John 9: What does Christianity say when home is just a place of loneliness?
Theme: Abandonment, alone, isolation
What does Christianity say when home is just a place of loneliness?
Why we know loneliness is a core issue:
Last year the World Health Organization declared loneliness to be a pressing global health threat,
Addressing the fact that loneliness is a damaging for the young as well as well as the old, African Union youth envoy, Chido Mpemba stated:
“[Loneliness] transcends borders and is becoming a global public health concern affecting every facet of health, wellbeing and development,”
The published report, notes that the likelihood you’ll complete university and even secure the high paid graduate job you’re aiming at, is largely dependent upon how you deal with loneliness.
Loneliness isn’t so much about not having friends. At its root, is a belief that your relationships and social approval is down to
never truly letting your guard down.
Never let them see who you really are,
because if they do glimpse the real you, they’ll never understand.
Don’t make the mistake to think you can’t be lonely in a crowd.
What’s worse, don’t make the mistake you can’t be lonely at home.
When I returned from Vietnam…
Context and overview
The eyewitness testimony begins with a very human story.
We meet a man who cannot easily find his way home - You see, he’s blind.
In the ANE his life prospects would have been heartbreaking…
You and I might be bitter about not having the opportunities, wealth, drama free childhood, and that might be the percentage difference between:
First, 2:1;
a graduate job or the rejection letter,
the dream relationship and future of living alone with cats -
but this guy, he never stood a chance.
In the world of YOLO he was born to be in last place.
But then an opportunity arises.
It happens rarely, maybe once in lifetime for the very fortunate. For most never.
And it’s the opportunity to actually get the one thing you believe will turn your life around for the better.
It’s the 200K in debt to a loan shark and then winning the lottery.
It’s being diagnosed with an incurable disease and then selected for a miracle drug trial.
This man, blind from birth, a lifetime of zero opportunities, suddenly encounters Jesus, a man who can seemingly do the impossible.
So Jesus does something weird, even disgusting - he makes mud and wipes it on the man’s eyes.
If it works, and he gains his sight, and his options have multiplied in click,
for the first time he can walk home by himself.
For the first time accepted by his community as an equal not a charity case.
For the first time [access to the temple] one of the great wonders of the world, religious acceptance.
For the first time parents who could say they are proud of him rather embarrassed by him. (Parents were blamed for the disabilities of their children).
For the first time he can see his home.
- For the first time, he’ll have a home. Because in world of such fine margins between survival and starvation anyone who was a burden rather than a contributor could never rest easy.
And it… works, sort of.
The unorthodox remedy works, and for the first time he can see.
But there’s no happy ever after.
What follows is chaos. What was meant to be a fairy tale becomes a nightmare.
A row breaks out. In this passage no less than 16 questions are asked following the healing. A public inquiry.
Rather than being thrown a welcome home party by his community, he’s dragged into the witness box not once but twice.
Rather than being thrown a welcome home party by his own family, [..] they, metaphorically, throw him under a bus, they publicly abandon him. They’re still ashamed of him.
Feel the weight of this situation. He gets one thing he’s longed for all his life.
- The one thing that would cure the isolation of being the problem child,
- the awkward member of the family,
- the outsider in the community.
And when, miracle of miracles, he gets it. His home is more lonely than ever.
- The need for true sight
What does Christianity say when home is just a place of loneliness?
Assuming that at times everyone is lonely, this story exposes two types of people.
Firstly, there are those who are optimistic about their isolation.
They say, “Yes, friends come and go, there are good times and hard times, but I just need to [….], and then I’ll be alright.”
The writer, thinker and former spy Shane Parrish calls them ‘happy-when’ people.
Secondly, there are those who feel alone, misunderstood and disconnected and they don’t believe anything will change that.
Jesus has something to say to you whichever group you’re in.
But warned his advice to the lonely is as unorthodox as his method of healing the blind man.
What does Jesus say, quite simply “You’re blind, and you need true sight that only I can give.”
That’s what he means in [5] when he says, 5 While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”
Offended yet? They certainly were 2000 years ago.
But before you too quickly join the mob of outrage with the Pharisees, hear him out.
[35-41] Jesus uses the word ‘see’,‘sight’, or ‘blind’ [4] times.
Blindness is a metaphor for assuming you know the way the world works when you don’t.
Let me be more specific, to be blind is to think you can satisfy your internal need for belonging and approval by outward achievement.
Always staying one step ahead. Always out-thinking, out working the competition.
For that is what the Pharisees were doing, their status of belonging to the inner circle of society was based on the belief they kept the laws of God better than anyone else.
You and I think we enhance our belonging and connectedness in the world by making better decisions than those around us.
Jesus says that such thinking is blind.
Madonna, one of the most high achieving pop-stars says:
“My drive in life is from the fear of being mediocre, that’s always pushing me. I push past it and I discover I’m a special human being, but then I discover that I’m still mediocre, and uninteresting – unless I do something else. Because even though I’ve become somebody, I still have to prove that I’m somebody. My struggle still hasn’t ended and it probably never will.”
Jesus says that such thinking is blind.
So this is what Jesus offers instead…
- Jesus Changes Everything
[5,6] Come with me to the mystery of the mud.
No question this is weird. What makes it more bizarre is that Jesus on multiple occasions heals people with just as a severe of not greater disabilities, by just speaking. Which is the clue, that he’s trying to show us something.
But what?
There’s one other key place in the whole of the Bible where mud has a life giving, life changing impact - Genesis 2…
5 Now no shrub had yet appeared on the earth[a] and no plant had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no one to work the ground, 6 but streams[b] came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground. 7 Then the Lord God formed a man[c] from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
Don’t get distracted by the ‘how’ of this ancient poem that describes the origin story of the world. Notice that Jesus is making the claim that if you want to see the author of creation, look for his signature move.
And according to Genesis 2, the creator of the world makes life from mud. It’s almost as if he’s writing his signature in mud across the man’s face.
In fact the creator's signature makes sense of Jesus declaring [5] “I am the light of the world”, referencing that it was his voice that first declared, “Let there be light“.
The point being made, is that this guys main problem is not that his eyes don’t work, but that his whole life needs to be remade, recreated, and the one who can do that is the God who made him in the first place.
People make the mistake of thinking that Christianity is bolt on to your life, no, you don’t need mending you need to be totally transformed.
You see, for the man who is blind,
- his community still don’t see him, they see a problem.
- His parents still don’t see him they see a problem.
And the message of Christianity is not that, though the world might reject you, deep down you are beautiful inside no Matter what anyone says.
No, denying reality is neither loving nor helpful.
Christianity argues that you are both wonderfully beautiful and capable of shocking ugliness.
And if we were to get what we truly deserved [screen] lock us up and throw away the key!
We deserve consequence for the many and varied injustices of our life. Including the blind man.
Including me and you.The Bible’s word for all that we’ve done wrong is sin.
Have you noticed that often in life justice being done almost always ends in loneliness for the perpetrator.
The DNA of the world seems to be that those who are most selfish always end the game on their own, be that a jail cell or fallen dictator on the run.
The story of Hitler alone in his bunker, facing the despairing isolation - the horror of loneliness seems appropriate for someone who did such wrong.
My theory is that all of us fear the threat of loneliness because we secretly know deep down we deserve it. What a relief people can’t read our minds!
So Jesus' point is remarkable. The blind man gets the attention, the compassion, the transformation of his creator not because he earned it, neither because God didn’t know what he was really like, but because he was simply loved regardless of the mess he was.
Consider the wonder of this moment - the greatest display of God’s power and generosity recreated in micro, on this one man’s eyes, the encore of transformation of the universe played on this man’s life.
The restoration of his sight was an echo of the restoration of his heart before God, completely cleansed and forgiven.
What a privilege!
Wouldn’t you long to receive that attention from God? Walk out tonight knowing that all that you have ever done wrong or will do wrong is completely forgiven?
“Ah, does that mean love is an excuse for denial of justice?”
Not long after this Jesus will be nailed to a cross, everything about the torture he experienced will be loneliness!
Christian or non-Christian, almost all historians agree that a man called Jesus of Nazareth was killed on a Roman cross.
Crucifixion was designed to not only break you physically, but to destroy you socially. That’s why it was so slow:
The method of being stripped naked, nailed to a tall wooden plank covered in your own blood and feaces, and then hauled high above the crowds so that everyone could see you.
- Was designed to fill your last moments with shame,
- to make those who knew you be ashamed of you,
- to be a public figure of disgrace and mocking.
- To be physically separated from your community.
- To literally be amongst a crowd and yet die utterly alone.
Why would Jesus choose to die like this?
Because He did this for you. Literally, to take the punishment you and I deserved for the many secret and not so secret injustices we are responsible for.
The man in this passage was blind. He believed the loneliness that had his whole life would be solved by recovering his sight.
What we learn is that Jesus cures his deepest fear of loneliness by forgiving him, through taking the cost of his injustice on himself.
You can’t control whether others in your life will love you or leave you, but by putting your faith in Jesus, you can know the one person who entirely sees you, will never abandon you.
To say, “I believe that is true,” is what Jesus means by true sight.
William Montague Dyke was ten years old, he was blinded in an accident.
So here’s the question:
Will you continue to trust your own efforts, intelligence and advantages to create a life where you will never be abandoned but always deeply loved?
Or will you acknowledge, that you can’t achieve that on your own, and instead throw yourself at the mercy of Jesus to come into your life, through forgiveness and with a love that will never let you go?
