith. It usually means that we believe in someone despite having no concrete physical evidence to back it up. The writer of Hebrews wrote, Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. This kind of blind faith is not something that we believe in. This kind of faith is a good thing.

[16:08] I hope we all have a degree of this blind faith. But the phrase blind faith can also describe when our faith falls short, like the Pharisees did, in this example. When we fail to see. In the story of Saul's conversion, his spiritual blindness literally knocks him down and renders him physically blind.

[16:36] Saul zealously chased new Christian converts to punish them and have them killed. He was so ardently opposed to the followers of Jesus that he pursued them in the city of Damascus. But on the way there, a great light shone on him and knocked him to the ground. Then he heard the voice of Jesus saying, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?

[17:07] And when he rose to his feet, he couldn't see. His eyes were physically blind and his heart was spiritually blind. When he arrived in Damascus, a Christian man, Ananias, visited Saul, and he laid his hands upon him and said, Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit. Both, not one or the other, both. And then something like scales fell from Saul's eyes. He could see, not just physically, but also with the eyes of faith. The Christian faith boils down to what we believe about Jesus. Jesus tells the man whose eyes he has healed, I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.

[18:07] In his book, Mere Christianity, the Christian writer C.S. Lewis wrote about what we come to see in Jesus. Here's what he says. I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about him. I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God. That is one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic on a level with a man said he is a poached egg, or else he would be the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was and is the Son of God, or else a madman or something else. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

[19:22] The Pharisees didn't see Jesus for who he really is. They are blinded by their rigid doctrines and their hostilities. But the man who was once blind now sees, and not just physically. In fact, we read the book last year about disabilities, and it's not really ultimately important to Jesus if these physical disabilities are answered or not. What's important to him is the human, is compassion for their plight, being able to give them the life that can help them be most complete. So he's not just no longer physically blind, but now he's spiritually awake and spiritually able to see. He experienced Jesus' healing power through the miracle, and now he sees Jesus as his divine savior. The same question stands before us. As you look at Jesus, what do you see? Look at his life, look at his death on the cross and his resurrection, and what do you see? What do his actions tell you?

[20:46] Here is one who didn't consider equality with God in heaven as something to be clung to. He eagerly poured himself out into our humanity to walk with us. His earthly life was filled with tremendous compassion. He comforted the afflicted, he challenged the comfortable, and then in his death on a cross, he accomplished the greatest act of healing. He broached the gap between our broken world and our corrupted, sinful, not-seeing selves, and the divine source of life and goodness. And in his resurrection, he defeated all our enemies and all of our spiritual blindness once and for all. There is nothing that can separate us from the love of God.

[21:34] We walk by faith, not by sight. You might call it blind faith, but Jesus is the light of the world. Once we walked in darkness, but now in the Lord we are light. May we walk as children of the light. Amen. All right, and let's pray.

[21:57] God, we pray that this Lent you would help us to see you for who you are, to see your journey to the cross, to see the way you died for our sins, to see the way you want us to have compassion on your people, to see humanity as you see it, and to see you as you truly are. God, that's what we pray for in each of our lives this morning. These things we pray in Jesus' name.