Psalm 23
Ephesians 5: 8 – 14
John 9: 1 – 41
A homily by Fr. Gene Tucker, given at
“A NEW DEFINITION OF SIN”
A wonderful line from the hymn “Amazing Grace” goes like this:
“For once I was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.”
The phrase seems to refer directly to the healing of the blind man, whose account we have before us in our gospel reading this morning, for this is the statement of the man born blind, “…one thing I know, that though I was blind, now I see.”
The phrase seems to refer directly to the healing of the blind man, whose account we have before us in our gospel reading this morning, for this is the statement of the man born blind, “…one thing I know, that though I was blind, now I see.”
As we consider this incident, a question arises: Who is/are the one/s who cannot see? Is it the blind man? Or is it the Pharisees?
In time, as the event unfolds, we come to see that it is the Pharisees who cannot see, despite their claim to be knowledgeable about the ways of God….for they say, “We are disciples of Moses.”
And what, exactly, can they not see?
What they cannot see is Jesus’ identity as the Son of Man, the one who had come into the world to show the way to the Father.
As the conversation between the man born blind who can now see and the Pharisees heats up, we see that the Pharisees deepen their hostility to Jesus, and entrench themselves in their hardened positions. John tells us that those hardened positions included throwing anyone out of the synagogue who confessed that Jesus is the Christ.
The Pharisees heap scorn on the man who was healed, saying to him, “You were born in utter sin, and you would teach us?” What they mean by this statement is that the healed man is a through-and-through sinner, certainly no one whose spiritual authority could be trusted.
So, in the final analysis, it’s the Pharisees who come off as sinners. They fail to see the true identity of Jesus as is revealed in His sovereign power, that power which comes from God the Father. It is through the signs that Jesus has done that we see His true identity. All throughout the first eleven chapters of John’s gospel account, we read of one miraculous event after another: changing water into wine, feeding the 5,000, healing the blind man, raising Lazarus from the dead (which is our reading for next Sunday). Noticing the structure of these first chapters of the Fourth Gospel, biblical scholars often label the first eleven chapters “The Book of Signs”.
The Pharisees’ sin isn’t one of having transgressed one of the hundreds of laws that the Law of Moses put off bounds.
The Pharisees’ sin isn’t a matter of having committed a misdeed. No, their sin is a matter of unbelief.
Now we have arrived at the root of the Pharisees’ sinful state, that of unbelief in Jesus as Son of Man. Having reach this point, we are able to backtrack in John’s gospel account to chapter three, verse 16, which says, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, to the end that all who believe in Him should not perish, but have eternal life.”
In that statement, made by Jesus to Nicodemus, we find the heart of a new understanding of what sin actually is.
Sin isn’t strictly a matter of doing some act that is wrong. Sin is a matter of turning away from God as God is revealed in the person, work, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
And, if we are to look back at our actions through this lens of understanding of what sin is, we can see that, ultimately all of our actions that fail to meet God’s standards of holiness amount to a turning away from God.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be too hard on those ancient Pharisees. After all, they are simply trying to live up to what amounted to their best understanding of the ways of God. But their best understanding of the ways of God blocked any new or different understanding. So blind were they that they could not see that the miraculous healing of the blind man, which was proved conclusively to them through the witness of the man, his family, and the man’s ability to see, amounted to proof that Jesus had at His command the very power of God. In response to this reality, all the Pharisees can do is to complain that Jesus had done this loving act of healing on the Sabbath day! How could they have possibly missed the evident power of God in their midst?
But the question comes to us, as well it should have to the Pharisees: What do we think we know and understand about Jesus, His life, teaching, death and resurrection that block a deeper understanding of exactly who Jesus is? Does our unwillingness to grasp the deeper insights into Jesus as He is revealed in Holy Scripture amount to unbelief?
After all, Jesus makes a very exclusive claim about Himself, saying in John 14: 6, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father, but by me.” If we truly believe this claim, then shouldn’t we embark on a quest to come to know Jesus more deeply and fully, that we may come to full belief in Him?.
AMEN.
