Knowing Jesus

John 9:1-41
In last Sunday’s gospel lesson, a Samaritan came to have life with God when, to her surprise, Jesus told her every sin she’d ever done while still reaching out to her with love and respect. In today’s lesson, a blind man comes to see that Jesus was “the Son of Man,” a phrase from the Old Testament book of Daniel for God Himself on the earth that He created.

Jesus promises that all who see Him for Who He is in this way and trust Him as their God and Savior will have life with God for eternity.

But as our gospel lesson shows us today, seeing Who Jesus is and trusting faith in Him are two different things. The gap between knowing about Jesus and knowing Jesus can only be measured in eternity.

It isn’t easy to believe. In his book, The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran theologian, says: “Salvation is free, but discipleship will cost you your life.”

The blind man in today’s lesson learned this truth the hard way, deserted and rejected by his family, his neighbors, and religious leaders. But at the end of the lesson, you realize that he became a true disciple, willing to give up on everything the world in which he lived held dear for the privilege of being Jesus’ disciple today and in eternity.

Let’s take a look at John 9:1-41.

In verses 1-7, at the beginning, Jesus and His disciples encounter a blind man. The disciples want to know whose sin was at fault for his blindness.

We human beings love to believe in neat explanations for the messiness that exists in our world. It helps us feel that we’ve got a handle on things we can’t explain. But this world is messy because the condition of sin has imprisoned the entire universe.

This means that bad things, hard things, and sad things happen even to faithful people.

So, Jesus says that it was neither the man’s parents or the man himself who caused the his blindness. But there was a purpose for Jesus encountering the man that day, Jesus says: “...this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him” (John 9:3).

Jesus then creates a bit of mud, smears it on the man’s eyes, and tells the man to wash himself in a nearby pool. He does so and, as John puts it understatedly, “[he]...came home seeing” (John 9:7).

When the once-blind man’s neighbors find out, they want to learn how it happened. They smell a conspiracy. “This isn’t really the blind man who used to beg,” some of them say. “Yeah,” others say, “he’s an impostor who just looks like the guy.”

The neighbors don’t like that this guy is healed. It upsets the status quo. It makes them envious that a miracle has happened to him. It introduces mystery into a world they thought they’d figured out. They don’t like it that something so good happened to a man who they, like the disciples, thought deserved his blindness. Most conspiracy theories start in this way, folks. But, in verse 9, the formerly blind man tells them: “I am the man.”

The neighbors still aren’t sold on the truth. Or, at least, they don’t want to see the truth that stands before them. So, in verses 10-12, they start to grill the healed man. “How did this happen?” they ask skeptically. The man replies: “The man they call Jesus made some mud and put it on my eyes. He told me to go to Siloam and wash. So I went and washed, and then I could see” (John 9:11).

I love his simple testimony: He met Jesus. Jesus told him what to do. He did it. Now, he could see.

Such simplicity in this circumstance is noteworthy. This man isn’t stupid. He can tell, as surely as you and I can tell when we read John’s account of this “conversation,” that the neighbors are getting hostile. Who is this uppity man to claim that a miracle was done for him?

Instead of talking about some miracle wrought by the preacher they’d been hearing about, it would have been more acceptable to them for him to say, “I was never really blind. I only pretended to be blind so that I could spend my days begging.”

Or, he could have left Jesus out of it altogether: “I washed in the pool of Siloam and it cured me.”

But, instead, he attributes the miracle to Jesus.

The crowd doesn’t like this. Some of you know that an atheist once told me after I’d shared some of my story of coming to faith in Christ after years of atheism that I never could have been an atheist. “If you were an atheist,” he told me, “you still would be.” But God can break through the sin, pride, and pain of this fallen world and bring good.

That’s what Jesus did for the blind man.

It’s what He did when He died on the cross and rose from the dead, offering new, eternal life to all who trust in Him.

It’s what He did when He gave me faith in Him to replace my atheism.

In verses 13-16, the neighbors take the man to the Pharisees, the experts in God’s Law. When the situation is laid before them, they’re scandalized to learn that Jesus performed this miracle on the sabbath.

This proved, some of them say, that Jesus couldn’t be from God. Others disagree. The Pharisees are in gridlock.

They turn to the blind man and ask who he thinks Jesus is. The Pharisees don’t want the man’s real opinion. They’re pressuring him to turn on Jesus, to renounce the whole thing, to say that his blindness AND Jesus are frauds.

Once more, the man doesn’t buckle under pressure. Jesus, he says in verse 17, “is a prophet.” A prophet, of course, is a person called by God to speak God’s Word to the world. Now, you and I know that Jesus actually is the Word of God. Jesus is way more than just a prophet; but He is that too. The man says of Jesus what he so far knows of Him. He tells the simple truth. His honesty is moving.

After their pressure fails to cause the man to renounce Jesus, they enlist his parents’ help. “Yes,” they say in verses 18-19, showing the spines of jellyfish, “that’s our son. But we don’t know anything about his story. He’s old enough to fend for himself. Bye!”

In Matthew 10:36, Jesus warns those who would follow Him that “a man's enemies will be the members of his own household.” When we follow Jesus, we can’t expect that all of our family and friends will be happy about it. Being a Christian who seeks to humbly follow Jesus is not making a popular choice.

The formerly blind man is so innocent about the ways of power and going-along-to-get-along, that when the Pharisees ask him to tell them again how he’d come to be sighted, he doesn’t take the hint. He was supposed to admit that he was part of a hoax. Instead, he asks: “Do you want to become his disciples too?” (John 9:27).

At this, the Pharisees tell the man that he must be Jesus’ disciple and that there’s no way of knowing whether Jesus is from God or not.

Now the once blind man says what was becoming obvious to him: “If this man [Jesus] were not from God, he could do nothing” [John 9:33].

At this, the once-blind man, alone among his neighbors and people, abandoned by his parents, condemned by the religious leaders of his country, was thrown out...excommunicated (John 9:34). The good religious leaders rejected him as one unworthy of God.

In the very next verse, we read about this exchange between Jesus and the formerly blind man: “Jesus heard that they had thrown him out, and when he found him, he said, ‘Do you believe in the Son of Man?’ ‘Who is he, sir?’ the man asked. ‘Tell me so that I may believe in him.’ Jesus said, ‘You have now seen him; in fact, he is the one speaking with you.’ Then the man said, ‘Lord, I believe,’ and he worshiped him.’”

The blind man saw Who Jesus was--God in the flesh--and so believed in Him and worshiped Him. This is the second miracle in our lesson.

The first was the miracle of restored sight.

The second was the gift of everlasting life when the man who had received his sight believed in Jesus.

This is the miracle that belongs to all who believe in Jesus. May we never lose our sense of awe and wonder at this miracle. The God Who made everything, Whose holiness we have repeatedly violated, became one of us, led a life free of sin despite temptation, and gave Himself on a cross we earned. Now He offers us life with God for eternity when we turn for sin and, like the once-blind man, believe in Him.

Jesus wasn’t done teaching others the way to life through this blind man, though.

In verse 39, Jesus says, “For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.”

The Pharisees were offended. “Are we blind too?” they ask Jesus (John 9:40).

Jesus’ response: “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains” (John 9:41).

In other words, the Pharisees could see that Jesus was the Son of Man, the Messiah, the Christ, the King of kings, the Lord, God.

But if they admitted to knowing all of that, they would be compelled by faith to let go of the stranglehold they had on power, position, and the lives and consciences of the people they bullied.

The Pharisees who rejected Jesus knew about God, but they refused to know God when He stood in front of them.

They recognized that Jesus is God’s Son. But they were comfortable in living apart from the living God. (And do you know what you call living apart from God? Death.)

The Pharisees chose blindness and so, Jesus says, they were condemned.

But the blind man focused on Jesus.

In ancient days, the rabbis said that Adam and Eve were created blind. They said that the two were totally dependent on God to lead them and that He only led them to places of freedom and peace, places where they were set free to be all that God had made them to be.

But, when they caved into the temptations of the serpent, eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, “...the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked...” (Genesis 3:7).

Now, the rabbis said, having fallen into sin, the two were cursed with sightedness. They experienced more than just the good in which God had led them; they now could also see the evil ways they could use their lives.

Sin ensnared them.

Sin fooled them (and has fooled every generation of human beings since) into thinking that it’s possible to live apart from God.

The vision of the entire human race has been clouded by a universe full of idols vying for our trust and our worship, leading us to selfishness, self-promotion, self-loathing, darkness, and death. Now, of course, the rabbis' teaching about this is a bit fanciful. But it does make an important point: When we take our eyes off of the God we know in Jesus Christ, making Him our True North, we lose sight of the only One Who can give us life. We go off course.

When the once blind man came to believe in Jesus, he was set free from his sin and from death. He didn’t just know about God; through Jesus, He came to know God Himself. He saw Jesus as His God and King.

That’s what Jesus makes possible for us see and experience too. May we follow Jesus and never lose sight of Him as “the [only] way, and the [only] truth, and the [only] life” (John 14:6). Amen

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This is the message prepared for worship this morning.]

A Question of Authority

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, yesterday.]

Acts 4:5-12
True story about a family in one of the parishes I served as pastor: They were very devout. They showed up for worship every Sunday and saw to it that their children were not only in worship, but also in Sunday School, Catechism, and youth group. They had a daughter who, unlike so many, didn't treat Confirmation as though it were graduation from the church. She stayed involved, evidencing a real faith in Christ.

This young woman went off to college, where she did well. While there, her commitment to Christ only deepened. She got involved with a campus Bible study. She got active with a local congregation in the college town, even going on a few mission trips. In telephone calls to her folks, she gave every evidence of being on fire for Christ.

I was talking with her mom one day and I asked how things were going. "OK," she said, "but I'm really concerned about Mary." "What's wrong?" I asked. "She's really gotten into Church, really into the Bible, really into telling others about Jesus," she told me. I wondered what the problem was. Her mom explained: “We raised her to be a churchgoer, not a fanatic.”

You know, there are people in the Church who have just enough of Jesus to be inoculated against Him. They warm a pew. They go through the motions of being "church members." And most importantly (to them), they are rostered members of their congregations who put money in the plate. What more could any normal--non-fanatical--person expect of them?

I've actually had church members say to me, "You know, Pastor, that was a beautiful sermon. It's great that we're called to love God and trust in Jesus above all else. But it doesn't work in the real world." I ask them, "Have you tried?"

But the fact is, there are lots of people in the Church who don't want to try. They want to keep God at arm's length. That's why they can be so hostile to people like Mary, who take their faith seriously and who strive to keep Jesus as the center of their lives. Do we, in today's world, need the kind of fanaticism Mary evidenced? Desperately!

But you know what? The unwillingness to stand under the authority of Christ and of His Word that Mary's mother articulated can also be seen among so-called "leaders" of the Church, respected pastors and theologians.

About ten years ago, I attended a meeting with other clergy. We had a guest speaker, a New Testament scholar who participated in something called the Jesus Seminar. Basically, the Jesus Seminar is a group of New Testament scholars from established denominations and prestigious universities and seminaries. They get together, hear papers presented, have discussions, and then vote on which parts of the New Testament are true and which parts aren't true.

The Jesus Seminar scholar who spoke to us said, "I don't remember the exact tally, but we voted against the resurrection of Jesus. We're confident that it didn't happen."

One of the pastors screwed up his courage, raised his hand, and said, "I understand that the Biblical writers don't agree on every particular detail of things. And each of them--the gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and the others like Peter, Paul, James, and the preacher in the book of Hebrews--have their own particular theological slants and emphases. But among the things that none of them disputed and on which they staked their lives is that Jesus died on a cross and was raised on the third day by God the Father. How can you take a vote and say that's not true?"

"Well," the theologian said, "have you ever met a person risen from the dead? It's not within the realm of the experiences of anyone else you might meet either. And if it can't happen today, it couldn't have happened then."

What he was doing was holding his experiences and his intellect as higher authorities than the Scriptures, the revealed Word of God. And whenever we do that, we're in trouble.

Now, people like these New Testament scholars or Mary's parents are what we might call nihilists. It's a term that comes from the Latin word, nihilo, meaning nothing. Nihilists, as I'm using the term here, are people who basically believe in nothing. If you can't see it, touch it, hold it, own it, buy it, sell it, or gain weight from it, it isn't true. To the nihilist, there's no heaven, no hell, no omnipotent, immortal God. Nothing.

There are a lot of their tribe these days, both inside and outside the Church. But the phenomenon is nothing new.

Turn to Acts 3, if you would. There, we're told that one day a few years after Jesus rose from the dead and ascended to heaven, the apostles Peter and John were entering the temple in Jerusalem. Like all the first Christians, these two were devout Jews and they maintained their religious practices even then, seeing Jesus as the fulfillment of God's promises to His people. As Peter and John were going into the temple, they met a man who had been lame--paralyzed--from birth. He was sitting there, hoping that people would give him some money. Peter looked at the man and the man thought that Peter was going to hand him a coin or two. Instead, look at what Peter says in Acts 3:6:  

“Silver and gold I do not have, but what I do have I give you: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk.”

This took place in a section of the temple known as Solomon's Portico or Solomon's Porch. It was teeming with people. You can bet that when this crowd saw this paralyzed man walking, leaping, and praising God, it got their attention!

So, this crowd came rushing toward Peter and John. They're about to hail the two apostles as miracle workers. But look at what Peter says to them in Acts 3:12 and beyond:

“[People] of Israel, why do you marvel at this? Or why look so intently at us, as though by our own power or godliness we had made this man walk? The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of our fathers, glorified His Servant Jesus, whom you delivered up and denied in the presence of Pilate, when he was determined to let Him go. But you denied the Holy One and the Just, and asked for a murderer to be granted to you, and killed the Prince of life, whom God raised from the dead, of which we are witnesses. And His name, through faith in His name, has made this man strong, whom you see and know. Yes, the faith which comes through Him has given him this perfect soundness in the presence of you all." 

The typical term for miracle in the Greek in which the New Testament was written is semeia. It means sign. It's like the exit sign over there. The sign doesn't point to itself. It points to the place where we can exit from this room. The miracles of Jesus were never ends in themselves. They had a point. So does this miracle Jesus performed through Peter on Solomon's Porch. All of these miracles represent signs of the fact that Jesus has power over sin and death.

The reason for that is simple. The bigger question in all of our lives--just as was true with this lame man--isn't whether we're healthy or not. The bigger question is whether--healthy or ill, weak or strong--you and I are reconciled with God. The miracles recorded in the New Testament are meant simply to point us to the only one who can overcome sin and death and decay and reconcile us to the God Who, alone, can give us new life: the risen Jesus! 

And that's why Peter is so quick to say, "It isn't me who did this, but Jesus, the Lord of all...Jesus, the One you wanted out of your life and put on a cross Who is now risen and alive right now!" He then told them that they could be right with God and have life beyond the grave if they would turn from sin and give their lives to Christ.

After Peter made his proclamation about Jesus, the same leaders who, just a short while before, had petitioned Pilate to put Jesus on a cross, had Peter and John arrested. That's where the lesson for this morning, Acts 4:5-12, begins. Take a look at the opening verses:

And it came to pass, on the next day, that their rulers, elders, and scribes, as well as Annas the high priest, Caiaphas, John, and Alexander, and as many as were of the family of the high priest, were gathered together at Jerusalem.  

Now, it's well-documented that among this crew, especially the priests, were people who were first-century nihilists. They called themselves Sadducees. The Saducees believed that the whole notion of a resurrection of the dead was crazy. They found it inconceivable that God could or would veto the power of death.


In fact, this group of important priests, elders, and scribes had fallen prey to something that one of my professors in seminary, Pastor Bruce Schein, used to warn us against. Pastor Schein told us, "Be careful of handling the holy. Be careful in handling the Word of God. Be careful in handling the Sacraments. You might begin to think that they're nothing. You might begin to thing that they're not important and that you are the only thing that makes them worth anything."


For the priests and others who were part of the Saducees party, religious life was simply a set of motions you went through. Liturgy was something pretty that they did. Participating in worship didn't mean that you really believed in a God Who has control over life and death. They were in control and they didn't need any sign from God pointing people away from them.


So, they call Peter and John out of their jail cell to make an appearance before them. And then we read in verse 7 of our lesson what these religious leaders wanted to hear from Peter and John:

“By what power or by what name have you done this?”

You have a daughter who goes off to college and gets involved with her faith and, exercising your parental authority, you demand of her, "Whatever possessed you to think that Jesus really mattered? Didn't you know that we just took you to church so you could learn good morals and be a nice person?" 

You meet a New Testament scholar who tells you that Jesus' resurrection never happened and the scholar asks you, "By what authority do you--a common layperson or a common pastor, who has never done graduate work or spent years studying the New Testament--have the temerity to tell us that this book is actually true, that Jesus really did die and rise."

The question of authority is what the religious leaders asked of Peter and John: "Who exactly do you think you are? Who told you that you could do and say these things?"

Look at how Peter answers the question in verse 9:

If we this day are judged for a good deed done to a helpless man, by what means he has been made well, let it be known to you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead, by Him this man stands here before you whole.  

You know what? Peter wouldn't have been in trouble if he'd said something like, "Well, I picked up a little magic somewhere along the way and that's how I was able to make the man walk again." Or if he'd said, "I recognized that his paralysis was psychosomatic and that if I simply told the man to walk, he'd be able to do it." If Peter had taken the credit for himself, this healing wouldn't have been controversial. The leaders wouldn't have even arrested John and Peter in the first place!

But the trouble was that Peter ascribed the miracle to Jesus. And the minute you give any credit to Jesus, you get yourself in trouble in this world. 

Jesus once said that for those who follow Him, enemies will not be the outside world, but those of one's own household...one's own family...one's own church. They're the ones who ask, "Who said that you could get so high and mighty with this Jesus stuff?"

The Saducees and others wanted to knock Peter and John down a peg or two. Peter said, in effect, "That's OK. I'm not the One Who did this. It was done by the One Who was killed by our sins, the One God raised from the dead."

Now I ask myself, "Where is it that Peter got the stuff to do this?" Remember Peter on Maundy Thursday, when Jesus was bring tried and faced death on the cross? He denied even knowing Jesus three times. Where does this guy get his guts? Acts 4:8 answers that mystery:

Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit... 

We can have the power to live by the faith in Christ we profess, not because we talk ourselves into it or because of some inspiration we pick up along the way, but because Jesus sends His Holy Spirit to those who are desperate enough to acknowledge their need of the Spirit, desperate enough to ask for the presence of the Spirit in their lives. 

I know all about that desperation. When I told my mother that I was going to seminary, she told me that she was apprehensive. "Mark," she said, "you've never dealt well with sickness or death. Are you sure you can be a pastor?" I said, "No." But here's how I've done it for twenty-seven years: In the car, on the way to the hospital, or the death bed, or the funeral home, I pray, "God, I can't. You can. Give me the right words. Give me the right silences. Send Your Spirit."

You know, that God has always answered that prayer? God has never failed once.


That's how Peter was able to share his faith in Christ. 


And that's how you and I, in the face of a world that is increasingly indifferent or hostile toward the good news of new life for all who repent and believe in Jesus, can stand firm. We can stand firm, not out of egotism or an attitude of being holier or better than others, but simply because we love God and we love others and those "others" need Jesus as much as we do.


Look at what Peter says at the very end of our lesson, Acts 4:12:

"Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”

Now, if we believe that--if we believe Jesus when He says that He is the way and the truth and the life and that no one can be reconciled with God the Father except through Him, we can't have it on our consciences that we have not shared Jesus with others. We can't settle for a hypocritical half-faith. And though we are unable to do it on our own, as weak, at least, as Peter, God can help us share Christ with others when we depend on His Spirit. 

Amen