Harriette Simmons
John 9:1-38
Sermon

"Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"

The question echoes down through the centuries and even now gets mixed up in Christian theology.

In the story read from John's gospel today, we see a poor man, a beggar. He must have been a familiar figure because Jesus' disciples knew that he had been blind from birth. Perhaps he stood or sat every day in the same place along the roadside and begged. People with physical disabilities had few options for making a living in those days.

The disciples, along with their Jewish brethren, assumed that because the man was blind, somebody had sinned, either the man or his parents. That was a common first century Jewish belief. It has infiltrated our thinking. Many of us live with the uneasy feeling that our welfare depends on our behavior. We try to live a "good life" so that nothing bad will happen to us. And when something bad happens to someone else, the thought may cross our minds that the person must have done something wrong. This is the whole theme of the book of Job. When disaster befalls his life, Job maintains that he has not sinned while all his relatives and friends insist that if he had not done something wrong, he wouldn't be in such a mess.

Jesus refutes this idea - plain and simple. He says,

"Nobody sinned, neither the man nor his parents, but rather God can use his blindness as an occasion to reveal God's glory in the world."

Wham! I'll bet the disciples didn't say a word. Jesus just shot a hole in four thousand years of Jewish theology. He is showing his disciples that God is friendlier than they thought he was - more compassionate and more powerful.

The theme of God's glory and power runs throughout the gospel of John. "Jesus is the Light of the world," says John, "and if you want to give up your blindness, put yourself in that Light. Let the light dispel the darkness."

Let’s go back to the blind man. In our story, Jesus then proceeds to do something which is strange to us but not to these first century people. He spits in the dirt, makes a paste of the mud and spreads it on the blind man's eyes. Ancient people believed that saliva had curative powers in it. The more important a person was, the more curative was his saliva. Pliny, the famous 1st century Roman historian, writes a whole chapter in his history on the curative powers of saliva. So the disciples, nor the blind man, would have been surprised at these actions.

Then the emphasis of the story shifts away from Jesus and the disciples and onto the blind man. Here is the rub, here is the "monkey on the back," for the blind man and for us. Jesus tells the blind man to do something if he wants to receive his sight, and the man has a choice - will he do it or will he not? Jesus tells him to go and wash himself, his eyes, in the Pool of Siloam. Then the blind man had a choice. He could remain where he was and beg for the rest of his life or he could go and find the Pool of Siloam. Faith, as action, begins to raise its head at this point.

The Pool of Siloam was one of the landmarks of Jerusalem, and it was the result of one of the great engineering feats of the ancient world. It was a holding pool for water cut through 583 yards of solid rock during the time of ancient Israel. It was dug without benefit of modern tools. Everybody knew where it was. But remember, this man was blind. It must have taken some ingenuity on his part to have found the pool. Maybe he asked someone to guide him. Maybe he stumbled along and found his own way. It is interesting that Jesus does not offer to help him find the pool.

But the blind man does find the Pool of Siloam. He washes in it, and he receives his sight. This story corrects our theology for all time.

The Gospel of John tells us that anyone who comes to Jesus, who is the "Light of the world," anyone who comes in faith, never leaves disappointed. Healing happens. The blind see. The lame walk. The deaf hear.

In the presence of Christ, healing happens- it may or may not be a physical healing, but, it will be a healing of the soul. Those who come to Jesus experience salvation, John is telling us that the sign and symbol of this salvation is healing, being made whole.

To turn away from Jesus, to reject him or ignore him and the love of God which he embodies, is sin, not just wrong actions. The opposite of sin, for John, is faith - not moral purity.

Yet nowhere in the story does John tell us that the man had any sort of "faith" in the beginning. He was just standing on the side of the road. It was Jesus who went up to him. But the blind man does possess one quality. He is radically willing. He is completely open. He surrenders himself wholeheartedly to Jesus and his homespun saliva and mud remedy. Then he is obedient to what Jesus asks him to do - he goes and bathes in the Pool of Siloam.

Besides correcting our theological blindness, the story forces us to ask ourselves a question of monumental significance. Where is our Pool of Siloam? Where is it that God, in Christ, is asking us to go and wash away (if not our literal, then our figurative) blindness? Where is that sacred place where we can step out of the blindness of addiction or acquisitiveness or ambition or despair or judgment and splash our faces with the clear water of amazing grace?

Each must decide for him or herself. But the one common denominator in all of these "pools of Siloam" is that they must be persons or places or disciplines in which belief in Jesus is deepened. Rather than simply believing things about Jesus - the stories, the doctrines - belief really means much more. The word "believe" in the original Greek and Latin means "to give one's heart to." The heart, in the Bible and in literature, is the deepest center of the self - the inner sanctum of sight or understanding. It is where the Spirit longs to dwell.

Believing in Jesus is giving one's heart to him. It is letting the light into the darkness. It is opening the doors of our soul to the Lord, the Savior, the Healer.

It is said that the story of the blind man was etched in many places on the walls of the catacombs of the first Christians. Down in the lightless recesses of these tombs, these early Christians could still see. They claimed that the "Light of the World" had washed away a blindness that no darkness could overcome.

God's love, through Christ, can still wash away our blindness. As Paul says to the Ephesians so he says to us:

Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.

Amen.