John 9:1-7, 13-17, 34-39 (Lent 4A)

St. John, Galveston 3/19/2023

Rev. Alan Taylor

 

+ In Nomine Jesu +


 

Grace and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

 

This morning’s message is based on the Gospel reading from John 9. It is Jesus healing of a man who was born blind. The man’s blindness brought up the whole issue sin and suffering and the connection that some believed existed between the two. Even in the minds of the disciples, someone must have sinned, either the blind man, or his parents that he was born blind.

 

It’s customary in the LCMS for Pastors in a given area to gather together once a month for what we call a circuit meeting. It provides an opportunity for the pastors to study the Scriptures or the Lutheran Confessions together. It also provides an opportunity for fellowship.

 

Our last circuit meeting was about a week and a half ago, at St. Marks in Lake Jackson. Rev. Joe Pelto was there. He retired fairly recently from a congregation in Laredo, Texas. About four days after that circuit meeting, I got an email from one of the other pastors in our circuit to let me know that Joe had passed away the day after our meeting. The message kind of took me aback because, while Joe had recently retired, he didn’t appear to be in ill health. Pastor Pelto’s funeral will be tomorrow at Peace Lutheran in Texas City where he was a member.    

 

Life is often difficult to figure out. Not so much that we live and die. The Scriptures, after all, tell us why that is. “The wages of sin is death.” What’s difficult to figure out, or even to accept, is the timing of things and how abruptly things can change, for good or for ill. The Scriptures repeatedly remind us how tenuous life is. “All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls.” As we grapple with life’s ups and downs, we are, therefore, called to direct our attention to God’s word, for it, unlike our flesh, “stands forever.”


 

As far as anyone knows, Pastor Pelto didn’t suffer in death. In fact, he passed away in his sleep. Suffering though, like death, has been a source of a great deal of confusion for people of every generation. Confusion in the sense that it’s a bit of mystery why one person suffers and another doesn’t. I suppose it becomes somewhat more confusing when the person who suffers is a Christian.

 

In Jesus’ day, and long before, for that matter, there was a common view of suffering that linked it to specific sins. You see that particular viewpoint in the Gospel reading for this morning. A man who was born blind was brought to Jesus. “(Jesus’) disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Clearly the disciples weren’t making a connection between sin in general and suffering. No, they were looking for a specific sin that caused the man to be born blind.


 

It was a convenient way to explain why people suffer in life. I mean, if someone was suffering, either they, or someone else, messed up. Frankly, this is what moved Job’s counselors to insist that he had to figure out what he had done to bring so much suffering into his life. And, until he figured it out, and repented of it, things were not going to change for the better.

 

Even today, though we might not hold such an openly crass view of a connection between sin and suffering, we still tend to link the two together. In the dark nights of our soul, when we’ve suffered at length, we are inclined to wonder what we did to deserve such suffering.


 

Jesus though addressed the disciples mistaken understanding regarding sin and suffering when He said, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.” He then went on to say, “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.”


 

At first glance, what Jesus said seems a bit odd, in that He seems to suggest that the man was born blind so that this miracle could be worked on him, as if he were used by God as some sort of a pawn in God’s plan. “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents (Jesus said), but that the works of God might be displayed in him.”

 

A closer reading of this section of John’s Gospel though has Jesus comparing physical blindness with spiritual blindness. At the end of the reading He says, “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.” What He said was a terrible indictment against the Pharisees who wanted to put the blind make to death because he was evidence of the mighty work of God performed by Jesus.

 

The point is, of greater importance than physical sight is spiritual sight. You may recall that elsewhere Jesus said, “whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?”


 

The work of God is to bring us to faith in His Son, Jesus Christ. None of us really knows what it takes in our lives to bring us to that faith. Oh, don’t get me wrong, God’s word does it. After all, the Scriptures say, “faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of Christ.” Still, God uses all of the various events in our lives, both good and bad, to lead us to faith in Him and to hold us there. More than anything, that is what’s behind the promise in Scripture where it says that “God causes all things to work together for good to those who love Him and have been called according to His purpose.”

 

The things in life that we find so difficult to understand are not a mystery to God. In Christ, everything in life is moving us toward that happy reunion in the glory of heaven, when there will be no more “mourning, or crying, or pain, when the first order of things will have passed away, when that which we see now only dimly, we will see face to face.”

 

I didn’t know Pastor Pelto well, but I did know him. As it is when someone we know dies, we tend to reflect on the sadness of the situation. I mean, Joe was here one day and gone the next. But it’s on days like that that all of the promises of God come to their fulfillment in Christ Jesus. The Bible says, in Christ, it is no longer death to die. It also says that, in Christ, “death has been swallowed up in victory.”


 

As his days drew ever closer to an end, St. Paul reflected on his life and what awaited him in the life to come because of the grace of God in Christ Jesus. To Timothy, his son in the faith, he wrote, “I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing.”


 

And so, the mystery that is life, finds all of it’s answers and all of it’s Amens, in Christ Jesus, who gave Himself for the blind that we all might see Him who is the light of the world.


 

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

 

The peace of God that passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus unto life everlasting. Amen.

 

+ Soli Deo Gloria +