Work the Works
Sunday, March 6th, 2005
Lent 4A
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
John 9:1-41
Sunday, March 6th, 2005
Lent 4A
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
John 9:1-41
1As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. 2His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ 3Jesus answered, ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. 4We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. 5As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.’ 6When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, 7saying to him, ‘Go, wash in the pool of Siloam’ (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see. 8 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?’ 9Some were saying, ‘It is he.’ Others were saying, ‘No, but it is someone like him.’ He kept saying, ‘I am the man.’ 10But they kept asking him, ‘Then how were your eyes opened?’ 11He answered, ‘The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, “Go to Siloam and wash.” Then I went and washed and received my sight.’ 12They said to him, ‘Where is he?’ He said, ‘I do not know.’ 13 They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. 14Now it was a sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. 15Then 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.’ 16Some 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. 17So 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.’ 18The 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 19and asked them, ‘Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?’ 20His parents answered, ‘We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind; 21but 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.’ 22His 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. 23Therefore his parents said, ‘He is of age; ask him.’ 24So 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.’ 25He answered, ‘I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.’ 26They said to him, ‘What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?’ 27He 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?’ 28Then they reviled him, saying, ‘You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. 29We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.’ 30The man answered, ‘Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. 31We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will. 32Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. 33If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.’ 34They answered him, ‘You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?’ And they drove him out.
35 Jesus heard that they had driven him out, and when he found him, he said, ‘Do you believe in the Son of Man?’ 36He answered, ‘And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him.’ 37Jesus said to him, ‘You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.’ 38He said, ‘Lord, I believe.’ And he worshiped him. 39 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.’ 40Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, ‘Surely we are not blind, are we?’ 41Jesus said to them, ‘If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, “We see,” your sin remains.
I’m a bedtime reader.
I don’t mean I read to the kids at bedtime … though I DO, sometimes, I mean that when I go to bed at night I have to at least open a book and read a few paragraphs in order to go to sleep.
As far back as I can remember, lying down in bed hasn’t been about going to sleep as quickly as I can, but about curling up with a good book. As a result, I have a stack of books next to my side of the bed, in, on, or under the nightstand, as well as on the floor.
Over the years the variety of books has broadened. I’m a science fiction fan, so for a long time that was all you could find in the stack. But lately, I’ve expanded the options. I’ve got Herman Wouk’s “War and Remembrance” next to the bed, as well as a couple of bestsellers.
I also have a book co-written by Tony Campolo and Brian McLaren, entitled Adventures in Missing the Point, How the Culture-Controlled Church Neutered the Gospel. In it, Campolo and McLaren address issues facing the Church today, under three main subheadings: God, World, and Soul. Under each, they address various sub-issues. Under God, they speak about salvation, theology, the Kingdom of God, the End Times, and the Bible. Under “World”, they touch on Evangelism, social action, culture, women in ministry, leadership, seminary, environmentalism, and homosexuality. Under “Soul, they speak on Sin, Worship, Doubt, Truth, and on Being Postmodern. Each has his own ‘take’ on the issue, and each responds to the other’s essays – a good example of good dialogue around a given subject.
I bought the book in September or October, I think, and I’ve only gotten a few chapters into it. Campolo and McLaren posit an argument that the Church has been co-opted, that we are too … influenced by our culture, rather than the other way around, to bring about the radical changes that the Gospel of Jesus Christ can make happen.
I’m not talking about making change happen by controlling the legislative process and effecting those changes through laws. I’m talking about individual, life-altering, face-to-face contact that ends up transforming both participants.
We’ve just finished reading the ninth chapter of the Gospel of John. Besides the length of the reading, is there any single event in the passage that stands out most for you?
Are you struck by the way everyone seems to keep trying to pass the buck when they are asked about Jesus, or more by the way the Pharisees keep asking all these questions all those questions, or by the way the neighbors supposedly couldn’t say for sure if the man who could now see was the same man they’d known all their lives?
In some ways, it can almost read like a keystone cops episode, if the subject weren’t so serious.
Here’s what we have: Jesus is walking along with his disciples and they run into a man who is blind. The disciples ask Jesus why the man is blind, is it because of HIS sins or the sins of his parents? It is telling that they already had what seemingly were the only two answers they would consider as plausible in their heads when they asked the question. It is indicative of the reactions we read of throughout the rest of the chapter from all parties. People were not used to thinking outside the accepted norms of society. And that society at the time was controlled by the Pharisees. Well, by the Romans, I suppose, ultimately, but in first-century Palestine, the day-to-day stuff was left up to the locals themselves. The Romans knew that they – the locals - were MUCH better at micromanaging than the Romans were, except where circumstances demanded direct intervention. That would come later.
Anyway, Jesus tells the disciples that it was neither his own nor his parent’s sins that caused the man to be born blind, but rather he was born blind so that God’s works may be revealed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me. In other words, there was a greater purpose … a deeper reason for which this happened. Watch!
What does he do? Jesus spits on the ground, makes mud, spreads it on the man’s eyes, and sends him off to the pool of Siloam to rinse off. And when the man does, he opens his eyes and he can see. The healing takes all of two verses out of the 41 into which the chapter is broken up. That part of the narrative ends at verse 8. For the next 33 verses the arguments go back and forth, about who Jesus was, if he was a sinner (because he’d healed on the Sabbath), if the man actually was who he said he was, talking to the neighbors and the PARENTS about who the man was, then arguing back and forth about who might or might not be a disciple of Christ, likening him to a disciple of Moses … the litany seems endless. There is so much talk filling the rest of the chapter that by the time we get to the end, we almost forget what started the whole argument in the first place: a man was healed by the power and the love of God through Jesus Christ.
The Pharisees missed the point. They were so caught up in the fact that the Sabbath had been violated, they couldn’t get past the fact that Jesus had, in their minds, sinned. It didn’t fit in their heads that God might actually do something outside the strict parameters they had set for themselves by codifying those 613 laws.
Richard Lischer, professor of Homiletics at Duke Divinity School, writes the following:
‘The question of origins pervades the Gospel of John. In our story we have the ancient version not of Who's on First? but of Where's He from? The authorities sink to the oldest of all debate tactics: assail the source of your opponent's argument. Poison the well. Where is this Jesus from? What rabbinical school did he attend? Where did he learn to break God's law? The formerly blind man replies, "He restored my sight. Where do you think he's from?"
Does this story mean that you must possess special knowledge to be a follower of Jesus? Must you see the way God sees?
No -- not knowledge, but acknowledgment.
The formerly blind man did not know all the correct religious phrases with which to interpret his salvation. He was not pious in the traditional sense or even respectful of his elders. What he knew for sure was that once upon a time he sat in darkness, and now the whole world was drenched in sunlight. And he acknowledged that.
"One thing I know," he said. And as he makes his witness to Jesus, we realize that the man blind from birth has a multitude of sons and daughters with their own stories to tell. "One thing I know," one of you might say (sounding like the Samaritan woman in John 4), “is that when I was going through my divorce I hurt so much I couldn't sleep or eat, and I was so filled with hate I couldn't think, but somehow I got through it, and I've come to recognize that the somehow was Jesus."
"One thing I know." How is that for ironic understatement? As if the only teensy little thing you happen to know is -- who saved your life! No, you start not with special knowledge but with acknowledgment. You may begin not with a public profession but with a prayer to the Light of the World.
The man's profession has a terrible consequence for him and for all of us. He is cast out of the synagogue. He is cut off from Torah, family, the sweet--smelling incense of the Sabbath, the certitude of the Law -- all because he looked deeply and directly into the Light.
If J. Louis Martyn and other scholars are right, this story reflects the historic parting of the ways between the synagogue and the Jews who believed in Jesus. We were once so close. Just how close we still are can be seen in those moments when we acknowledge our dependence on God, and place no limits on who and how God saves in Jesus Christ. If we read this story as an ironic comedy and nothing more, we miss the loneliness of its final scene in which Jesus and the man converse outside the synagogue. But if we catch its underlying pathos, we will see this story for the tragedy it really is, and wait upon God to write a new ending.’
So the question for us today, here at Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton is this: Are we limiting the way we are viewing God’s work in the world, are we blind to the radically unexpected nature of the Gospel, are we ONLY looking for God to work in a certain way, through certain people, in a certain timeframe, in a certain sequence, or are we ready to acknowledge that God can and does work in ways we never even knew existed?
Can we be open to those unexpected ways in our own hearts, in our own lives, seemingly insignificant coincidences that turn out to be God-things?
What happened this week in your life? Looking back, was there something that struck you as odd, something you maybe couldn’t quite put your finger on, that now, looking back on it, seems to have been one of those instances, one of those thin places where you could catch a glimpse of the Kingdom shining through? If it DID happen, share it with a friend, or a family member. It is in those events that we find our hope and our courage … and the ability to recognize and to continue to work the works that God has for us to do.
Let’s pray.
I don’t mean I read to the kids at bedtime … though I DO, sometimes, I mean that when I go to bed at night I have to at least open a book and read a few paragraphs in order to go to sleep.
As far back as I can remember, lying down in bed hasn’t been about going to sleep as quickly as I can, but about curling up with a good book. As a result, I have a stack of books next to my side of the bed, in, on, or under the nightstand, as well as on the floor.
Over the years the variety of books has broadened. I’m a science fiction fan, so for a long time that was all you could find in the stack. But lately, I’ve expanded the options. I’ve got Herman Wouk’s “War and Remembrance” next to the bed, as well as a couple of bestsellers.
I also have a book co-written by Tony Campolo and Brian McLaren, entitled Adventures in Missing the Point, How the Culture-Controlled Church Neutered the Gospel. In it, Campolo and McLaren address issues facing the Church today, under three main subheadings: God, World, and Soul. Under each, they address various sub-issues. Under God, they speak about salvation, theology, the Kingdom of God, the End Times, and the Bible. Under “World”, they touch on Evangelism, social action, culture, women in ministry, leadership, seminary, environmentalism, and homosexuality. Under “Soul, they speak on Sin, Worship, Doubt, Truth, and on Being Postmodern. Each has his own ‘take’ on the issue, and each responds to the other’s essays – a good example of good dialogue around a given subject.
I bought the book in September or October, I think, and I’ve only gotten a few chapters into it. Campolo and McLaren posit an argument that the Church has been co-opted, that we are too … influenced by our culture, rather than the other way around, to bring about the radical changes that the Gospel of Jesus Christ can make happen.
I’m not talking about making change happen by controlling the legislative process and effecting those changes through laws. I’m talking about individual, life-altering, face-to-face contact that ends up transforming both participants.
We’ve just finished reading the ninth chapter of the Gospel of John. Besides the length of the reading, is there any single event in the passage that stands out most for you?
Are you struck by the way everyone seems to keep trying to pass the buck when they are asked about Jesus, or more by the way the Pharisees keep asking all these questions all those questions, or by the way the neighbors supposedly couldn’t say for sure if the man who could now see was the same man they’d known all their lives?
In some ways, it can almost read like a keystone cops episode, if the subject weren’t so serious.
Here’s what we have: Jesus is walking along with his disciples and they run into a man who is blind. The disciples ask Jesus why the man is blind, is it because of HIS sins or the sins of his parents? It is telling that they already had what seemingly were the only two answers they would consider as plausible in their heads when they asked the question. It is indicative of the reactions we read of throughout the rest of the chapter from all parties. People were not used to thinking outside the accepted norms of society. And that society at the time was controlled by the Pharisees. Well, by the Romans, I suppose, ultimately, but in first-century Palestine, the day-to-day stuff was left up to the locals themselves. The Romans knew that they – the locals - were MUCH better at micromanaging than the Romans were, except where circumstances demanded direct intervention. That would come later.
Anyway, Jesus tells the disciples that it was neither his own nor his parent’s sins that caused the man to be born blind, but rather he was born blind so that God’s works may be revealed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me. In other words, there was a greater purpose … a deeper reason for which this happened. Watch!
What does he do? Jesus spits on the ground, makes mud, spreads it on the man’s eyes, and sends him off to the pool of Siloam to rinse off. And when the man does, he opens his eyes and he can see. The healing takes all of two verses out of the 41 into which the chapter is broken up. That part of the narrative ends at verse 8. For the next 33 verses the arguments go back and forth, about who Jesus was, if he was a sinner (because he’d healed on the Sabbath), if the man actually was who he said he was, talking to the neighbors and the PARENTS about who the man was, then arguing back and forth about who might or might not be a disciple of Christ, likening him to a disciple of Moses … the litany seems endless. There is so much talk filling the rest of the chapter that by the time we get to the end, we almost forget what started the whole argument in the first place: a man was healed by the power and the love of God through Jesus Christ.
The Pharisees missed the point. They were so caught up in the fact that the Sabbath had been violated, they couldn’t get past the fact that Jesus had, in their minds, sinned. It didn’t fit in their heads that God might actually do something outside the strict parameters they had set for themselves by codifying those 613 laws.
Richard Lischer, professor of Homiletics at Duke Divinity School, writes the following:
‘The question of origins pervades the Gospel of John. In our story we have the ancient version not of Who's on First? but of Where's He from? The authorities sink to the oldest of all debate tactics: assail the source of your opponent's argument. Poison the well. Where is this Jesus from? What rabbinical school did he attend? Where did he learn to break God's law? The formerly blind man replies, "He restored my sight. Where do you think he's from?"
Does this story mean that you must possess special knowledge to be a follower of Jesus? Must you see the way God sees?
No -- not knowledge, but acknowledgment.
The formerly blind man did not know all the correct religious phrases with which to interpret his salvation. He was not pious in the traditional sense or even respectful of his elders. What he knew for sure was that once upon a time he sat in darkness, and now the whole world was drenched in sunlight. And he acknowledged that.
"One thing I know," he said. And as he makes his witness to Jesus, we realize that the man blind from birth has a multitude of sons and daughters with their own stories to tell. "One thing I know," one of you might say (sounding like the Samaritan woman in John 4), “is that when I was going through my divorce I hurt so much I couldn't sleep or eat, and I was so filled with hate I couldn't think, but somehow I got through it, and I've come to recognize that the somehow was Jesus."
"One thing I know." How is that for ironic understatement? As if the only teensy little thing you happen to know is -- who saved your life! No, you start not with special knowledge but with acknowledgment. You may begin not with a public profession but with a prayer to the Light of the World.
The man's profession has a terrible consequence for him and for all of us. He is cast out of the synagogue. He is cut off from Torah, family, the sweet--smelling incense of the Sabbath, the certitude of the Law -- all because he looked deeply and directly into the Light.
If J. Louis Martyn and other scholars are right, this story reflects the historic parting of the ways between the synagogue and the Jews who believed in Jesus. We were once so close. Just how close we still are can be seen in those moments when we acknowledge our dependence on God, and place no limits on who and how God saves in Jesus Christ. If we read this story as an ironic comedy and nothing more, we miss the loneliness of its final scene in which Jesus and the man converse outside the synagogue. But if we catch its underlying pathos, we will see this story for the tragedy it really is, and wait upon God to write a new ending.’
So the question for us today, here at Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton is this: Are we limiting the way we are viewing God’s work in the world, are we blind to the radically unexpected nature of the Gospel, are we ONLY looking for God to work in a certain way, through certain people, in a certain timeframe, in a certain sequence, or are we ready to acknowledge that God can and does work in ways we never even knew existed?
Can we be open to those unexpected ways in our own hearts, in our own lives, seemingly insignificant coincidences that turn out to be God-things?
What happened this week in your life? Looking back, was there something that struck you as odd, something you maybe couldn’t quite put your finger on, that now, looking back on it, seems to have been one of those instances, one of those thin places where you could catch a glimpse of the Kingdom shining through? If it DID happen, share it with a friend, or a family member. It is in those events that we find our hope and our courage … and the ability to recognize and to continue to work the works that God has for us to do.
Let’s pray.
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