Believing is Seeing
Believing is Seeing
When Jesus’s disciples ask if the man born blind was so born because of his sin, they’re doing what many of us have done at least once. We’ve come against a situation so overwhelmingly tragic that we say something to relieve our secondhand grief without considering how the person actually experiencing the grief will experience our explanation. Jesus puts it another way: We want to know the cause of something that is already in the past, and therefore something we can’t change, although it might temporarily make us feel better if we know who to blame. What matters, Jesus tells his disciples, isn’t the cause, but its purpose, over which we still have some control. I know something of this.
When I was seventeen, my mother (a school principal) took a trip to the Southwest with a friend and teacher at her school. They came to a lookout point at the Grand Canyon. She got too close to the edge, lost her balance and fell. At a memorial service in my large Baptist church, the Pastor — who was close to Mom and normally a wise preacher willing to puncture easy assumptions — said that she had at least died while appreciating God’s gift of the natural world.
Truly I say to you that for most of my college years I was spittin’ mad at God. But as more and more people came into my life who loved me, and in the years since have continued to come into my life, I have found the love of God that remains and endures the randomness of this crazy world. I do not believe in God as puppet master, for God has created this world in freedom, with people and things bouncing off of each other in seemingly random ways. But I do believe in God as the great improviser, always able to open a door in our lives where love can come in. I no longer ask the cause, but I have found the purpose.
And in the case of the man born blind, it doesn’t take years for the purpose to become clear, because his healing puts him in the middle of a fight. At least some Jewish experts believe that Jesus has violated the commandment not to work on the Sabbath by the healing itself and the means of the healing, the making of mud which hearkened back to when the Israelites were forced to make mud bricks in Egypt. So for PR purposes, they need the healed man to disown his healer. And he’s on his own, even his parents want nothing to do with him or the circumstances of his healing for fear of being “put out of the synagogue.” And when he refuses to dissociate himself from Jesus, he himself is “driven out” because, back to the disciples’ original dumb question, he is the one “born entirely in sins.”
To be clear, Jesus had serious disagreements with the religious leaders of his people. His disciples would have serious disagreements that did lead to their expulsion. John’s comment about the parents’ fear of being “put out of the synagogue” is likely reading back into the story something that happened to Jesus’s disciples. But the point of this story is not for us to carry 2,000 year-old grudges. It’s whether we can see ourselves in the man born blind, the victim of random circumstances, but who after being driven out, Jesus “found him.” And having seen that being healed of his physical blindness was just the start of his troubles, this man could still say, “Lord, I believe,” and also “trust.” No longer fixated on the cause of his blindness, he now knows God’s purpose for him. The cliché is “Seeing is believing.” The truth here is that believing is seeing.
We are here because Jesus found us, in ways that we can only speak for ourselves. My story is not your story. And each of us has our own past for which we might want to find a cause, or others might want to impose a cause on us. But each of us also has a purpose. And there are many whom Jesus is finding, and will find through us, in our listening, and our loving, without platitudes or dumb questions: just listening, loving, and finding.
March 15th, 2026
The Fourth Sunday in Lent Year A
The Rev. David Kendrick