The Rev. Joseph Farnes
All Saints, Boise
Lent 4A
March 15, 2026
During Lent, we spend time in John’s Gospel, and that means we move away from the sayings and snippets we tend to get from the other Gospels. We don’t get the straightforward moral teachings we might get in Matthew and Luke, and Mark’s Gospel moves quickly whereas John’s Gospel tends to take its time. It takes its time to develop themes. It slows down.
Which makes for incredibly long Gospel readings like today, where we read an entire chapter of John’s Gospel to hear about the healing of the man born blind. It’s not a story you can carve up, though I hear some folks do just that. They think it takes too long, that our increasingly short attention spans will simply not tolerate such a lengthy story.
But I think that’s honestly another reason *to* read a lengthy story like this. In other Gospel readings, we get a snippet of a story. A person appears, the person and Jesus have a conversation, there might be a healing, and onlookers are upset because they’ve decided that whatever Jesus does must be wrong, and Jesus gives an insightful response about the nature of God.
But in John’s Gospel, we actually linger with the story. The man born blind is not a set piece or a plot point in the story who shows up when needed and then disappeared as soon as Jesus says something. The man born blind is brought to the center. He speaks. He explains what he experiences. He brings our attention to the actions that happened. He pushes back on the religious authorities. And even this man’s parents are part of the story; the religious authorities are quick to interrogate them, too! The religious authorities are on the hunt for some kind of proof that Jesus isn’t who he says he is, but the man born blind simply relates to them again and again what he experienced. Anointing with a mud paste, a washing in the pool of Siloam, and the man can now see, something he could not do before.
The people in the story get to stand on their own. They are not backdrops or foils for Jesus’ preaching. John’s Gospel surprises us by letting people speak for themselves and wrestle with their encounter with Jesus. The man born blind can now see, and he starts off saying that Jesus is a prophet… then on his second encounter with Jesus this man believes in what Jesus says about himself, that Jesus is the Son of Man. This man born blind is able to see physically, and he is able to see spiritually. Because this man was open to each encounter with Jesus revealing something deeper, this man could see more deeply each time.
Which is the opposite of what the religious authorities in the story do, and the opposite of what many of us do. We have our story, we have our interpretation, and we will stick with that story and interpretation no matter what. The religious authorities in the Gospel reading see Jesus as a sinner and a charlatan, and no matter what he does, their interpretation will not change. Jesus gives sight to a blind man, and they say he’s a sinner. What will happen next week when we hear the story of Lazarus being raised from the dead? Will their interpretation change? These religious authorities have their view of who this Jesus is, and they will not change their view. They will stick to the image of Jesus they have in their minds, and be angry that others encounter Jesus and see someone radically different, someone who heals, someone who is the Son of Man and the Messiah.
In our current day and age, there is a view that we should hold fast to our interpretation of things. That’s what we see on social media, yes? Isn’t that what political parties do? You have your view of the world, and everything in the world must conform to that. Those people are the bad guys, and we’re always the good guys. If you slip up and say something that doesn’t conform to our interpretation, then we’re going to cast you out. Us, all against them. Are you one of us, or are you one of them? It’s a terrifying groupthink, to use the phrase from Orwell. But we are social creatures, and the more that we live in online bubbles and no longer spend time together in flesh-and-blood community, the more we define our social us-and-them through words and ideas.
We’re not like the man born blind. Are we willing to let our eyes see, or will we quickly see what we *want* to see? Will we fit everything into our pre-existing box, or will we encounter things anew? The man born blind let himself encounter Jesus and to be changed. Are we willing to be changed? Are we willing to see? Or are we afraid that we might see something differently? Are we afraid that we’ll see something that means that our worldview, the box we put everything into, is going to have to change?
I cherish at the end of the Gospel reading where some Pharisees ask Jesus if he thinks they are blind. Notice the physical proximity – these religious authorities are standing near Jesus. Would you expect that? Wouldn’t you expect these religious authorities to have walked away or kept their distance from this man they thought was a fraud? Or was it that Jesus went to where they were, where they were driving this man born blind out of their community?
Jesus keeps the encounters going. The decision is not made once-for-all. Jesus doesn’t write off the religious leaders, and it seems that the religious leaders aren’t completely writing off Jesus, either. Something in them wants to be seen as wise or good by Jesus. There’s something there. Maybe it’s our human desire to be liked – even if we think someone’s a terrible person and an enemy, maybe we still want them to respect us in some way. But maybe that human desire is a sign of something more – our desire to have authentic, real encounters with God and with others. We want to be seen. We want others to have open eyes to see us as we are. Perhaps this is what we need to learn from this long story: we who wish to be seen as full human beings should also work to see others as full human beings, and we who wish to be seen by God should work to let our eyes behold Christ, to meet him as he is, and to let him help us see. Amen.