Horizons Bible Study 2016-2017
Who is Jesus? What a Difference a Lens Makes
Lesson 4: John 9
When I was in the fifth grade, I got eyeglasses. I was amazed at the difference. From a distance, I could see leaves on trees and street signs. I could make out the homework assignments on the blackboard.
Light and shadow were sharper and more nuanced.
The Gospel of John, more than any other Gospel, is distinctive in its portrayal of Jesus. The lens through which he is viewed is an eternal one. Jesus is the Word that created life, and Jesus is the light of the world. The image of Jesus as God’s light conveys his singular role as revealer — the one through whom God’s light shines and the one who illumines the meaning and purpose of human life (Frances Taylor Gench, “Encounters with Jesus”).
The focus of John 9 is sight and insight, blindness and cluelessness. Each character in the story represents far more than what one sees on the surface. Each character in the story, except Jesus, has a particular lens through which he or she views the world that either expands or limits her/his perception of who Jesus is.
The story begins with an unsettling question. Jesus and his entourage pass a man blind from birth begging on the street. Rather than giving the man a coin or entering into conversation, the disciples pose a theological question, “Who sinned — the man or his parents — causing him to be born blind?” It is a question that wants an orderly universe with a direct cause and effect. We ask of a person with cancer, “Did you smoke?” We want a predictable universe where health and happiness result from hard work and good behavior and poverty and disability are the consequences of laziness, addiction or ignorance.
Jesus will have none of turning a person’s disability into a theoretical question. Jesus says, “You’re asking the wrong question. We need to be agents of thriving compassion, working for the One who sent me.” Without the blind man seeking healing, Jesus initiates an act of compassion. Grace acts first before any deserving of love or healing. Jesus makes a mudpack of his spit and dust and places the paste on the man’s eyes. “Go, wash in the Pool of the Sent.” The man goes, washes and sees!
One might expect a grand celebration upon the man’s return, but instead his own family and neighbors are confused, agitated and anxious. I will call the man Benjamin, so he doesn’t remain nameless. Some question, “Is this the man who sat here and begged?” Others say, “Yes, it is he.” Others scoff, “No, he just resembles the blind beggar.” The formerly blind man, Benjamin, refuses to be talked about and elbows his way into the discussion. “I am the very same person.” The skeptical ask, “Really, how did this happen that you can see?”
Family and neighbors only knew Benjamin as restricted, destitute and dependent. They couldn’t get their heads around the fact that he could now see. They could only understand what had been and what in their world was possible.
We live in a world of assumptions that tell us how to view reality, God and others. Institutions, societal norms, family, friends, prejudice, love, hope and fear all become a lens through which we understand life.
The religious leaders of Jesus’ time (and religious people today) picture faith as a checklist of do’s and don’ts. The Sabbath, as a day of rest, was to be a tangible sign of God’s liberation from working every day as slaves in Egypt. But the understanding of the Sabbath had devolved into a finely prescribed list of what constituted work and rest. Because Benjamin had been the recipient of Jesus’ “work,” Benjamin gets hauled before the religious authorities and grilled. Everyone from family to authority figures are skeptical about what has happened.
In the exchanges between formerly blind Benjamin and the religious leaders in John 9:13-34, Benjamin refuses to be intimidated. In question after question, he returns to what he experienced with Jesus and progressively gains insight into who Jesus is. Maybe it takes being challenged before we can become clearer about our faith. Benjamin first defines Jesus as a prophet (9:17) and then as one from God (9:33). He ends up worshipping Jesus as the Son of Man, the one who brings “God’s dangerous, but healing light, into the world” (Tom Wright, “John for Everyone”).
Jesus as the light of the world challenges, and sometimes shatters, our assumptions. God then gets larger, brighter, riskier and more mysterious. How have you grown in insight and clarity about Jesus? How have you experienced Jesus as a “dangerous, but healing light”?
ROSALIND BANBURY is associate pastor for adult ministries at First Church in Richmond, Virginia.
