Today I’m sending along a sermon I preached from this Sunday’s lectionary text at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Athens, TN. You can always contact me via lyndseymedford.com/speaking if you’d like to bring me to your church, event, or retreat!
I’ve also been out and about with:
this podcast episode of Our Island in the City
this interview at Love is Stronger Than Fear
an excerpt from My Body and Other Crumbling Empires in Bearings Online
As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. 2 His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” 3 Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. 4 We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. 5 As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” 6 When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, 7 saying 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?” 9 Some were saying, “It is he.” Others were saying, “No, but it is someone like him.” He kept saying, “I am he.” 10 But they kept asking him, “Then how were your eyes opened?” 11 He 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.” 12 They said to him, “Where is he?” He said, “I do not know.”
The Pharisees Investigate the Healing
13 They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. 14 Now it was a Sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. 15 Then 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.” 16 Some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, for he does not observe the Sabbath.” Others said, “How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?” And they were divided. 17 So 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.”
18 The 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 19 and asked them, “Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?” 20 His parents answered, “We know that this is our son and that he was born blind, 21 but 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.” 22 His 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. 23 Therefore his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.”
24 So 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.” 25 He answered, “I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” 26 They said to him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” 27 He 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?” 28 Then they reviled him, saying, “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. 29 We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.” 30 The man answered, “Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes. 31 We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will. 32 Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. 33 If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” 34 They answered him, “You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?” And they drove him out.
Spiritual Blindness
35 Jesus heard that they had driven him out, and when he found him he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” 36 He answered, “And who is he, sir?[f] Tell me, so that I may believe in him.” 37 Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.” 38 He 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.” 40 Some of the Pharisees who were with him heard this and said to him, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” 41 Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.
John 9, NRSV
I come to this passage and to you this morning of two minds. As a good seminary-trained preacher, I want to illuminate this grand theological statement Jesus makes, “I am the light of the world,” and point out some interesting bits of Greek.
But as someone born with a chronic illness, and at times disabled by it, I find myself much more fixated on the immediate and elaborate details of the blind man’s experience. I’m delighted by this whole mud-mechanism of healing. I’m horrified by the very idea that the man could have somehow caused his blindness before his birth. And I am all too familiar with the exasperating, tedious drama of demands that disabled people explain the inexplicable, and the subsequent refusals to believe us about the plain facts of our experiences living our own lives.
The CDC estimates that 1 in 4 people in the U.S. lives with a disability, so I imagine there are a lot of us in this room who feel a personal stake in this story. Some of us are daydreaming right now about what healing would be like. Some of us are frustrated by the implication that disabled people need to be healed at all, instead of celebrated for the unique ways of being we bring to the world. Some of us just feel overwhelmed by the healed man’s frustration and a little let down by this punchline of “Who’s really blind here?” And some of us, despite all evidence, are trying valiantly to resist understanding ourselves as disabled at all.
Because in our society, like in Jesus’s, to be disabled is to not quite count. In our society, we don’t really take people seriously if they can’t produce on the labor market. We are slow and resentful to accommodate people’s physical or cognitive needs. We prefer that sick people keep their suffering and their unruly bodies to themselves. In the U.S., we place savings and income limits on people who receive disability payments, keeping them in enforced poverty.
We also subject each other to some of the same interrogations that we witness in the Gospel story. Under the guise of “heath and wellness” culture, for example, we blame people for their illnesses and needs. And we unconsciously, superstitiously shy away from people and families whose lives we are more afraid of than curious about.
Sometimes I think of the Gospels as story after story about interruption. And that’s what happens here: Into these structures and cultures that devalue disabled people, Jesus comes to interrupt. To the disciples’ apparently common but also horrific question about who caused the man’s blindness, Jesus says, “no one!”
In fact, when we come to the sentence, “he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him,” there are two translations available to us here, because there was no punctuation when the Greek manuscripts were written. This clause, “so that God’s works might be revealed in him,” could belong in two places. And the phrase immediately before that - “he was born blind” - was inferred by the translator, but doesn’t appear in the text. Without getting too far into any more grammar, we can also read Jesus as saying: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned. So that God’s works might be revealed in him, we must work the works of him who sent me while it is day.”
And so, in this place where blindness made people beggars, Jesus used this very weird, earthy, intimate gesture to make the man no longer blind. No longer cast out from society. No longer in poverty. No more passersby asking each other hypothetical questions about him as if he were not there, not able to hear, not human.
I want to stop here and say that, even though it appears this blind man wanted to be healed, lots of blind people do not feel that way. In today’s world, we have tools and knowledge and resources to arrange our society to accommodate blind people and allow them to live and participate independently. The same goes for Deaf people, those with mobility issues, neurodivergent folks, and any number of other disabled groups. Disabled people have our own unique ways of being in the world and understanding the world, and these are valuable ways of being human, and we belong with our disabled bodies on streets and in businesses and in concert venues and stadiums and on airplanes and in churches just as we are.
It is not God’s dream for disabled people that our bodies or our identities change, so we can become more like nondisabled people. It is also not God’s great and glorious dream for disabled people, as I have heard so many of these healing stories preached, that we all get jobs.
If we are disabled and we are lonely, or struggling, or devalued, or impoverished as a result, it is not because we are defective. It is because the world outside of us is in need of healing. We have interesting and important perspectives on life and the world. We have the opportunity to relate to our bodies in different ways than the disembodied norm. We have been creative and resourceful and cultivated communities of care in order to survive up to this point. And we, like the man in the story, exhibit courage and faith when we tell the whole truth about our lives.
Jesus is also disrupting others’ assumptions about the blind man in this story. His disciples are talking about this guy who’s stuck on the side of the road, and Jesus decides to bring him from the literal periphery of the situation to the literal center of the story. He touches the man in this very strange and intimate way, and he involves the man in the final step of his own healing by sending him on this little pilgrimage to the pool. He makes the man’s agency and his consent part of the story of his healing. And of course later, when they meet again, Jesus also tells the man that it is those who devalued and disbelieved him who are most in need of healing.
So the man is healed and the story goes on. And we discover that, as much as dominant culture labels disability as deviant, healing is even more threatening to the status quo.
If neither the man nor his parents sinned, and if Jesus proved it by healing the man, how is anyone supposed to make sense of this world? If disability is just part of life and not a mark of God’s disfavor, but we’ve called sick and disabled people sinners and left them by the road, then what does that say about us?
If our reasons for avoiding or excluding people can’t be masked as righteousness or common sense, then how are we supposed to encounter people and bodies and experiences that are unfamiliar?
We would often rather reject plain facts than have to question our assumptions about the world. We would rather have our neat categories for interpreting each other than learn each other’s actual truths. And so this tedious rigmarole ensues with the man, his poor, beleaguered, squirrelly parents, and the sabbath rules, and the escalating vitriol against him.
But Jesus comes back to be with the man.
When Jesus says, “I am the light of the world,” I don’t think he is trying to cast aspersions on darkness. God is not uncomfortable with blindness; God is not uncomfortable with darkness. The light of the world does not come to create or reinforce beliefs about who is in and who is out, who is self-evidently sinful and who is obviously righteous, or who is “normal” and who doesn’t belong.
The light of the world brings us all into a spacious place of healing. The kind of healing that inspires us to speak the truth about ourselves and our value even when institutions and leaders refuse to believe us. The kind of healing that reshapes our society to respect and include and care for everyone. The kind of healing that restores the lost pieces of our humanity that we threw away when we abandoned our marginalized neighbors.
At the end of this passage, Jesus says, “I came into this world for judgment.” The light of the world brings the kind of judgment that judges us all worthy of this healing—even if it is surprising and a little painful for those of us who thought we were healthy.
“Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” (Ephesians 5:14)
The light of the world is already with us.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
