Hey there. Welcome to When Love shows up, my podcast. And, we’re gonna do something a little bit different today. This past Sunday I preached a sermon that wasn’t recorded, our recording device wasn’t working on Sunday, and there were some things that I said to the congregation that I would like to make sure that I say again and that are on record. I don’t know that one sermon is any more important than any other sermon, but, I did speak a lot about, some things that are happening currently in our world, in our country, and, that are connected, I think, on a deep level to our Gospel call as Christians. And I wanted to make sure that I had a chance to do that again.
So I’m gonna sort of redo my sermon here in this space, which is, not something I’ve ever done before and we’re just going to see how it goes. So that’ll begin with me reading the actual text from which I preached this past Sunday. We’re gonna start, this with a reading from the Gospel according to John.
And it’s the whole chapter nine. It’s the the whole ninth chapter of John’s Gospel, and here’s how that reading goes.
As Jesus walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, rabbi, who sinned this man or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered ‘neither this man nor his parents sinned, he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. We must work. The works of him who sent me while it is day night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.
When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, saying to him, go wash in the pool of shalom, which means scent. Then he went and washed and came back able to see the neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, is this not the man who used to sit and beg?
Some were saying it is he. Others were saying, no, but it is someone like him. He kept saying, I am the man, but they kept asking him. Then how were your eyes opened? He answered. The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes and said to me, go to Shalom and wash. Then I went and washed and received my sight, and they said to him, where is he?
He said, I do not know. They brought to the Pharisees, the man who had formerly been blind. Now, it was a Sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. Then the Pharisees also began to ask him how he had received his sight. He said to them, he put mud on my eyes then I washed, and now I see. Some of the Pharisees said, this man is not from God for, he does not observe the Sabbath. But others said, how can a man who is a sinner perform such signs? And they were divided. So they said again to the blind man. What do you say about him? It was your eyes he opened. He said he is a prophet?
The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they called the parents of the man who had received his sight and asked Themis, this, your son who you say was born blind. How then does he now see? His parents answered, we know that this is our son and that he was born blind, but we do not know how it is that now he sees, nor do we know who opened his eyes.
Ask him. He is of age. He will speak for himself. His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews. For the Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue. Therefore, his parents said. He is of age. Ask him. So for the second time, they called the man who had been blind and they said to him, give glory to God.
We know that this man is a sinner. He answered, I do not know whether he’s a sinner. One thing I do know that though I was blind. Now I see. They said to him, what did he do to you? How did he open your eyes? He answered them. I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again?
Do you also want to become his disciples? Then they reviled him saying, “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.” The man answered. Here is an astonishing thing. You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes.
We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing. They answered him. You were born entirely in sins and are you trying to teach us? And they drove him out.
Jesus heard that they had driven him out and when he found him he said, do you believe in the son of man? He answered, and who is he, sir? Tell me. Said that I may believe in him. Jesus said to him, you have seen him and the one speaking with you is he? He said, Lord, I believe, and he worshiped him. Jesus said, I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see and those who do see may become blind.
Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, surely we are not blind, are we? Jesus said to them, if you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, we see, your sin remains. And that’s the end of the reading.
Okay. Did you get all that? It’s a long story, right? Where does one even begin to talk about that? Well, I personally can’t even get past the very first part of the story, to be honest with you. And I never have been able to. I’ve never been able to get past the very first part where Jesus is walking along with his disciples.
They happen upon a man who is blind on the side of the road begging. The disciples who have been following Jesus, who have been learning from Jesus, who have been getting into what he does and who He’s about and what he’s about, and all those things that they see this and they see the blind man, and the first thing out of their mouth is, Hey Jesus so whose fault do you think it is that he’s blind this man? Is it something he did or is it something his parents did? It’s the first thing they come to that they think about. By the way, he’s sitting right there. They’re not even talking to him. They’re talking about him right in front of him. Hey, Jesus, who’s the sinner?
This guy or his parents that he is born blind. You know, I’ve been watching a lot of that show, on HBO, The Pitt lately, which is set in an emergency room. And, one thing we see a lot on that show is, a lot of episodes where they look at bedside manner, and this is really bad bedside manner. The guy is right there. And by the way, he’s blind, not deaf. He can hear you. Right. Anyways, these people see a man who is blind, see a man who’s in need, and their first thought, their first question is, I wonder what he did to deserve this. Wouldn’t it be convenient If we could ascribe their question to some ancient far off time and a different culture than ours and all those things, and certainly in Jesus’ time, we know that one of the major sort of tensions within the faith was their wrestling with this notion that if you did good, God would bless you and if you did bad, God would curse you. This was of course one way that they understood when good things happen and bad things happened, but not the only way. And we have lots of evidence of tension, in the faith of Jesus and his people around him.
Good things happen to good people. Bad things happen to bad people. But also why good things happen to bad people and vice versa. So it’s not a settled matter. It would be convenient if we could just say, oh, in those days they believed that. But in reality we know that even today we have some of the same problems.
If I see someone suffering, I don’t want to admit that I wonder what they did to deserve that, but we know that it does happen. We know that when you see someone on the side of the road, someone in need, someone begging that a natural thing that you might think is, I wonder what they did. They put themselves in that situation.
We know we do that. We also, by the way, do that to ourselves. Who among us when some ill has befallen us or been sick or something, has not asked a question at some point, what did I do to deserve this? And not only do we do it when bad things happen, we sometimes even do it when good things happen.
Some wonderful thing comes my way and I say, what did I do to deserve this? So it would be great if I could just say, those disciples are so wrongheaded and they’re in some other ancient culture, and it’s so different. But the reality is to, to this day, we still wrestle with the idea of who deserves what.
And so often we look at a situation, we see suffering, and instead of entering into that suffering. Instead of entering into the uncertainty and fear that comes along with the solidarity, with suffering and the empathy, we shield ourselves by intellectual questions of who deserves what. Philosophical questions, instead of just facing the suffering we see right in front of us, but not Jesus.
Jesus has absolutely no time for questions of who deserves what or why, and there’s been a lot of ink shed over what Jesus meant when he said, this man was born blind in order to glorify God. But I am of the belief that Jesus is just moving the conversation along and essentially saying, it doesn’t matter how it got this way, what matters is what’s about to happen.
What matters is how we care for him and what we do to work with him. And serve him and love him. Jesus is not interested in the ‘who deserves what’ conversation, and all the sorts of justifications that we come up with for suffering in the world. He is interested in the human being that is standing or sitting right in front of him.
He’s interested in that person’s humanity, and he is interested in affirming, and loving and blessing that man in his humanity. And that is exactly what Jesus does. It’s not about who deserves what, it’s about what happens now, and then Jesus listens, he does. All these people, by the way, are talking around the man or at the man or past the man, and Jesus speaks directly to him and heals him.
And yeah, we should acknowledge that the way Jesus does it is kind of weird, right? He spits on the ground and makes mud and then sticks the mud in the guy’s eye and tells him to go wash. Eh, it’s kind of weird. There’s no way around that. It’s kind of weird. You know what though? It’s also really beautiful when you can get over the weirdness part.
It’s really beautiful and intimate and humanizing, and earthy. Jesus literally gets his hands dirty in order to care for the man. Yes. Who cares? Who deserves what? We are here to serve. This might actually be the true miracle of Jesus Christ in this world. The miracle of recognizing and serving and loving the humanity that is right in front of us.
Yes, Jesus heals. Yes, Jesus saves. Yes. Good. How does he do it? Through a consistent process of recognizing and honoring the humanity of the people that he meets, no one gets notched into a little column. Jesus doesn’t spend a lot of time with who deserves what. Jesus is laser focused on recognizing and serving the humanity that he sees right before him.
And this is his salvation. This is our salvation. Through him, if we’re interested at all, and as Christians in following Jesus, we should start right there with the humanizing of others. But I wanna acknowledge that this is a real tension for us as well, because we like the people in the story do get caught up in who deserves what.
And by the way, it’s throughout the whole story, you’ll notice this was a really long reading. It’s one of the longest readings in the Gospels in terms of a Sunday reading that you’ll hear. Forty-one verses, a whole chapter. And you gotta notice. The story’s not primarily about the healing. I mean, Jesus heals the guy in the first three or four verses, and then there’s another 37 verses where all they’re doing is talking about, ‘ yeah, but wait a minute, who really did this? Did it really happen? Did he deserve it? Who deserved what? Who’s to blame for this?
They spend so much time on who is deserving and who should be blamed and questioning. They’re not even celebrating the miracle of a man who’s been given his life back. That’s bananas, right? Like think about that. This man is healed, his life has changed, he’s been given a new way to live.
And then we spend all this time just sitting around on all the particulars of who deserves what and what should and shouldn’t have happened. And I just want us to acknowledge that that is something we understand very well. First, the disciples do it. Who deserves and who did what wrong? That this man was born blind.
Where does the sin lie? But then we see the Pharisees do it after that. And the Pharisees do the same thing of trying to understand if Jesus was really worthy to have performed the miracle that he performed and if the man was worthy of receiving it, and if it should have happened on the Sabbath.
All of these questions about worthiness and who deserves what, are their preoccupation. This story is not primarily about the healing that Jesus undertakes of one man. This is a story about the prejudices and preconceived notions that we bring to the table when we enter into relationship with others.
When we are so caught up in who deserves what, that we refuse to recognize the miracle of the humanity that is right in front of us, that we refuse to love and to serve. That’s what the story is actually about, and it is a very human condition. We see it in the disciples, we see it in the Pharisees, and I’ll tell you what we even see it in the author of John’s Gospel.
Here are his own prejudices, his own preconceived notions. You may notice as you listen to this story and throughout Lent, as we listen to John’s Gospel, we hear John refer in a negative sense to the Jews. The people were afraid of the Jews and the Jews had disrespected or had had distanced themselves from Jesus and throw these people out and all this stuff and that language.
The Jews hits hard, doesn’t it? It should. It should bother you when you hear it. It’s a very negative polemical language that John is using, and it should make us uncomfortable now. A lot of work has been done to contextualize why John talks like that, and there’s some that can be helpful for us, just so that it’s not so overwhelming.
We can understand, of course, that well, first of all, Jesus is a Jew, as are the disciples, as is the man who’s healed, as are his parents. Everybody in the story is Jewish. Okay. Everybody in the story is a Jew. Beyond that, it’s possible that the author of John’s Gospel is Jewish. Certainly, some of the members of of his church that are listening to the Gospel are Jewish, and there’s Jews and Gentiles living together.
And we can also recognize that this is early enough in the development of the church that the most of the people who are adherence to Jesus’ way are still understanding themselves primarily as Jews. That’s just shifting. There’s this tension between essentially two different factions of Jewish people.
Those who think that Jesus was the Messiah and those who don’t. And John is writing this Gospel. In the midst of that tension, John is probably writing with his own fear in mind, his fear, ’cause Christianity at that point is nowhere near a dominant religion or culture. It’s a marginalized culture within another marginalized culture, the nascent Christian culture that’s emerging.
Is tiny and powerless and marginalized, and alongside their Jewish siblings who are also tiny and disenfranchised and marginalized. So both the Jews and the Christians who still partially understand themselves as Jewish, they all are experiencing fear of persecution and harm. And we can understand also that even the word in Greek is Judeans, and that John means a very specific group of Jewish people who are, and he’s talking about the ones who are in power.
We could do all that work of a contextualization, so we don’t just read John as purely antisemitic, but also no matter how we contextualize it and how we study it, the language is ugly and it hurts us. And we should pay attention to his own prejudice around that and his intention of using that polemical language, especially here and now.
We live in a time and in a place where antisemitism and anti-Jewish rhetoric is on a rise in the way that we have not seen in our lifetimes. It is terrifying. Our Jewish siblings are scared. Just in the last week we’ve seen another attack on a synagogue in this country. And we know that that attack on that synagogue was done by a man of Lebanese descent who upon seeing the Israeli Army attack his people in Lebanon, undertook this ugly act of attacking a synagogue.
He did the ‘they deserve it’ game. The who deserves what. It’s the same thing. And so we have to resist that. We have to resist that anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish rhetoric, whether it’s in the Gospel or in our daily lives. We have to think like Jesus and move towards the humanization of all people. We cannot treat all groups of people as big groups and ignore the individual humanity of each person that we are meant to recognize God’s presence in, and to love and to serve.
Anti-Semitism. There’s no room for it. There’s no room for anti-Jewish rhetoric in our hearts as Christians. There should not be and we should not allow it. Now that being said, a lot of people will defend our Jewish siblings by then going, that’s right. It’s that Lebanese man. It’s an Arabic issue. It’s a Muslim issue.
No, that doesn’t work either. The proper response to antisemitism and anti-Jewish rhetoric is not Islamophobia or anti-Muslim rhetoric either. That doesn’t work either. That is a dehumanizing blame game that does not work and is anti-Jesus. It’s not who Jesus is, and we are seeing so much of it in the last couple years, especially when the atrocities occurred in Israel on October 7th. Just a couple years ago when those occurred, there were so many people who were ready to excuse those things and blame Jews and Israelis for the conditions that created that circumstance. But then likewise, we had all sorts of people who were willing to blame Palestinians and make it all about what they deserved in terms of Israel’s response and the atrocities that have been committed in Gaza. Since we see this blame game going on that completely dehumanizes people and is anti Christ, if we’re serious as Christians about following Jesus, we have to resist those easy, simple classifications.
And we have to seek the humanity in each person, love and honor it. We reject antisemitism. We reject Islamophobia. We reject hatred against Jews, but we reject it against Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians, and certainly against Iranians.
By the way, in the time and place we live in right now, when our country has undertaken a war in Iran. Where Iranian civilians and citizens are being killed by our bombs, by our people, you’ll see all sorts of justifications for that too. Who deserves what? Who deserves what? Oil refineries are being blown up and toxic chemical oil infused rain is raining down upon people and doing untold damage we cannot fathom in one of the most densely populated cities on earth. And we’re coming up with, well, that wouldn’t happen if… We’re trying to figure out how we can explain who deserves what.
Our military bombing a school in Tehran, you’ve probably heard about that. First, our government lied about it, but eventually they fessed up that, yes, we did that and killed dozens, over a hundred little children, little girls. And I heard someone say, well, what was that school doing there in the first place?
That is not the question. We are not going to be able to play games about who deserves what to shield us from the pain and the sorrow that we are witnessing. Jesus resists, shielding ourselves from pain and sorrow by doing the blame game and who deserves what Jesus steps in and steps forward into the humanity for which we were made,
And that is the truth of who we are meant to be.
You’ll notice maybe that Jesus. Is missing for a big chunk of the story that’s unusual in the Gospels, but so much of the story isn’t about him. It’s about other people, as I said, and their preconceived notions and prejudices and the blame game and who deserves what. But Jesus does show back up at the end of the story.
And do you know why he shows up? He shows up to check in on the man. He hears that he’s been rejected, that he’s still kicked out. And Jesus goes to show up and check in on him. How you doing? That’s who Jesus actually is, and that’s who we’re meant to be. We’re meant to be the ones who seek the humanity in others to love and to serve it.
It is not the Christian vocation to conquer this world in Jesus’ name. It is not the Christian vocation to bomb this world in Jesus’ name, and it is certainly not the vocation of the Christian to play the blame game in who deserves what. In Jesus’ name. It is our holy calling in Jesus’ name. To love and serve our neighbor, to seek the humanity and the people right in front of us, and then to serve that humanity.
You must remember that we make it one of our stated beliefs that every single human being is made in the image of God. Humanity is made in the image of God. So if that’s true for us to seek out the humanity of others is to seek to honor God’s presence in each person that we meet. We resist hatred. We resist broad, broad classifications.
We resist the blame game and spending all of our time deciding who deserves what, so we can shield ourselves from the suffering. Now we enter into the suffering of our neighbor. We stand or sit alongside them, we roll our sleeves up and get our hands in the dirt, and we do so in order to care for and love and serve and heal the people around us.
There is no place in the Christian heart for the hatred of others, especially not hating others for being different from us.
It is not our job to change their minds. It’s not our job to make Jews, Muslims, atheists, or anyone else Christian, just like us. It is our job to seek God’s presence in them, to love and to serve them. When we do that, we are participating in the miraculous life of Jesus Christ. We are fulfilling the covenant for which we are made.
We are embodying our own divine destiny. We were made by God in God’s image to love and serve one another. It doesn’t matter who deserves what. It only matters what we do next.
