Sermon on John 9:1–41: Four responses to Jesus, illustrated through the healing of a blind man
Reverend Harry Newton preaches at SumRed Church on the story of the man born blind in John's Gospel.
Summary
Reverend Harry Newton delivers a sermon at SumRed Church based on John 9:1–41, the account of Jesus healing a man born blind. He opens with a personal anecdote from Uganda to illustrate how perception shapes response, then frames the central question of the passage — "Who do you say I am?" — as the most important question any person will face. Newton works through four groups in the story — the neighbors, the Pharisees, the man's parents, and the blind man himself — showing how each responds to Jesus differently and with different outcomes. He argues that fear, skepticism, philosophical rigidity, and social pressure are the primary obstacles to recognizing who Jesus is, and he closes with a direct challenge to the congregation to weigh up their own response, regardless of their spiritual background.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Opening illustration: perception shapes response
Am Rev Harry Newton: You respond to someone often based on how you perceive them or what you think of them. So you get a read on someone and then you respond according to how you conceptualise that person.
For example, years ago I was in Uganda with my dad, going back to visit my godparents who have since passed away. We were staying at the hotel across the road from the presidential palace. For those of you who've been to Kampala in Uganda, you'll know it was a very grand, colonial-styled hotel — big colonnaded front, really beautiful. There are pineapple trees and you're allowed to go take the pineapples and eat them. It's amazing, except I'm allergic to pineapple. That's how I found out I'm allergic to pineapple. Another story for another day.
Anyway, we'd just been on safari for a few weeks and I was really dirty and stained. I had dropped the water canister off the back of the Land Rover and split it while we were in the desert, so we had gone almost a whole day in the desert without water, which is as horrible as it sounds. We'd finally got back into civilisation, got a drink, stayed the night at this horrible place — I'm surprised we didn't die of something — and then the next day we get to this hotel. We're standing there in no small lack of luxury, except all my clothes are stinky. So I put them all in the wash and my old man goes, "Well, you can borrow one of my shirts, Harry."
My dad was a pastor. He had one of these shirts — if you didn't know, these shirts have these secret little collars in them that you can pull out and make it look like a priest collar. Super snazzy. I don't know why they're designed that way. People say so you can hide. I assume so, I don't know. But anyway, he gave it to me, and I didn't put the white collar thing around, but I went for a walk with my old man. We're walking around the back of the presidential palace and he's pointing out various things to me. We go past the guard hut, and the guard walks out and goes, "Come here, come here." And you don't say no to a guy with a Kalashnikov. So I come up and he's like, "Are you the bishop?"
Now, I'm about 19. So what does Harry say? Yeah. To which he goes, "Bless me, Father." And he kneels. And I'm like, "Bless you, my son." And my dad is livid, but he doesn't say anything. Then the guard goes, "Would you like to come in and meet my companions?" Sure, why not?
Long story short, we end up having dinner in the presidential palace with the vice president and his wife, the local imam from the local mosque, and the leader of the interdenominational church group who were talking about persecution of religious minorities in the north. We ended up at dinner with these people, and they kept asking me what my opinions were on things, and they treated me with a huge amount of respect because everybody thought I was important. Now, obviously, I'm not a bishop. I definitely wasn't back then. You can't get ordained until you're mid-twenties at the earliest. You can't be a bishop until you're 36, I think it is. They didn't know that.
The point is, the way you perceive someone impacts how you treat them and how you respond to them. If I had rocked along looking like a bum, he probably wouldn't have invited me in. He probably would have pointed his Kalashnikov at me and said, "Move along." And I would have moved on.
The central question: who do you say Jesus is?
Many, many moons ago — about two thousand and something years ago — Jesus is walking along with his mates. He pauses, turns to them, and says this: "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?" Now, just as a quick aside, "Son of Man" is an oblique self-reference. Who do people say that I am? And they reply, "Some say you are John the Baptist. Some say you're Elijah. Still others say you're Jeremiah or one of the prophets." In other words, you are either the reincarnated version of your cousin whose head got lopped off two weeks ago — which means he was reincarnated as his cousin before his cousin was killed, which is a whole issue — or you're the reincarnation of one of the ancient prophets like Elijah or Jeremiah, or you're someone else. And there were people who thought he was a troublemaker. There were quite a lot of people who thought Jesus was actually an existential threat to the Jewish state.
So he turns to them and says, "Well, who do you say that I am?"
Park that story for another day, because here's the thing. That question — who do you say Jesus is? — is arguably the most important question you are ever going to answer in your life. I don't know what your spiritual orientation is like. I'm going to assume that some of you in this room today don't have the same spiritual orientation as me, and that is absolutely fine. It genuinely is. I'm just stoked you're here. But here's the thing: regardless of whether you consider yourself spiritual but not religious, whether you've been following Jesus your whole life or just five minutes, whether you're a Buddhist, an atheist, or something in between — it does not matter. How you perceive Jesus will impact how you respond to him. And how you respond to him is the most important decision you are going to make in your life. And to not make a decision is to make a decision.
So regardless of your spiritual orientation, you need to consider the question: who is Jesus, and how will you respond to him? Because either the stories are true and he is the God-man, or it's all made up and we should go home and have some cake. Because man, do I like cake. Especially lemon cake. Occasionally I hack my wife's Facebook and post something like, "Man, Harry's the man, he's so beautiful and amazing, I'm going to bake him a lemon cake and buy him some beer." And people go, "Oh, Amy's been hacked." And do you know what? She bakes me a lemon cake. So, real rewarding bad behaviour. But anyway, that's another thing for another day.
Background to John 9: the Festival of Lights
Here's the thing. In our story this morning, we hear of four different groups who respond to Jesus in four different ways, and each of their responses has an outcome for how they then go on to live.
Super quick recap. The story came from what's called the Gospel of John — one of four accounts of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. John, most likely Jesus' little cousin, a really interesting little guy, wrote this book. About two chapters earlier, Jesus and his disciples are on the way to Jerusalem, the capital city, for what's called the Feast of Tabernacles, otherwise known as the Festival of Lights. What they would do — and this is super cool — they would get these giant golden bowls, talking like the size of this band area up here, and they'd fill each one with around 100 to 120 logs, douse them in oil, and set them alight. Four of these bowls on the four corners of the city. Then men would come along with firebrands and light them, and they would dance through the streets throughout the night, playing music and having a party. And then the women — and this is bizarre, I'll be perfectly honest — they would have a candle competition, essentially. See who could have the tallest candle burning. Apparently the record was 22 metres high. I don't know how they measured that. I don't know how that's true. I don't know how it managed to burn that long because the wick wouldn't work. But the point is they would make these huge candles as high as this roof, if not higher, and they would burn them throughout the night. It went for seven nights.
Now, we might think, oh, that sounds vaguely fun. But remember, in ancient times there was no electricity. At night the city is dark. It's dangerous. If you've ever been to a country where there's no power, or you remember post-earthquake when there was no power, you remember how dark it can get. It's pitch black. And so they have all this fire going. There's celebration. There's music. There's drinking. There's eating. There's fun. The kids are not sleeping. Everyone's grumpy. It's great. For about a week. And in the midst of this, thousands and thousands of pilgrims would come each year.
In the midst of this, Jesus turns up and bumps into this blind man in our story.
The healing and its meaning
We're told that Jesus is looking at him, and the disciples ask him, "Teacher, who sinned? That man or his parents, for him to be born blind?" Now, I've got to put it out there. It's a pretty harsh God who punishes a foetus in the womb for its sin and makes it blind. Amy and I have some close friends on the North Island, and we buried their children. God did not want their children to be born with birth defects that led to their untimely deaths. One of my closest friends — I took his wedding, his wife got pregnant, we went out to see the baby, all really cool. He died about four months later because he was born with a defect in the heart. To say that happened because the baby did something in the womb is just silly.
The disciples are working on the assumption of cause and effect. And we might think that sounds a bit silly, but we do at times make that assumption to a degree. We'll say, well, that bad thing that happened to that person is kind of to be expected because they behave a certain way, so they should expect consequences. Or in secular circles you hear people say, "Karma — you did something bad, something bad comes back to you; you did something good, something good comes back to you." Cause and effect, to a degree. And to a degree there's an element of truth. But we need to be really careful when it comes to what is essentially judgmentalism, because human suffering is not always linked to bad thoughts, words, or deeds. Bad things happen to good people.
One of the privileges of my role is that I've had the privilege of sitting with people through some horrific times in their lives. I won't share the details, but there's one woman Amy and I know quite well from the North Island. Amy sat in the police interrogation room with her as this woman's entire life imploded because of what someone else had done. We walked with her through that season, and the season is still going on all these years later. It's still horrific. She's in contact with us quite often and we do our best to support her from afar. That did not happen to her because she's a bad person. She's a better person than I am. I'm a ratbag. She's a saint.
Terrible things happen to good people, and terrible things happened to Jesus. And regardless of whether you consider yourself a Christian or not, there is no way you can ever say that's because Jesus deserved it. The guy did nothing but help other people.
Which is why Jesus says in verse 3, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned." His point was that this man who was born blind wasn't born that way because of a direct consequence of something he or his parents did. He'd just been born that way. And what Jesus does is take that suffering, take the evil, take the darkness, and turn it into something good, something beautiful, something light.
So he takes this man aside. He spits in the dirt — which, just to be honest, that's gross. It's post-COVID. Don't do that to each other. I had COVID recently. Please don't do that. He spits in the ground, gets the mud, and the guy would have heard the footsteps, and then somebody slaps this stuff on his face. And then Jesus says, "Go wash yourself in the pool." And the guy's like, well, that's a weird thing to do. Okay. He goes to the pool, washes his face, and light dawns. Darkness is dispelled. A guy who has literally never seen light in his life, doesn't even know what colours are, suddenly can see around him — and Jesus isn't there. So he heads home, happy. Life is good for about five minutes.
It's a great story, even if you don't necessarily believe it. Jesus heals a man, changes his life. But here's the thing. The miracle points towards something beyond Jesus just healing someone. Through his actions, Jesus was showing who he is and what he had come to do. He was pointing to a deep spiritual truth in life, which is why he says, "I am the light of the world."
Now, you might miss the significance of that. In the ancient Jewish faith, right back when there was an ancient prophet called Moses, he met the living God. God gives him this mission to go to the Israelites and lead them out of slavery. And Moses says, "Who should I say sent me?" And God responds, "I am who I am. This is who you are to say to the Israelites: I am has sent me to you." And because of this, the phrase "I am" became synonymous with the name of God in Jewish circles. So whenever Jesus says "I am," he makes an I am statement. In the Gospel of John — John's account — there are seven I am statements. He's making a statement about his divine identity. "I am the light of the world. I am the spiritual light to a world living in darkness."
And I think that's why the responses of the four groups of people in our story are included in such detail — the neighbours, the Pharisees, the parents, and the blind man himself — because they all respond to Jesus in very different ways.
The first group: the neighbours
So, super quick. Let's look at the four groups. First, we've got the neighbours.
Now, who here has ever tried to awkwardly ignore their neighbours when going in and out of the house? I did it yesterday. I did not want to make small talk. You know, have you ever been to a hotel and you hear another door, so you just kind of wait a few seconds — and then, oh, they've gone — and make a run for the lift? No one wants to live in an apartment block and make small talk with neighbours they don't actually like, particularly when you heard them arguing the night before through the wall. No one wants to be in the lift making small talk. When you hop in the lift, everyone's chat, chat, chat — then silence. It's great for the introverts. The extroverts die on the inside on the way up and down.
But this is not an impersonal apartment block where we carefully avoid and ignore our neighbours so we don't have to make small talk. This is a neighbourhood where people know each other. Their kids play together, they eat together, they wash their clothes together, they go down to the well, they gossip about each other, they say horrible things about each other, they also celebrate good things about each other. This is proper community. This is not middle-class New Zealand where we all kind of try to awkwardly ignore people who aren't on our friend list on Instagram. They knew each other well.
And so when they see this man and see that he's healed, they know something is different. They walk up to him and say, "What's going on with you? You're looking at us. You can see. What happened?" And he explains. And we're told they don't get it.
What I find really interesting is that in their brief conversation, they could see he's better, but they couldn't understand it. Why? Because they're seeking a logical explanation for something that doesn't make logical sense.
I've got a friend — I've lost contact with her actually, a little while ago — but Mo. She's awesome. Mo had cancer twice, and both times around she got to death's door in hospital. My dad had become a pastor later in life, and both times around the word came to dad: "Mo is dying, you need to go see her." So dad goes to the hospital.
The first time he went, he took the prayer book — which is this red book we have as Anglicans — and it's got prayers in there. You can pray for the person who's dying. You can place holy oils on them and pray almost a little bit like the Catholic version of Last Rites. I've done it many times. It's a really poignant thing. He goes in prepared to do that. And Mo, who's only mildly compos mentis and struggling to speak, essentially says, "No." She's a stroppy Māori girl. She says, "No, Dave. No. You're going to pray that I get healed because I've got things to do next week." So my dad goes, "All right, Mo." And he prays for her. And then he starts to do the second prayer about praying for the upcoming death. She's like, "No, Dave." So dad prays for healing and leaves.
Mo turned up to church on Sunday. I kid you not. She got healed twice. It has happened twice in five years. And she's still alive to this day. That was back in 2005 the first time, and about 2007 or 2008 the second time. And since then she has been cancer-free. The doctors were like, "We genuinely don't understand it."
Now, here's the thing. She turned up to work, and she worked with a mate of mine from high school. I remember Jack saying to me, "How did that happen?" I said, "Well, go ask her." He said, "I did. It didn't make any sense. She said God healed her. That doesn't work." She came to parties. People said the same thing. She even went to church. People were like, "Wow, Mo, what happened?" "I got prayed for." "Oh, okay. Did you try a new drug?" "No, I got prayed for." "Oh, right. So are you on herbals?" They're trying to figure it out. Even the people at church couldn't make sense of it. They were inherently skeptical, just like the neighbours in our story today.
And in the end, they aren't sure what to do with this healing. So they take the man down the road to the experts, to the Pharisees, the religious leaders. Pharisees are religious people who are highly respected, and you go to them if you have an issue, if you want some wisdom or some advice. So they take the man down to these guys to help them get an understanding of what's going on. Their response to Jesus is essentially rooted in skepticism. They're skeptical, despite what they can see in front of them.
The second group: the Pharisees
Then we have the second response, from the Pharisees. Now these guys come across as nutcases to a degree, don't they? You can almost hear them yelling at the man, going back and forth, trying to make sense of what's going on with Jesus — or this man, by extension, with Jesus.
The Pharisees are threatened by Jesus. They see him as a threat to their power and influence, but also as a genuine existential threat to the Jewish state, because they knew the Romans would crush anyone who built up too much of a following, too much of a public profile. They knew the Romans would be brutal. And so they were engaging in a form of ancient cancelling — an ancient form of cancelling before social media. They said anyone who associates with Jesus is going to be excommunicated, shunned, cancelled.
Which is why they had this fixation on Jesus being a sinner. Did you notice they used the word "sinner" over and over and over again? Why? Because to them, a sinner isn't just someone who does bad things. A sinner is someone on the outside, someone who is completely unacceptable, completely unclean, someone who has intentionally made poor life choices, someone who hangs out with the wrong people — the people you don't want your kids hanging out with. And think about it, that's what Jesus did. He spent time socialising with drunks, with prostitutes, with tax collectors, with non-Jews, with social outcasts. He hung out with the people that polite society doesn't hang out with. And for the Pharisees, Jesus is the epitome of what it means to be a sinner — someone on the outside — which means there is no way he could have the ability to do something like this, because there's no way God would work through him.
And so they say to the man, "Tell the truth. We know this man is a sinner." To which the man replies, "I'm sorry, I don't know what else to tell you. One thing I do know: I was blind, but now I see." And at that point the whole story gets a bit silly. You can almost picture the spit flying. You ever seen someone so angry their veins pop out and the spit comes out? They scream at the man, "How? How did he open your eyes?" To which an exasperated bloke replies, "I've already told you. Do you want to hear it again? Look, we know that God listens to godly people. We know that God listens to the godly person who does his will. So if this man is not from God, he could do nothing." And then the Pharisees are enraged — enraged by his tone and the implication of what he's saying — and they grab the man and throw him out into the street.
Why are they so angry? They're angry because they're threatened by Jesus. But more than that, they're angry because he doesn't fit into their philosophical outlook on life. He doesn't match what they already believe to be true, and they won't allow their worldview to be changed or challenged. And I'm going to put it out there: it is scary to let your worldview be challenged. And so instead of embracing the truth about Jesus, they reject the healed man, and by extension Jesus, and they fail to see him for who he really is — the light of the world.
The third group: the parents
That brings us to our third group. This one's really short. It's the family — worst parents of the year award. They call on the man's parents, and the parents are frightened of the Pharisees. They dodge the questions and simply say, "Ask him. Ask our son." Why do they respond that way? Because they're scared.
And this is a really common response to Jesus — a really common response even today. We get a glimpse, perhaps even experience a miraculous answer to prayer. Perhaps we have an amazing spiritual encounter. Something happens. We see a glimpse of who Jesus is, but we're scared of what others might say or think. And so we respond by avoiding him. Or we relegate our faith to being such a private endeavour that we never speak about it to somebody else. Because we're scared.
The fourth group: the blind man himself
And that brings us to the fourth person who responds to Jesus — the man himself. Because after all the drama, his good day has gone down the dunny. He's excommunicated, abandoned by his parents, kicked out of his community. And he meets Jesus again. And of course, as Kirstie pointed out to us, he doesn't know who Jesus is, because he hasn't actually seen him before. And so this guy walks up to him and says, "Do you believe in the Son of Man?" — an oblique way of saying, do you believe in the Son of God? And he says, "Who is he, sir? Because he's the guy who healed me. Tell me so I might believe in him." And Jesus responds, "It's me. I am he."
And the man declares out loud — imagine at the top of his lungs — "Lord, I believe." And we're told he falls to his knees and worships Jesus, out of gratitude and amazement for what's happened.
Here's the thing. In Middle Eastern society, men do not do that. They do not get on their knees in front of other people. They do not degrade themselves like that. They act with mana. Imagine the prime minister walking out and throwing themselves at the feet of a local preacher and crying out, "I need Jesus." Everyone would look at him and go, "That's a tad weird and a bit unbecoming." It's not what you expect. And that's the man's response. Why? Because he recognises who Jesus is. Just like the people back in Africa thought I was a somebody and responded appropriately, this guy sees that Jesus is a somebody and responds appropriately. He was blind — literally living in darkness — and now he can see.
And herein lies the key difference between the man's response and all the other responses. The key difference is that he did not let rules, fear, philosophical sensibilities, or even skepticism get in the way. He simply responded in faith.
And you know, it's a tad ironic, isn't it? They're at a Festival of Lights, and the only person who sees the light of the world is the blind guy.
The challenge: how will you respond?
In our final verse, Jesus says, "I have come into this world so the blind will see." He didn't mean physically blind people. He meant spiritually blind.
Regardless of whether you've been following Jesus five minutes, five years, five decades, or not at all, the challenge of the story is to not let fear, skepticism, rules, or philosophical sensibilities get in the way of recognising who Jesus is — the light of the world. The challenge is to recognise who he is and then to weigh up how you're going to respond. You need to decide how you are going to respond to Jesus. Is he interesting? Yeah, he is. Is he God? I don't know — you need to weigh that up. Because your response to that has massive implications.
We all respond in different ways and at different rates. Amy, my wife, is a bit of a thinker. You ask her for something, she'll think about it. You ask me, I'm very impulsive. You might be like me, you might be more like Amy, you might be somewhere in between. You can take your time to weigh this up. But you all need to consider the question: who is Jesus, and how will I respond to him?
My hope is that you won't respond to him with skepticism. You won't respond to him with fear. You won't just write him off. But you'll actually weigh it up seriously. Because either the stories are true or they're not. And if they are true, then that demands something of us.