One of my favourite things about early Spring is the
smell of mud. I enjoy getting out in the
yard or in the woods when the snow’s all but gone and the ground is saturated
with water and the smell of mud pervades.
To me, this is the smell of all things becoming new. The death that winter is has passed. The pall of snow is lifted and from the mud
comes new life. It is the smell of hope.
This is also the time of the year when the kids come
in all muddy. I can’t really say I’m
happy about that, but I know how much fun they have playing in the mud. They are exited that the snow is passing and on
some days now it’s warm enough to get the bikes out. Without fail they will play with the mud and
make mud cakes, mud pies, and mud men. For
the child at heart, mud inspires creativity and is just plain fun.
Looking at our passage from John, besides singing a
little Hank Williams, whenever I read this passage of Jesus spitting into the
dust to make a mudpack to put on this blind man’s eyes to make him see I
immediately think of Jesus/God being a little boy playing in the mud. When God plays with mud, we have to expect
something really creative that’s laden with hope. That’s kind of the way the Bible depicts it
“in the beginning”. If you remember from
Genesis 2 God played in the dirt and out came this man named Adam. I like to imagine that dirt being not just
dirt but the mud of spring and like a little child God made a mud man and
breathed life into him.
Well, I am inclined to think that John wants us to
look back to Genesis with this story. If you want a little bit of Bible trivia,
there is a huge Creation/New Creation motif in John’s Gospel. He starts and ends it with Creation
references. At the beginning of his
Gospel he says that the Word of God by which the universe was made and ordered
became human as this man Jesus. This
leads us to expect that as he tells us about Jesus we are supposed to see that in
every thing Jesus says and does God is making things new. Then, at the end of his Gospel it isn’t just
that Jesus raises from the dead. It is
that Creation culminates in Jesus resurrection and there’s a hint of the Garden
of Eden in the scene with Mary Magdalene meeting Jesus in the Garden talking to
the Gardener only to realize it’s Jesus.
Jesus restores the fellowship that Adam and Eve lost with God in the
Garden. There are also points in between
where analogies to Creation/New Creation appear such as this one of Jesus
healing this man born blind with mud made from the dirt of the earth and some of
that “holy, powerful, life-giving, spit of Jeeesus”. And, this is where we find Jesus playing in
the mud.
To point out a few things about this man born blind,
first, his blindness is not the punishment of anything he or his parents had
done. It was a popular superstition back then that children born with
disabilities were a curse by God for the sins of the parents. That is never the case. With respect to the man’s blindness Jesus
said, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the
works of God might be displayed in him.”
That said, Jesus played in the mud and displayed a work.
This man’s blindness, though not the punishment for
sin, was a metaphor for sin that in this case takes the form of spiritual
blindness, which is the inability to recognize God’s presence and works. The man himself is apparently naïve in this
respect. He like every human is born
with spiritual blindness due to the general human problem with sin. That’s the fact about life outside the Garden.
This spiritual blindness gets especially twisted when
we mix it with religious authority and so Jesus gets quite pointed with the
Pharisees about their “blindness”. As
religious leaders they claimed to be able to “see”, to be able to recognize God
and God’s works, and also to have the authority to judge people in these
matters. Yet, the Pharisees, though they
claimed to “see”, couldn't see who Jesus is.
Therefore, they were unable to grasp the significance of what Jesus had
just done in healing this man born blind.
The Pharisees were “blind” to seeing this healing as being the Creation
power of God, the Word of God at work. The
result is that they pronounced the judgement of calling this healing work of
God evil and they excluded this living testimony to the healing work of God
from fellowship, and then in the end became murderous towards God.
This healing is a sign in John’s Gospel, a sign of
what God is up to as Jesus to heal and save his creation. Jesus is the Word of God by which God made
everything become flesh. This Jesus took
dirt, dirt from which Adam (Humankind) was first made. He saturated it with his own saliva (the holy
spit of Jeeesus) which represents the life and presence of God. The result was that this dirt was no longer
dirt but mud. Like the Nicene Creed says
about Jesus, two natures in one person.
In essence, Jesus made a New Creation, New Humanity mudpack
to cure that man’s physical/spiritual blindness. The Bible says that when Jesus returns and we
are raised from the dead we will be like him for we shall see him as he
is. This is possible because of the Holy
Spirit living in us giving us a foretaste of it now. This blind man now seeing become a sign pointing
to this new humanity, a new humanity that doesn’t just hear about God and tries
to live accordingly, but rather a humanity that “sees”, a humanity that is
aware of God’s presence and his healing/saving work.
This mudpack is quite symbolic of the healing/saving work
the Trinity is doing in, through, and as Jesus to humanity. Jesus himself is the fallen human flesh of
Adam infused with God the Son. Like the mudpack made from dirt and “the holy
spit of Jesus” applied to this man born blind, Jesus (the New Man) applied to
the blindness of Adam (the Old Man) makes things new, makes humanity able to
see God, to perceive God’s presence and work in Jesus.
This healing event is a good example of what grace
is. Grace is God the Trinity – God the
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – working as Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit
to create a new realm of human existence in which we sin-blinded and broken
humans can see, which is being in relationship with God the Father through
Jesus the Son by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit given to us. God has made this new reality possible in
Jesus by the presence and work of the Holy Spirit. There is salvation/healing in no other place.
Something else that needs to be noted is that the
blind man discovers his healing when he washes in the Well of Siloam, which
means Sent. This is how faith correlates
to grace. Paul says we are saved by
grace through faith. If grace is God’s
opening up this new realm of existence of saved/healed humanity in Jesus
through the Holy Spirit that is among us now in part but will be fully with us
when Jesus returns, then faith is our participating in this new realm. Faith isn’t just having beliefs or simply trusting
God. Faith is our participation in Jesus’
life and mission. If you find he’s
opened your eyes, then look around and live according to the Gospel, the Good
News that God has and will in totality save his Creation from Sin, Death, Evil,
and all oppressive powers. With the eyes
of faith we see God’s grace all around us and experience ourselves standing in
the midst of it.
It is as Paul has said in our Ephesians reading,
“For, once you were in darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light – for the fruit of
the light is found in all that is good and right and true. Try to find out what is pleasing to the
Lord.” How do we find out what is
pleasing to the Lord? Spend time with
him in prayer. Read the Bible. Fellowship with fellow-believers. Talk about what the Lord is doing in your
lives. Focus on loving your
neighbour. Think of yourselves as the
minister to the people who live in the eight houses immediately surrounding
you. Get to know them and let them get
to know you. Ask the Lord to show you what
he’s doing in their lives and make you a part of it.
Each of us as followers of Jesus who by God’s grace
have had our eyes opened to know Jesus and his love by one form of healing or
another, we are light in this world. It
is in the midst of actually be Jesus’ disciples that we go from simply hearing
about Jesus to actually seeing and knowing him and because of his presence and
healing work in our own lives we become light whos help others to see that in Jesus
Christ, the realm of grace, the darkness is fading, that God is saving/healing
his Creation an even these our neighbours.
Amen.
