“True Sight” Colchester Federated Church, March 15, 2026, Fourth Sunday in Lent (John 9:1-41)

On this Fourth Sunday in Lent we are moving from Jesus talking about being born from above with Nicodemus to offering living water to the Samaritan woman at the well.  Today we are exploring the story of Jesus healing a man who was born blind in the Gospel according to John.  Here is another amazing one-on-one encounter where Jesus fundamentally changes someone’s life with his compassionate heart.  Here is another person Jesus sees with his compassionate eyes. 

Jesus walks along and sees a man who was blind from birth.  His disciples ask, “Rabbi, who sinned so that he was born blind, this man or his parents?”[1]  Now we may react negatively to that question from the disciples right at the outset of this story, as if blindness is caused by sin in the first place.  It was an assumption at the time that human misfortune could be traced to sin.  Normally the victim was blamed, though sometimes the parents were considered to be at fault if there was a misfortune present from birth.[2]  We may understandably react to this question about who is to blame—the man or his parents.  Jesus answers by saying that neither the man nor his parents sinned to cause his blindness.  Yet God’s mighty works will be displayed through the blind man. 

Then things get really interesting.  Jesus spits on the ground and makes mud with his saliva.  He smears the mud on the man’s eyes.  Jesus tells him to go wash in the pool of Siloam.  And he does—the man goes away and washes in the pool, and lo and behold he can see.  The story goes on from there because it ends up that Jesus performs this healing on the Sabbath.  Some of the Pharisees don’t agree with this healing on the Sabbath because it’s not as if the blind man’s life was on the line or anything.  Technically, healing him could have waited a day.  There’s that whole debate about whether Jesus should have healed him on the Sabbath or not.  And the religious leaders have a hard time believing that this healing happened in the first place (whether on the Sabbath or not) since they know that this man was born blind from birth. 

In the end, the man is brought forward before the religious leaders.  His parents are even summoned to see what’s what.  The formerly blind man received this miracle of healing from Jesus’ spit and mud concoction and washing in the water.  And after this miracle of sight for the first time in his life, he declares, “Here’s what I do know: I was blind and now I see . . . No one has ever heard of a healing of the eyes of someone born blind.  If this man wasn’t from God, he couldn’t do this.”[3]  The man is healed and then he testifies about Jesus’ power.  God’s mighty works are displayed in him just as Jesus said they would be from the beginning.      

Many Christians believe that Jesus was fully human and fully divine.  That Jesus was God incarnate who lived and breathed and walked among us to teach us how to love as God loves.  Ours is not a religion where God is far removed from the human experience, where God is removed from the joys of human life and also the suffering and pain of human life.  It ends up that our God is a God who spits on the ground, makes mud with God’s hands, and rubs that mud on someone’s eyes in order that the person might be healed.  How much more personal and human and tactile of a God can we possibly see here in our story from the Gospel according to John?  Jesus shows us over and again how far he as Emmauel, God-with-us, will go to bring healing and wholeness to people. 

This is an encounter of physical touch and human bodies and spit and mud and washing.  It is no wonder that after experiencing all that Jesus did for him the man’s response was, “Lord, I believe” and he worshipped Jesus.[4]  So yes, we see the divinity of Jesus here in the form of this miracle.  But also how much more human can Jesus possibly be here?  This is one of those healing stories that shows what makes Christianity unique as a world religion.

Because Christianity is inherently a religion about the beloved community that Jesus built around him, the beloved community that continued after his death and resurrection.  This is the beloved community of his disciples that continues on today, the community that we are blessed to belong to.  We are the Body of Christ in the Church.  It’s a religion about Jesus as God-with-us and among us and beside us and before us.  The founder of our faith was not some high and mighty figure far removed from our human experience.  No, he was a human being who spat on the ground and made mud and rubbed it on someone’s eyes and healed them. 

There is a physicality when we come together as Christians to worship God in community.  Harvard Divinity School Professor Stephanie Paulsell once reflected that,

“Embodiment is central to the Christian faith.  The Christian emphasis on the incarnation of God’s presence in Jesus and the Christian understanding of community, which describes the church as the body of Christ, both put embodiment at the center of Christian meaning.  Jesus’ command that we love our neighbor as we love ourselves makes it clear that our faith has everything to do with how we live as embodied people.  And when we gather to worship, we do things together that bring this command to life: in the meal of communion, we eat and drink, gathered together by Christ’s own wounded body; in baptism, it is our bodies that are bathed in cleansing water; in the passing of the peace, we touch one another in love and hope.”[5]

If we mapped out a typical Sunday morning here at Colchester Federated Church and thought about corporate worship through the lens of embodiment, what would we discover?  When we gather for worship, we greet one another at the door of the church with a smile and a handshake or a hug.  We are handed a worship bulletin by our ushers and make our way to take our seats in the pews.  We pass the Peace of Christ by shaking hands or hugging one another, greeting one another in Christian love.  We pray responsive prayers together and sing hymns, using our bodies in the act of worship.  At our church, we gather around the sanctuary in the circle of friendship, holding hands to bless each other as we finish our service of worship.  We may say farewell to one another at the end of the service or make our way downstairs to coffee hour for coffee and treats (and for fellowship).  These are physical acts—this is embodiment.  Because Jesus was never some impersonal figure, but a human being who gathered people around him.

Professor Paulsell notes that the Christian liturgical calendar is a record of embodiment in some ways.  Because the calendar itself takes shape around the life of Jesus and the community of followers that he called into being.  We can especially see this as we are in Lent and will soon move into Holy Week.  As Paulsell notes, “Fasting during Lent, foot washing on Maudy Thursday, celebrating the Easter Vigil at midnight unite us with Christians of every age who have sought to enter bodily into the narrative of Jesus’ life and death.  During Easter, it is Jesus’ resurrected body that teaches us, perhaps more than any other image in Christianity, that bodies matter.”[6] 

Some folks have said that the perennial Christian way of being is to “Gather the people.  Break the bread.  Tell the stories.”  Sometimes we make church far more complicated than it perhaps needs to be.  There is real power in the gathering of the people and the breaking of the bread and telling the stories of our faith side by side.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

[1] John 9:2, CEB.
[2] Footnote on John 9:2, The CEB Study Bible with Apocrypha, pg. 189 NT.
[3] John 9:25, 32-33, CEB.
[4] John 9:38, CEB.
[5] Stephanie Paulsell, “Honoring the Body” in Practicing our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People, ed. Dorothy C. Bass, pg. 16.
[6] Stephanie Paulsell, “Honoring the Body” in Practicing our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People, ed. Dorothy C. Bass, pg. 26.

Photo by Timon Studler on Unsplash