Sermon for Sunday, March 15, 2026

March 15, 2026
By Kristin Berkey-Abbott




John 9:1-41



On Friday, after two days of wrestling with this Gospel text, after thinking about issues of sight and blindness, I went to the optometrist and the dermatologist. Oddly, I got more insight about sight from the dermatologist than the eye doctor. In some ways, these two things—Gospel text and doctor visits—are not connected. The eye exam happens annually, and I had the dermatologist appointment way back in December, after my biopsy came back as a melanoma, long before I was thinking about this Gospel text.


At Friday’s dermatology visit, we talked about my last visit, about how we both first thought my melanoma was something else. It looked like a pinkish bug bite, not the classic dark-mole-gone-wrong kind of melanoma. But because it turned out to be a melanoma, on Friday we evaluated my skin much more thoroughly than we ever did before. My dermatologist decided to biopsy three more spots, which she likely wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t had the last biopsy come back as a melanoma.


In today’s Gospel, too, we see people taking a second look. In some cases, the second look has life-saving implications. Sadly, though, that’s not always the case.


The disciples see a blind man and ask who sinned. This belief would be common in ancient times where disease was thought to be an outward sign of inward unworthiness. In many ways, we still see vestiges of this belief today. I thought of it recently, when an old grad school friend announced he had esophageal cancer, and another grad school friend and I tried to remember when he had stopped smoking. It seems a modern method of doing what those disciples did: trying to establish who is to blame for misfortune and often, sadly assuming that it is the victim’s fault. And there’s also more than a bit of trying to reassure ourselves that we can avoid misfortune by virtuous living.


Jesus gives an answer that we would now expect, that nobody is to blame. And then, Jesus goes further, saying that he can use this misfortune to glorify God. Jesus in the Gospel of John is always on the lookout for ways to show people who he is. In the Gospel of John, Jesus knows that he’s the Messiah from the get go, and he’s always trying to let others know too. It might be with long discussions with people like Nicodemus and the woman at the well. This Sunday, Jesus shows that he is the Messiah by making a blind man able to see and later telling the blind man that he is in the presence of the son of man who is the light.


This healing bothers me, though, and it’s not about the spit. If Jesus walked into this sanctuary right now and offered to heal the arthritis in my feet with his holy spit and some dirt, I’d have my shoes off lickety-split. But it’s the fact that Jesus doesn’t ask the man if he wants to be healed, the way he does with so many others. I know that it’s my 21st century sensibility that makes me wish that Jesus had looked for a way to show that the blind man had different abilities, like enhanced hearing. I wish that Jesus asked permission before he rubbed the mud on the man—or at the very least told him what he was about to do, the way the best doctors tell us what’s going to happen before they do the procedure, like my dermatologist did on Friday: “now I’m going to take a picture of your spot . . .”


The next part of text is even more disturbing, and a good teaching moment about rebirth and healing: we see the reaction of all the neighbors, some of whom don’t recognize the blind man who can now see and some who doubt it’s the same man. By now it’s clear that we’re working with blindness on many levels. Had the neighbors really never seen the blind man at all? How could they not recognize him after spending time assisting him? Perhaps they are like my dermatologist, who sees me in a new way, now that I’ve had a melanoma. But it’s probably something more troubling.


It’s tempting to say something like they never saw him but just saw his disability, but that’s probably more of a 21st century approach. What’s probably more accurate about their disbelief is what the blind man says later—this kind of healing has never been done. They’re so busy looking for explanations that they fail to see the miraculous. They might see but cannot accept the miraculous. Or it may just take them awhile to process what they’ve witnessed.


The religious leaders are not much help. As is usual when they are depicted in the Gospel of John, they get bogged down in the legalistic angles of the questions: if Jesus healed on the Sabbath, he couldn’t really be doing miracles from God, could he? The reaction of the blind man’s parents shows how much power the religious leaders have—the blind man’s parents can’t rejoice for fear of being displaced from their community. Their answer also shows a way of dealing with this kind of power, a sort of understated defiance when they say, “Go ask our son the grown man. Ask the blind man who he saw heal him.” They’re not rejecting their son so much as they’re rejecting the relevance of the question.


This poor blind man! Back and forth he goes: summoned in for interrogation, released, re-examined on the same questions, until he’s finally exasperated and says in verse 25, "I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see."


Keep in mind, he can’t even describe the man who healed him. He’s only heard his voice and followed his instructions to wash afterward, after Jesus has gone. He doesn’t see Jesus with his eyes until the end of the Gospel. As with so many encounters with Jesus, in a way that’s similar to the stories of Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman at the well, the blind man doesn’t understand what he’s been shown, at least not at first. And to be fair, most of us are the same way—it takes time to adjust to a new situation, to new information, to a diagnosis that comes back that is different than what we expected or hoped for, to a flood of light that breaks through the gloom.


The blind man has heard the voice of Jesus before he could see him, has felt the fingers of Jesus smearing mud on his eyes, but he doesn’t actually see Jesus with his newly opened eyes until after the relentless questioners have made their judgment and moved along.


The blind man has several encounters with Jesus: in the first one, he only hears the voice of Jesus. In the second one, after he’s been interrogated by the religious leaders, he comes to understand who Jesus is as he sees him later, face to face.


We don’t read the next chapter of John in this morning’s Gospel, but if we did, we’d have an even richer understanding of both this text and chapter 10, the one that follows this text. In chapter 10, Jesus talks at great length about sheep and shepherds and the ones who hear his voice and respond. If we read them together, it’s clear that the blind man heard the Lord’s voice and responded, whereas so many others do not.


The blind man isn’t the only one in today’s Gospel who has heard the voice of Jesus, the good shepherd. Jesus heals the blind man in a way that shows the power of God’s love to all the members of the blind man’s community and family. We might be left wondering what will happen to the blind man and the larger community. But if we read further, we find out that with each miracle, Jesus’ circle of followers grows. With each miracle, the landscape changes, for Jesus and for all who see and hear him. With each miracle, we see people expand their ideas of what might be possible in this world.


As I watched the dermatologist study my skin, I thought about how the landscape of my body has also changed. Once we looked and saw sun damage or bug bites. Now my dermatologist lingers on every spot, just to make sure that she sees, not turning a blind eye, not overlooking potentially deadly cancers.


Jesus, too, encourages us to see our landscapes differently. As with skin, there are many spots that might turn out to be nothing, like community members who don’t really know us or care to look closely. But they might turn out to be malevolent, like the Pharisees in this story who still don’t understand how blind they are at the end of today’s Gospel.


Again and again Jesus reminds us of how God knows us down to our tiniest details. Again and again, Jesus encourages us to hear God’s voice and recognize our creator. Jesus continues to invite us to experience transformation and healing, transformation that might seem impossible when we first consider it. Jesus know that if we say yes to his invitation that we might also attract the attention of the badgering, oppressive forces of society. But Jesus also promises that he will be beside us as we testify to the power of God, that once we were blind, but now we see.