Blindness and Walking By Faith: Lessons from John 9:1-7

Today, T.D. Jakes preached a message from God to me.  It was about the blind man Jesus healed by making clay from spit and telling him to wash in the pool Siloam after the disciples asked whose sin caused his blindness:

John 9:1-9 (NASB) 

As He passed by, He saw a man blind from birth. And His disciples asked Him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he would be born blind?"  

Jesus answered, "It was neither that this man sinned, nor his parents; but it was so that the works of God might be displayed in him.  We must work the works of Him who sent Me as long as it is day; night is coming when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the Light of the world." 

When He had said this, He spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and applied the clay to his eyes, and said to him, "Go, wash in the pool of Siloam"(which is translated, Sent). 

So he went away and washed, and came back seeing.

As usual, the Bishop made many excellent points.  I am only recording a few that speak to me in my moment...

1. Blindness was this man's particular weakness, allowed by God, that facilitated God's glory.  My strengths and weaknesses are increasingly public and difficult for me to handle.  But they facilitate God's glory--and my humility.   There is no fault; nothing wrong with me and no punishment I am suffering.  It is just my particular set of weaknesses that facilitate my utility.

2. The disciples viewed the man as a public display of the costs of sin.  For them, the man existed as a site for casting derision--derision that extended even to his family.  This despite the disciples deserving the same consequence (i.e. if blindness always results from sin--parental or otherwise--we should all be blind).  I should be careful that I can survive the measures/condemnations I use against others.

3. Jesus covered the man's eyes with clay, then told him to go to Siloam.  This is a picture of faith (and I would argue recreation).  The man is already blind, but now Jesus has heaped more "blinders/barriers" on him.  From the looks of it, his situation is made even more difficult after a genuine encounter with God.  The man must now publicly grope his way, doubly blind, through the city to where he was "Sent/Siloam."  I, too, must publicly grope my way through this particular phase of my life--one I have long feared and feel like my life has not prepared me for much at all.  ... but there is a promise....

4. The man washed in Siloam, where he was sent, and God gave him sight.  If I grope my way, understanding this a process of practicing and developing faith, I will also be healed--of fear, troubling circumstance, ignorance.  And, like the formerly blind man, I will come to know God better.

5. The process that dramatizes my weakness and results in healing glorifies God.

Death

I have recently grown to despise death.  Since you all know me well, you know that I have oscillated between being very emotionally expressive in my youth to increasingly emotionally stilted only to return to a much healthier place lately.  The catalyst for the recent change was my grandfather, Leslie Durant, passing December 14, 2004.  I simply cannot get over it.  I miss him all the time.  There appears to be no honor great enough to offer him, so I continue my Sisyphus-esque task, heaping small tribute upon small tribute, trying to create something worthy of him.

In the process, I have become profoundly sensitive to others' pain concerning death.  I cried for nearly half an hour listening to Dan Savage tell the story of his mother's passing on This American Life.  Only this morning, a NPR correspondent's tribute to her late father had me in tears getting out of the car.  The pain of losing someone to death is incomparable and universal.

And it's not so much the loss of immediate, corporeal access to loved-ones that is so gut-wrenchingly agonizing about death.  It is how pathetically most of us die.   Most of us don't go out in a blaze of glory.  We slowly slip away.  Actually, our faculties slowly abandon us.  We return to dust while we are yet living.  We have to sit patiently and watch it happen to ourselves.  The commentator this morning spoke of congratulating her father during his final years for attempting the herculean tasks of getting out of bed each morning, after he had slowly lost first the ability to speak, then hear, then walk over the previous several years.

God have mercy.  Lord have mercy.  Selah.