A few years back I was playing music
with some friends, a husband and wife duo. She played guitar and he
played banjo and Bluegrass Gospel was their thing. After about a
half an hour out of the blue he asks, “Have you ever been healed?”
He didn't give me time to answer and said. “She has.” Then she
began to talk about having Carpal Tunnel Syndrome in both wrists
about six months prior. It was so bad she could not play her guitar
anymore and something like that is pretty hard on a musician. She
went on to say how one day she was walking in a store in Bramalea
City Centre Mall and out of nowhere up comes this Southeast Asian
man. He stepped up close to her and said, “In the name of Jesus be
gone from her.” Suddenly, her wrists didn't hurt anymore. She
was completely healed.
As a Presbyterian minister I don't
often hear things like that, but oh how I wish I did. As a minister,
I quite often pray for people to be healed …physical problems,
emotional problems, relationship problems…and nothing happens. I
wish I knew why. Why doesn’t Jesus move in the power of the Holy
Spirit to heal these needs and glorify the Father? In the Gospels
healing was a major if not the predominant manifestation of the
Kingdom of God breaking in upon us. In fact the Greek word for
healing is also the word for salvation. Yet, it seems like we must
resign ourselves to apparently unanswered prayers and having to
soldier on with painful realities and calling it faith. Some may
think what this woman shared was quite strange, but this minister
wishes he could hear more of it. It's Jesus getting real with us.
It took a lot of courage for her to share that with a Presbyterian
minister. We Presbyterians don't so readily share things like that.
I though of that woman when I read
this passage from John and I wondered what it must have been like to
have been that man born blind but then Jesus healed him. Being
Presbyterian, I also take a careful notice of how he was received by
the people and by the religious authorities after he was healed. We
Presbyterians are quite cerebral and dutiful in the way the way we go
about our faith and we don't leave much room for Jesus getting real
and healing people. We like our healings to be by means of the
medical profession. So what was it like to be that man and be healed
and find one's life utterly changed in the blink of an eye.
Prior to the healing this man born
blind had to have lived an unimaginably horrible life. People born
with disabilities back then suffered the superstitious stigma that
they were cursed by God for some horrible sin that their parents had
committed. The man would have grown up in a home where any parental
love he received was tainted with knowing his parents were asking
what was it that they had done that was so wrong that they deserved
this child.
He would have had no friends outside of immediate family because
other parents would not have let their children play with a cursed
child. Most likely, other children would have spat on him and called
him names. As soon as he was of age, about twelve or thirteen, his
parents would most likely have kicked him out of the house to go and
fend for himself. Or, if they were just as outcast themselves, they
probably sent the child out to beg so that they could have an income
apart from the shame of begging themselves. If that's the way it was
for him what would it have been like to have been suddenly healed of
what others said was a curse and all of a sudden be able to enter
society with those same others as a newly transformed person?
What drew my attention in this text
as I pondered it earlier this week was how this now healed man had to
define himself, desperately define himself, as the man who was born
blind but now could see. I imagine him in great frustration having
to scream at the top of his lungs, “I am the man.” Of the people
around him some said yes he was that man. Others said that he only
looked like that man. So, with extraordinary exuberance he
proclaims, “I am the Man.” This man was the man that Jesus had
forever transformed by healing him of his cursed blindness and
now!!!!!...all of a sudden he has got to figure out how to live in
this world with the people who used to spit on him while they threw
change at him and with the authorities, particularly the religious
authorities who say that what happened to him was not of
God...because it happened on the Sabbath. To add insult to injury
people kept asking him where the man was who had healed him and he
could only rather helplessly answer, “I don’t know.”
One of the most remarkably life-giving
things that could happen to a human person by the hand of God
happened to this man born blind and all of a sudden he finds himself
having to defend the healing hand of God as if he himself had done
something odiously wrong. Because the matter involved God and the
Sabbath, he had to go defend his healing before the “religious”
authorities who basically told him, “Once cursed, always cursed.
Get out of here.”
Let's not forget parental abandonment.
In the midst of the interrogation the authorities called in his
parents to prove who he was. Instead of celebrating that their son
had been healed by God himself and that by association they
themselves were no longer under some stupid curse, for fear of the
“authorities” his parents to their shame abandoned their son
saying he’s now an adult and can answer for himself.
Well, after all the hoopla the man
finds himself all alone yet knowing, knowing that the Messiah had
healed him. But where was this Messiah? He didn't know. He didn't see who it was that had put the mud in his eyes and told him
to wash. And then, there in the isolation of being well in a sick,
sick world Jesus comes and finds the man and there in his alone-ness
he comforts him and Jesus basically says “I am the man, the Son of
Man for whom you have been waiting all your life so that you can be
healed and finally live.” Jesus tells him that true
seeing/believing is being acted upon by the transforming, loving
power of God and knowing Jesus is the one and only who could do this.
Suddenly, the now seeing man begins to worship Jesus.
This is a significant moment in the
Gospel of John. Believe it or not this is the only time in all of
John’s Gospel that anyone worships Jesus. Even when Jesus appears
to his disciples after his resurrection. Thomas came close when
boldly confessed to Jesus “my Lord and my God” but John doesn't
say he worshipped Jesus. It's almost as if this moment is the centre
of John's Gospel. There is something quite profound here with this
man; the blindness, the healing, the seeing, the worship. True
seeing is being transformed by the loving and truly saving power of
God in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit.
It is sad that people who have been
healed by God in ways that can't be explained so often find
themselves feeling abandoned by those closest to them for a lack of
an understanding of how amazing God’s grace really is. It takes a
lot of courage to say “I am the man.” Big miracles like that
don't happen to everybody every day, but this I can say: Jesus in the power of the
Holy Spirit to the Glory of the Father is at work in each of our
lives and in this congregation in some less noticeable but just as
significant ways. It takes a lot of courage to step up and attest to
what the Lord is doing in your life. If we take the reality of Jesus
really acting in our lives in the power of the Holy Spirit out of the
church, we take the Kingdom of God out of the church and we find
ourselves having a very cerebral duty-filled faith groping about in
that unfortunate darkness of having to ask what are we here for.
But, when we all get together and attest to what Jesus is doing in
each of our lives no matter how insignificant we may think it is and
even if we think we're just crazy, when we stand together to say we
are the ones whom Jesus has changed the Kingdom of God breaks forth
and shines amidst the darkness for everyone to see. That, my
friends, is what we are here for. Amen.
