I can see!
John 9:1-41
A special welcome to you if you’re here today and this is your first time at City Church. Especially if you’re here to witness one of the baptisms as a friend or family member. We’re so glad you’re here.
But maybe you’re a little bemused about what’s going to happen. I mean your friend is going to get into this pool, get dunked underwater in front of a hundred people.
It’s unusual. I get that.
But maybe you think that’s consistent with what they’re like or what they’ve become. They’ve got religion.
And perhaps, if you’re being honest, you find that a little odd.
They’re intelligent. They’re not gullible. So why would they believe that God has come into this world — and that God has actually changed their life?
Richard Dawkins, a prominent critic of Christianity, once described faith as
“Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.” Richard Dawkins
“[Faith is] the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”
Perhaps that’s what you think too.
And if it is, can I say: that’s a really good question to bring with you today.
Because John doesn’t say, “Stop thinking. Just have faith.”
Quite the opposite.
He says: Look at what happened. Listen to the witnesses. Think about the evidence. And then decide what you make of Jesus.
So look with me at verse 1.
Jesus is walking along, and he sees “a man blind from birth.”
Not someone who has recently lost their sight.
This man has never seen.
That means he’d never seen his parents.
Never seen his brothers or sisters.
Never seen the face of a friend.
Never seen a sunset.
Never even seen the light of day.
And in the ancient world, his blindness would have shaped his whole life.
He would have been denied an education.
He would have struggled to find work.
That’s why verse 8 tells us he was reduced to: begging for money.
His blindness wasn’t just a medical condition.
It had become his whole social reality.
And yet, look at verse 1 again.
Jesus sees him.
The man who cannot see is seen by Jesus.
Isn’t that beautiful?
And then the disciples speak up.
Verse 2:
“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
It’s not exactly the bedside manner of Florence Nightingale, is it?
But it does expose one of the biggest blockers that stop people from looking into Christianity.
You might be here today thinking:
“If there really is a good God, why is there so much suffering?”
“Why do innocent people get hurt?”
“Why would a loving God allow someone to be born blind?”
Those aren’t stupid questions. They’re some of the deepest questions any of us can ask.
And what’s striking about this story is that Jesus doesn’t brush the question aside.
He engages with it.
Because before we can understand what Jesus came to do, we need to understand how Jesus sees people who suffer.
- Suffering – vv. 1-7
Which brings us to our first point today from verses 1-7.
Suffering.
When we see suffering, we instinctively want to know: “Why?”
“Whose fault is it?”
Who’s to blame?
Maybe it’s their own fault. Things they’ve done of failed to do.
Or their parents’.
Maybe it’s the doctor’s fault.
Or the government’s.
And if we can’t find anyone else to blame, sometimes – well sometimes we blame God.
Why do we do that? Well, we want an explanation. We want to understand it.
Because perhaps, if we can understand why it happened, we can work out how to stop it happening to us.
But notice that Jesus refuses to play along with the disciples’ line of questioning:
“Faced with the binary choice: the man’s fault or his parents?”
Jesus says, “Neither”.
Now, friends, this is so important.
Because the problem of suffering is not just a problem for Christianity.
It’s a problem for every single worldview.
Religious worldviews have to explain suffering.
But so does atheism.
Because if you believe that we are ultimately just a collection of atoms, the product of random processes, competing for survival in a universe without any ultimate purpose or meaning, then suffering isn’t objectively wrong.
It just is.
But none of us actually live that way do we?
Try telling that to my pastor friend whose wife has been diagnosed with inoperable cancer and has been told she has months to live.
“Don’t worry. It’s just atoms. It’s just survival of the fittest.”
That answer isn’t going to satisfy anyone.
There are no easy answers to the problem of suffering.
And Jesus doesn’t give us a neat little formula here.
But he does tell us something very important.
He tells us that we cannot look at person’s suffering and simply assume that it is punishment for their particular sin.
But the Bible doesn’t leave the question there.
It actually gives us a bigger story for understanding why suffering is in our world.
And that takes us right back to the opening chapters of the Bible.
In Genesis 1, we’re told that God created the world and it was good. It was the world as it was meant to be.
But then Genesis 3 happens.
The first man and woman reject the maker’s instructions. They decide they want to rule themselves.
And like a brick pulled out of a wall causing the whole thing to come crashing down, so Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God; their decision to rule themselves; it caused the whole of creation to come crashing down.
And that is why our world is filled with cancer and car crashes and drownings and mental illness and wars and death.
Did this man sin or did his parents?
Neither, Jesus says, but we all did.
And you see, that’s why Jesus came into the world.
Jesus didn’t come simply to explain suffering.
He came to rescue us from it.
Look at the end of verse 3:
“This happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.”
That’s shorthand in John’s Gospel for the great work of rescue that God sent Jesus to do.
And then, almost immediately, Jesus gives us a glimpse of what that rescue looks like.
He spits on the ground.
Makes a mud pack.
Puts it on the man’s eyes.
And tells him to go and wash.
And verse 7:
“So the man went and washed, and came home seeing.”
Now don’t rush past that.
He came home seeing.
He’d lived his whole life in darkness.
And suddenly, for the first time, light floods in.
But John wants us to see that this miracle is about much more than one man receiving his physical sight.
Because look at verse 5.
Back in chapter 8, Jesus had already declared:
“I am the light of the world.”
And now he repeats it here.
Jesus is the one who brings light into darkness.
He reveals what is true about us and the world.
He brings life.
He shows us the way.
And so, as this blind man receives his physical sight, John is inviting us to ask a much bigger question:
What will he do with Jesus?
Because that’s the question facing all of us.
What will we do with Jesus – the light of the world?
Picture of car on country lane with bright lights
Many years ago, Anna and I were driving home from a wedding down a dark country lane when a police car suddenly did a U-turn, came after us with its blue lights flashing, and pulled us over.
I wound down the window and was told:
“Your lights, sir. Full beam!”
My lights were lighting up the dark country lane. But they were also blinding drivers travelling in the opposite direction.
That's what light does. It illuminates and helps some people to see. But it can also blind.
Which brings us to the two responses that we see to Jesus in this passage.
- Suppression – vv 8-34
Firstly, spiritual blindness leading to suppression.
And we see that in verses 8–34.
Now, let me stop there for a moment.
Because I realise I’ve just introduced a concept that some of you might be thinking,
“Spiritual blindness? What on earth does that mean?”
Let me try to explain.
And I’ll begin with a confession.
On Monday morning, I spent three hours on a speed awareness course.
Yes.
I got caught doing 37 at the top of Princess Road, which now has a 30-mile-an-hour limit.
30mph limit sign
I know.
It’s embarrassing.
But here’s what’s interesting.
Before that course, I could see the 30-mile-an-hour signs on the Princess Road.
I’d seen them hundreds of times.
I knew exactly what they meant.
30 means 30.
The problem was that seeing the sign didn’t necessarily change the way I drove.
But something happened on Monday.
Because after that course, how do you think I drove down the Princess Road?
Very slowly.
Why?
Well, partly because I don’t fancy getting points on my licence.
But it was more than that.
They showed us what happens when you’re just one mile an hour over the limit.
They showed us the consequences of car crashes.
The people who are injured.
The families who are devastated.
The lives that can be changed in a split second.
And suddenly, the thing I had been able to see became something I could really see.
Do you see the difference?
And that gets us towards what the Bible means by spiritual sight.
Because human beings have more than our five physical senses.
We have the capacity to perceive reality in other ways.
We have wisdom.
Empathy.
A moral sense.
And spiritual sight is something like that.
It’s not merely the ability to see something.
It’s the ability to recognise what it means — and respond to it.
And the Bible says that, by nature, all of us are spiritually blind.
And look at how that blindness plays out in this story.
Verse 9. The man’s neighbours are immediately thrown into confusion by the miracle.
Faced with an event they think is impossible – a congenitally blind man being able to see – they dismiss it: “No, he only looks like him”.
Think about how strange that is.
They know him.
They’ve seen his face.
They’ve seen him sitting there.
They’ve probably walked past him countless times.
And now, when the evidence is staring them in the face, they can’t quite bring themselves to accept it.
And the man himself keeps saying:
“I am the man.”
But they don’t want to accept it.
So what do they do?
They take him to the experts – verse 13 – the Pharisees.
But look at how they respond. Verse 16:
“This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath”.
They are spiritually blind.
Notice that spiritual blindness isn't the inability to understand an argument. These people are intelligent. They're religious experts. They know their Bibles really well.
Spiritual blindness is deeper than that. It's what happens when we have reasons for refusing to let Jesus challenge the way we've decided the world works.
You see, the Pharisees were committed to a framework, a way of seeing the world, a worldview, which could not accommodate what Jesus had done.
You see God had given His people the Sabbath.
A gift.
A day of rest each week.
But the Pharisees had created a long list of things that could NOT be done on the Sabbath.
And one of those was healing – except in the case of an emergency - which this was not.
So the Pharisees have a problem.
The man can see.
But Jesus apparently shouldn't have been able to make that happen.
And so rather than changing their understanding of Jesus, they change their understanding of what has happened.
“This man must be a sinner.”
Spiritual blindness.
Now, you might be thinking, “Surely that’s just a religious problem.”
But it isn’t.
Because we all have frameworks.
We all have assumptions about how the world works.
And our instinct is to protect the framework.
Perhaps there are some of you here today who would say,
“I'm not religious. I’m an atheist.”
And perhaps you came to that conclusion when you were 10 or 11.
Maybe you looked at the world, thought about God, and decided:
“There isn’t one.”
And perhaps you've been living inside that conclusion ever since.
Now, you may be right.
But let me ask you something.
Are you still willing to investigate?
Are you still willing to be challenged?
Because I look back ate of the things I believed when I was 10 or 11…
Like that girls are boring and no fun. Or Bros are a brilliant band!
And I’m pretty relieved I changed my mind on them!
What if spiritual blindness isn't simply about what we can't see?
What if it's also about what we refuse to see?
And that brings us to the man's parents.
Because perhaps the most unsettling example of spiritual blindness in this passage isn't the Pharisees.
It's the man’s parents.
Look at verses 18–23.
They get dragged into the whole thing.
And they clearly don’t want to be there.
They know exactly what’s happened.
Their son was born blind.
Now he can see.
But they don’t want to say what has happened. Why?
Well John tells us. Because, verse 22, the Jewish leaders had decided that anyone who acknowledged Jesus as the Messiah would be thrown out of the synagogue.
That was the first century equivalent of losing your job, your home and your driving license all at the same time.
And perhaps that's one of the most searching things in this whole passage.
Sometimes the biggest obstacle to following Jesus isn't a lack of evidence.
It's that we don't like where the evidence might lead us.
I remember when I was twenty.
I'd been a Christian for about two years, and I invited a friend, James, to a whole weekend of events organised by a university Christian union.
The talks were excellent.
They clearly explained Jesus - his life, his death, and his resurrection.
And at the end of the weekend, I asked James,
“Do you believe what you've heard?”
And he said,
“Yes. I believe there was a man called Jesus.
I believe he died.
And I think he rose again.”
So I asked him,
“Will you become a Christian, then?”
And he said,
“No.”
“Why?”
And he said,
“Because I don't want to stop sleeping with my girlfriend.”
You might laugh, but actually, I really appreciated his honesty.
Because sometimes the issue isn't:
“Is it true?”
Sometimes the issue is:
“If it is true, what will it mean for me? And am I willing to accept that?”
And that's much more uncomfortable.
Spiritual blindness causes us to suppress the evidence.
And so the Pharisees interrogate the man again.
They won’t budge.
And so they resort to insults.
Verse 34:
“You were steeped in sin at birth; how dare you lecture us!”
And they threw him out.
Do you see the irony?
The man who was physically blind is gradually coming to see who Jesus is.
The people who can physically see are becoming increasingly blind to who Jesus is.
John the Gospel writer is warning us here:
Be careful. Be really careful.
Because spiritual blindness doesn't always look like ignorance.
Sometimes it looks like expertise.
Sometimes it looks like asking lots of questions.
And sometimes it looks like having all the evidence you need…
and refusing to see it.
- Sight – vv 35-41
That is what we ALL do by nature. Which brings us to our final point today – Jesus gives sight.
There’s a really beautiful structure to the passage. Did you notice it?
Jesus is there at the beginning.
Then, in the middle of the story, he disappears.
And then, right at the end, Jesus comes back.
And at the start Jesus gives the man his physical sight. That’s incredible. Life transforming.
But John wants us to know that that wasn't the most wonderful thing that happened to this man that day.
Because later that same day, he received something even more precious.
Spiritual sight.
He came to see who Jesus really is.
And I want us to notice two things about how that happens.
Firstly, it happens gradually.
Look at the progression.
Verse 11.
When his neighbours ask him what happened, how does he describe Jesus?
“The man they call Jesus…”
That's all he knows.
Then, verse 17.
The Pharisees ask him what he thinks about Jesus.
And he says:
“He is a prophet.”
Do you see the progression?
He's beginning to see.
Then, verse 33.
After yet another interrogation, he says:
“If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.”
He's getting closer.
“He is from God.”
And then Jesus comes back.
Verse 35.
Finds him and asks:
“Do you believe in the Son of Man?
And then verse 38:
“Lord, I believe.”
And he worshipped him.
Where are you on that journey?
I was right at the start back in 1994 when I began interrogating my Chrisian friend about that man they call Jesus.
It took me 18 months of deep investigating to get to my own verse 38.
Where are you?
But there's something else we need to notice.
The man doesn't go looking for Jesus.
Jesus goes looking for him.
Look at verse 1.
Jesus sees him.
And now, in verse 35, Jesus finds him again.
And that's important.
Because perhaps you’re here today thinking you’re investigating Christianity.
You’re asking questions.
You’re weighing evidence.
You’re trying to work out what you think.
John would say: yes—but look at what's happening in this story.
Jesus is looking for you.
Which means, it’s not just about:
“Are you searching for Jesus?”
Rather:
“Will you recognise him when he finds you?”
And you know, that’s what has happened today. As you’ve met Jesus on the pages of John’s Gospel.
So how do we receive spiritual sight? How do we obtain that sense?
Look at verse 38.
The man saw Jesus.
He heard Jesus.
And he worshipped Jesus.
That's what spiritual sight looks like.
It isn't simply knowing more information.
It’s not just being able to win an argument about Christianity.
It’s seeing who Jesus is…
hearing what he says…
and responding to him.
And that takes us right back to where we began.
Because our rebellion against God — our decision to be our own ruler — has brought sin and suffering into our world.
And it’s done something to us too.
It has made us spiritually blind.
We’ve lost our sense of God.
So how do we see again?
We look to Jesus.
Remember what Jesus said back in verse 5?
“I am the light of the world.”
Jesus came into our darkness.
He experienced deep, deep suffering in our world. He knows what it’s like.
And at the cross, he took our sin upon himself.
And he experienced the judgment our rebellion deserved.
He entered our darkness. Became blinded for us…
so that we could be brought into his light.
He died for us.
And he rose again.
And that's why Jesus can give us spiritual sight.
Not simply because he gives us better information.
But because he rescues us from our sin.
He brings us back to God.
He opens our eyes.
And so, as we come towards the end, I want to ask you the question John has been asking us all the way through this chapter:
What do you make of Jesus?
Maybe you're at verse 11.
“The man they call Jesus.”
If that's you, keep looking.
Keep asking questions.
Keep coming back to City Church.
We’ve got a course starting a week on Wednesday called Alpha, and it’s a great place to explore who Jesus is and what Christianity is all about. Why don’t you sign up.
But maybe you’re at verse 38 and ready to say with this man:
“Lord, I believe.”
That’s what our friends are about to do as they go down into that pool of water.
They’re not going into that water to become Christians. That’s already happened. But as they go, they are telling us something.
They are saying:
“I once was blind.
But now I see.”
But perhaps you're not quite ready to get into your own pool of Siloam today.
That’s okay.
But wherever you are on the journey, there's one thing I want to encourage you to do.
Don’t look away.
Don’t close your eyes.
Don’t decide you've already got Jesus worked out.
Don’t let pride stop you.
Don’t let your assumptions stop you.
Don’t let the cost stop you.
Look at Jesus.
Because the man who was blind from birth eventually saw something that changed everything.
He saw Jesus.
He heard Jesus.
And he fell down and worshipped him.
And today John is inviting you to do the same.
Let me pray.
