Encounter with a Sufferer

When I was a child growing up in Montreal, my family would often take vacations on the coast of Maine, at Old Orchard Beach. We would sometimes stay at a vacation spot called Bayview Lodge, which was a cluster of cottages not far from the beach. And we would see many familiar faces there, as families would return summer after summer for their vacations.

One of my abiding memories was of a physically and intellectually challenged boy named Cal. Actually, Cal was not a boy at all – he was a young man in his late 20’s when I first encountered him. But he only had the mental capacity of a five year old. His body was severely disfigured – he was short, had a hunched back, and his head was much larger than normal. He walked with a painful bow-legged gait. He wore thick horn-rimmed glasses, had a cleft palate, and wore a funny sailor hat to keep the sun off his gigantic head.

Cal loved nothing more than to play with trucks in the sand. I well remember the first time he hobbled over to where I was playing, wanting to join me. As a child, I recoiled in fear from this strange young man, even though my parents assured me that he was harmless. I guess I just couldn’t get used to having a playmate who was old enough to have whiskers, and who made guttural truck sounds in a deep male voice. I never did feel very comfortable whenever Cal was around.

I’ve thought about Cal from time to time since then. Here was a human being whose entire life was defined by his physical limitations. Cal would never run and frolic in the surf, he could never read a book. He would never experience the mystery of romantic love. He would never have children of his own. There were whole areas of human experience that he was locked out of. Indeed, Cal would not even live very long – I learned later that in his late twenties, he was already long past his normal life expectancy. Cal’s condition defined everything about him.

And what must life have been like for his parents? I don’t remember much about them, other than that they were gentle, devoted people who clearly loved their unique son. But their whole lives must have revolved around his care. Special diet, special medications, special equipment to help him get around in a specially-designed home. Special helpers who would come in to assist them and give them a break from the 24-7 responsibility of caring for Cal. And in the end, what did they have to look forward to but an early death, and a tearful funeral with a short, wide casket.

Cal and his parents represent a whole category of people for whom suffering is a way of life. In our day and age, we have attempted to be sensitive to them; to respect and accommodate their special needs. But for the most part, we, who consider ourselves “normal” (and that is a dubious assumption!) tend, for the most part to ignore those who suffer, if not avoid them altogether.

And yet when God visited this planet, He did not do this. When you read the Gospels – the stories of Jesus’ life and ministry – you quickly realize that physically and mentally challenged people—suffering people—were highly visible. They played a very strong supporting role in the drama of redemption. They were attracted to Jesus, and indeed, Jesus was attracted to them. He definitely had a special place in his heart for those people for whom suffering was a way of life.

Indeed, when Jesus articulated his “mission statement” at the outset of his ministry, he quoted a passage from the book of Isaiah that framed his ministry in terms of its impact on sufferers…

The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. (Luke 4:18-19, quoting Isaiah 61:1-2)

When John the Baptist was thrown in prison, he went through a period of darkness and doubt. At his lowest point, he sent his disciples to ask Jesus if he really was the Messiah. Here is what Jesus said:

Matthew 11:4-5 Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor.

The central message of the Gospel is that Jesus cares about sufferers.

And in John 9, he encounters another one, a man who had been born blind. Of all the healing miracles Jesus performed, he gave sight to the blind more than any other. That is because there is a tremendous spiritual symbolism in that particular miracle. It shows that…

Just as Jesus can give physical sight, so he can give spiritual sight to those who are spiritually blind.

Which is, in fact, an even greater miracle.

In order to fully appreciate what happened when Jesus encountered the blind man in John 9, it is important that we have some understanding of the preceding chapters.

In John’s Gospel, we have three great themes:

1. Light – Jesus is the light of the world

   1. “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” (John 8:12)

2. Life – Jesus is the source of eternal life

   1. “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty. (John 6:35)

   2. “I came that you might have life, and have it abundantly (John 10:10)

   3. “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live… (John 11:25)

3. Love – Jesus is the embodiment of God’s love

   1. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son (John 3:16)

   2. By this will all men know that you are my disciples if you love one another (John 13:35)

Now as Jesus moves along in his public ministry, there is a growing antagonism to these claims from the religious leaders. The crowds loved him, but the religious leaders hated him. They even began plotting to kill him.

We come to John 7, and Jesus goes up to Jerusalem for the Feast of Tabernacles. And there, at the Temple, he runs smack into the Pharisees and the scribes, the teachers of the Jewish Law. John 7 and 8 are fierce passages, full of tension and confrontation as the Jewish leaders square off against Jesus.

The Jews are angry with him because, on his previous visit to Jerusalem a year ago, he had performed a healing on the Sabbath day – he had healed a paralyzed man at the Pool of Bethesda. He simply told the man to pick up his mat and walk – which in the opinion of the scholars of the Jewish law, constituted work, and was therefore a breach of the Sabbath.

They didn’t have eyes to see the miracle, they didn’t rejoice that this poor man had been healed, the only thing they understood was that a rule had been broken. That was their mindset.

So when Jesus reappeared in Jerusalem at the Feast of Tabernacles a year later, they resumed their attack on him. This time, they even accused him of being demon-possessed. Imagine!

So Jesus says to them, in chapters 7-8, “You people are blind. You don’t have eyes to see the spiritual truth that is staring you in the face. You don’t understand my teaching; you don’t even understand the Law of Moses in which you claim to be experts. You don’t know me, or my father. You don’t know where I came from or where I’m going. You are spiritually blind.”

And against that backdrop, on the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles (which lasted a week), he said to the common people:

John 8:12 I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.

In other words, your religious leaders are blind but you don’t have to be. Follow me and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free (8:32).

So there is this great battle of light and darkness raging through chapters 7 and 8. Chapter 8 closes with the Jewish leaders so enraged that they pick up stones to stone Jesus because he claimed to be God. He said “Before Abraham was, I am” – using the very statement by which God introduced himself to Moses back in Exodus 3.

So that sets the stage for what happens in chapter 9…

Chapters 7 & 8	Chapter 9
Inside the Temple	Outside the Temple
Jesus despised and rejected by the “super spiritual”	Jesus received and worshiped by a simple sufferer
Jesus exposes the spiritual blindness of the religious leaders	Jesus removes the physical and spiritual blindness of a poor man
Jesus hides himself from the Jews	Jesus reveals himself to a blind man
Jesus accused of being demon-possessed	Jesus worshiped as Lord and Saviour

Let’s see what happens in chapter 9…

John 9:1 As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth.

John 9:2 His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

Let’s stop there. When it comes to suffering, the question that seems to come most easily to our lips is “Why?”

• Why did this happen?

• Why have I been given this cross to bear?

• Why me and not someone else?

And theologians have always attempted to come up with satisfying answers to the question of Why? In saying what they say in v. 2, Jesus’ disciples show that they are assuming a very common answer to the question Why?.

Their assumption is that suffering comes as God’s punishment for sin. And so their question is simply: Who sinned - this man or his parents, that he should be born blind? Now to our ears, that seems like an odd question to ask – How could a man sin before he is born, that he could be born bearing the punishment for that sin?

But the Jewish rabbis taught that it was possible for a baby to sin “in utero”, and they placed great significance in what happened to a baby, or the movements of the baby in the mother’s womb.

For that matter, there are some religions today which teach reincarnation, the belief that a person’s current situation is determined by his moral performance in a previous life.

The other part of the question is easier to understand, because it was generally believed, and still is in some circles, that sins committed by parents, or even grandparents, may be visited upon the children. And in a certain sense that can be true – a mother addicted to cocaine gives birth to an addicted baby. The sins of the mother are visited upon the baby as a matter of cause and effect.

So the disciples’ question isn’t as strange as it appears. But notice that their question comes, not from compassion for the blind man himself, but simply from their own theological curiosity. In their eyes, the man born blind was a riddle to be solved, not a real person who was suffering. But Jesus saw him with different eyes.

John 9:3 “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.

I am struck, over and over again, by how Jesus never dwelt on a person’s past – only on his future. Last week we saw in John 4 how…

Jesus is always more interested in where we are going, and what we’re becoming, than where we have been.

He showed that in his concern for the woman at the well. In John 8, he shows it again in his dealings with a woman caught in adultery. He says “Neither do I condemn you. Go now and leave your life of sin.”

Here, in relation to the blind man, he says “The matter of who sinned is entirely irrelevant. The matter of moral blame for this man’s condition is not the question. The reason that this man is the way he is right now – the reason that God has sovereignly allowed him to be blind – is so that the work of God might be displayed in his life. This man is blind in order to show what God can do.”

And it seems to me that this is a powerful perspective on why God allows suffering in this world. He allows it in order to show what he can do in it and through it. If you, or someone you love is suffering, that is ultimately why God has allowed it – He wants to show what he can do in your life and through your life.

Now many of us immediately jump to the end of the chapter and say “Well, what God wanted to do was to cure this blind man. So that must be what God wants to do in all cases of suffering – he wants to cure it. He wants to take it away. That must be the work that he wants to display.” And there are many Christian groups who take that view.

But I believe that that is a wrong assumption. Jesus did not heal this blind man in order to show that God could heal physical blindness – even congenital blindness. The climax of the chapter comes not when the man has his physical eyes opened, as dramatic as that is, but when he has his spiritual eyes opened – because that is the greater miracle. The opening of the man’s physical eyes is merely an overture to the opening of his spiritual eyes.

And this happens in stark contrast to the Pharisees, who see with their own eyes a physical miracle that has taken place, but they can’t accept it because of the spiritual blindness of their own hearts.

There are many sufferers who have asked God for physical healing. The Apostle Paul was one of them. Some have been healed, others have not. We have to trust God that the work he wants to display in our lives may require that we remain in a condition of physical suffering in order for God’s greater work of spiritual healing to be that much more powerfully revealed in us.

For example, the Apostle Paul pled with God to heal him of his physical problem – he called it a thorn in the flesh – and we have good reason to believe that Paul suffered from a condition of near-blindness. But God didn’t heal him physically. Rather, God said “Paul, my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in your weakness.” So Paul’s physical suffering became a platform for the grace and power of God to be worked out in his life.

The same thing can be said of Fanny Crosby. She wasn’t born blind, but through a tragic mistake, a doctor unintentionally blinded her at the age of six weeks. And she was blind for the rest of her life. And she wrote thousands of hymns and was a tremendous blessing to countless people who marvelled at how God could use a blind woman so powerfully.

Look at Joni Earickson. A diving accident as a teenager left her paralyzed and in a wheelchair. Many well-meaning Christians told her that God’s will was to heal her, and the reason she was in that wheelchair was that she just didn’t have enough faith in God. But God has used her in that wheelchair to bring blessing to thousands of sufferers because she let God use her suffering as a platform for something greater that he wanted to do. Indeed, we would never even have heard of Joni Earickson were it not for the fact that God allowed that accident to take place.

Make no mistake about it – God cares for people who are suffering, and he wants to do a great work in them and through them – but that great work may not involve healing them physically.

But we’re getting ahead of our story. Pick it up again in verse 4.

John 9:4 As long as it is day, we must do the work of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work.

John 9:5 While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”

John 9:6 Having said this, he spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man’s eyes.

John 9:7 “Go,” he told him, “wash in the Pool of Siloam” (this word means Sent). So the man went and washed, and came home seeing.

Why did Jesus do this strange thing to heal this man? He spat on the ground (the Greek verb for spit is “ptuo”!), made some mud and put it on the blind man’s eyes. There have been all sorts of suggestions made – people in those days felt that there was special healing powers in saliva; mud was often applied to wounds as a poultice, etc. etc.

We don’t know why Jesus did it this way, but a couple of observations are in order:

1. Jesus almost always physically touched the suffering people he encountered. That’s really saying something, because in those days, touching a person who was ill was regarded to make you ritually unclean. People just didn’t touch sick people or dead bodies. Yet Jesus didn’t care about any of that – he wanted to show this man that he mattered to him, so he touched him, and he touched him where he was suffering. He anointed his eyes.

2. He anointed his eyes with mud, which did three things:

3. 1. it made his blindness worse, if that were possible. If there were any glimmer of light before, it was gone now. Sometimes when Jesus deals with us, our problems get worse before they get better

   2. it made him look rather strange. Sometimes when God is working on us, we end up looking ridiculous in the eyes of others

   3. it gave him an incentive to obey Jesus command – it gave him a reason to go and wash

4. Jesus commanded him “Go and wash in the Pool of Siloam”. What Jesus commanded wasn’t easy. Remember, he was a blind man. He spent his days sitting begging outside the Temple. His family probably dropped him off there at the beginning of the day, and picked him up again at night. That was all he could do. And now Jesus sends him on a mission.

   Often when Jesus healed someone, he asked the person to do take an active part in the healing process.For example, in Mark 3, a man came to Jesus with a withered hand. Jesus said “stretch forth your hand”. That must have been a terribly hard thing for that man to do. He had gone through life hiding that hand, concealing that hand, and now Jesus said to stretch it out in front of everyone.

   The Pool of Siloam was located about 1 km away from the Temple, in the southeast corner of the city. It could only be reached through narrow winding streets. It must have been very difficult for this blind man with mud on his eyes to negotiate his way through the jostling crowds and the clamorous marketplace, asking directions along the way to the Pool of Siloam. But he did it. He did it in obedience. He did it because he trusted Jesus. Notice that Jesus had simply said “Go and wash in the Pool of Siloam” He hadn’t made any promises to the man. He hadn’t said “Go and wash and you’ll be able to see.” This blind man went strictly by faith.

Verse 7 tells us: “So the man went and washed, and came home seeing.”

What an experience for a man born blind!

Notice that he went home. Sometimes the hardest place to go when God has done a work in your life is to go home. It is hardest to tell those who have known you best and longest that the Lord has changed your life, that you’re not the same person anymore.

Look at the reception he got (v. 8)…

John 9:8 His neighbors and those who had formerly seen him begging asked, “Isn’t this the same man who used to sit and beg?”

John 9:9 Some claimed that he was. Others said, “No, he only looks like him.” But he himself insisted, “I am the man.”

John 9:10 “How then were your eyes opened?” they demanded.

John 9:11 He replied, “The man they call Jesus made some mud and put it on my eyes. He told me to go to Siloam and wash. So I went and washed, and then I could see.”

This is the man’s personal testimony. Nothing fancy. Nothing elaborate. Just the facts of how Jesus changed his life. He repeats his testimony in v. 15. Now look what happened next…

John 9:12 “Where is this man?” they asked him. “I don’t know,” he said.

The blind man didn’t know a whole lot about Jesus. He didn’t know where he was or who he was. All he knew was that Jesus had healed him.

So these people decided to do what people always do when something happens that they can’t explain – they go to the experts.

John 9:13 They brought to the Pharisees the man who had been blind.

John 9:14 Now the day on which Jesus had made the mud and opened the man’s eyes was a Sabbath.

Jesus healed this man on the Sabbath. The Pharisees were going to have a problem with that. Specifically they had a problem with how he did it. Jesus made mud – an action which was considered by the Pharisees and legal scholars to be work, and thus, a desecration of the Sabbath.

The rabbis had formulated all sorts of rules and regulations around the Sabbath – they called it “building a hedge around the law” to keep anyone from inadvertently breaking it. And they were very scrupulous in applying these rules. The results were ridiculous: You were not allowed to spit on the ground on the Sabbath, lest your spittle roll in the dust and make mud. You were not allowed to put ointment on a wound on the Sabbath, lest the ointment draw out the pus, which would be work.

Jesus broke their rules and incited their anger. They were not concerned that a man had been given his sight – they were angry that someone had dared to break their rules. That is why they say in v. 16…

“This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath.”

But others asked, “How can a sinner do such miraculous signs?” So they were divided.

John 9:17 Finally they turned again to the blind man, “What have you to say about him? It was your eyes he opened.” The man replied, “He is a prophet.”

The man still didn’t know much about Jesus.

John 9:18 The Jews still did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they sent for the man’s parents.

John 9:19 “Is this your son?” they asked. “Is this the one you say was born blind? How is it that now he can see?”

John 9:20 “We know he is our son,” the parents answered, “and we know he was born blind.

John 9:21 But how he can see now, or who opened his eyes, we don’t know. Ask him. He is of age; he will speak for himself.”

John 9:22 His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews, for already the Jews had decided that anyone who acknowledged that Jesus was the Christ would be put out of the synagogue.

John 9:23 That was why his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.”

Imagine! Instead of celebrating the miraculous healing of their son, these parents are cowering in fear lest they be put out of the synagogue. To be excommunicated from the synagogue would have been a severe punishment, because it would have cut them off from their social life and even their ability to make a living. This is how the Pharisees enforced their spiritual authority. They were bullies.

John 9:24 A second time they summoned the man who had been blind. “Give glory to God,” they said. “We know this man is a sinner.”

John 9:25 He replied, “Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!”

John 9:26 Then they asked him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?”

John 9:27 He answered, “I have told you already and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples, too?”

John 9:28 Then they hurled insults at him and said, “You are this fellow’s disciple! We are disciples of Moses!

John 9:29 We know that God spoke to Moses, but as for this fellow, we don’t even know where he comes from.”

John 9:30 The man answered, “Now that is remarkable! You don’t know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes.

John 9:31 We know that God does not listen to sinners. He listens to the godly man who does his will.

John 9:32 Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind.

John 9:33 If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.”

John 9:34 To this they replied, “You were steeped in sin at birth; how dare you lecture us!” And they threw him out.

Now watch what happens next. All this time, Jesus was nowhere to be found. But as soon as this happened…

John 9:35 Jesus heard that they had thrown him out, and when he found him, he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?”

John 9:36 “Who is he, sir?” the man asked. “Tell me so that I may believe in him.”

John 9:37 Jesus said, “You have now seen him; in fact, he is the one speaking with you.”

John 9:38 Then the man said, “Lord, I believe,” and he worshiped him.

The blind man now saw Jesus, not only with his physical eyes, but with the eyes of his spirit as well, and he recognized him and worshiped him.

1. Jesus has a special place in his heart for those who are suffering.

2. The purpose of suffering is to show what God can do.

3. Jesus’ goal in this encounter was not just to heal the man physically – it was to awaken him spiritually so that he could recognize who Jesus really was, and believe in him.

Have you recognized Jesus for who he really is?