March 15, 2026
Did you ever think, if God would only do some spectacular miracle, I would believe, and not only me, everyone would believe! You’re looking for God to do something amazing!
God might respond, how about this? I made the earth, which has everything you need: air you can breath, water to drink, wash and play with, all kinds of food, and temperatures you can tolerate. How about this amazing planet you live on, with over a million species of animals, all adapted to their climate. If you look at outer space, there is no other planet like this that can sustain life! The earth is spectacular! Is that enough so you’ll believe?
Or how about the human brain! I made it so you don’t even have to think about your heart, your brain automatically keeps it beating! Your brain also keeps you breathing, and your digestive system digesting! Is that enough so you’ll believe?
We might say, that’s great God. But do something else, something really big, like a great healing! That would really take me across the finish line to put all my faith in you!
The question is, how much spectacular-ness do you need in order to believe, to put your faith in God and follow Jesus? Today we’ll see people have different responses to a miracle when Jesus heals a blind man in a story from the gospel of John.
John has a moment at the end of his gospel when he answers the question: why did he write his gospel? He says in John 20:31, These signs “are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name.” John wrote the gospel about Jesus, so that you will believe! You didn’t see the spectacular healings, the signs Jesus performed. But these are written so that you will come to believe. So that you will put your trust in Jesus and have life in his name. John’s gospel is an invitation to faith.
In John chapter 9, Jesus’ disciples see a blind man who has been blind since birth. They ask Jesus, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Back then, they thought if you were disabled in any way, it was a punishment from God. I hope we don’t think that today. Jesus told his disciples that nobody sinned! The man wasn’t blind because of anybody sinning.
Then Jesus spits on the ground, makes some mud with the saliva, and puts it on the man’s eyes. I think it’s a good thing the man was blind, otherwise he wouldn’t let Jesus come for his eyes with dirt and spit! Yuck! So, Jesus puts this mixture on the man’s eyes and tells him to go wash in the pool of Siloam. What does the blind man do? He chooses to walk by faith, not by sight. He puts his faith in Jesus to heal him. He goes, washes in the pool of Siloam, and on the way home, he can see!
The man’s neighbors, and the people who used to see him begging have different reactions to him now being able to see. Some say, this is the blind man, Jesus healed him! Others say, no, this guy just looks like the blind man. The formerly blind man says, “I am the man!”
The neighbors bring the man to the religious leaders called Pharisees. They ask the man, how is it you can see now? The man tells how Jesus put mud on his eyes, then he washed and now he can see. Even the Pharisees are divided on what happened. Some of them say, Jesus is not from God, he does not keep the Sabbath! Because Jesus healed the man on the Sabbath. They believed Jesus shouldn’t work on the Sabbath.
Other Pharisees say, how can Jesus perform these signs if he is a sinner? They don’t believe that the man had been born blind, so they send for his parents. They ask his parents, “Is this your son? Was he born blind? How is it that he can see?”
“’We know he is our son,’ the parents answer, ‘and we know he was born blind. 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 says, “His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jewish leaders, who already had decided that anyone who acknowledged Jesus was the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue.” The Pharisees have already decided they hate Jesus. They aren’t going to believe what they saw, what they experienced, a man born who was born blind, standing in front of them, seeing. There is something to see, but they won’t look. There’s something to discover, but they deny it’s there.
The Pharisees decide to bring the man back and question him again. Tell the truth, they say, we know Jesus is a sinner.
The man says, “Whether Jesus is a sinner or not, I don’t know.” The man doesn’t have to understand everything in order to believe something. He says, “Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t’ know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!” (That’s a line from the song, “Amazing Grace”, I once was lost, but now I’m found. Was blind but now I see.) For many Christians, this is where we are. We tell our faith story. We can’t explain it all. But we know, at one moment in my life, I was in trouble, or I asked God for a sign, and something happened. For some of us it happened instantly. Or for some, it happened gradually.
The Pharisees ask, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” the man is getting tired of the same questions, over and over. He replies, I told you. You didn’t listen. Do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples too?
They don’t like that! They hurl insults! We are disciples of Moses, but this Jesus guy, we don’t know where he comes from. The man says, “This is remarkable, you don’t know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners. He listens to the godly person who does his will. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” They say to him, “You were steeped in sin at birth!” In other words, you deserved to be born blind! And they throw him out. They are refusing to see what can be seen, refusing to believe what is in front of them. Sometimes we’ve all been guilty of that. We have a set of ideas of what we believe, and we’re not always open to God’s way. The Pharisees insult the man born blind and reuse to believe him. Sometimes we don’t understand something, and instead of expressing compassion, while we sing about mercy and grace, we can’t extend that to others. We should be the most compassionate people in any room we enter.
Jesus goes and finds the man after the Pharisees threw him out, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” “Who is he sir?” the man asks. “Tell me so that I may believe in him.” Jesus says, “You have now seen him; in fact, he is the one speaking with you.” The man says, “Lord, I believe,” and he worshiped him.
My challenge for you this week is to think about the reason you believe in God. Share that with someone. John shared the story of the blind man Jesus healed so that we would believe. Pay it forward so someone else might believe as well.
The story of Jesus healing the man born blind teaches us the importance of an open mind to God, and an open mind to faith. Jesus came to earth and he was so much better and bigger than anyone imagined. God so loved the world that he gave his son so no one would ever be lost to God. There are very few occasions when you will be absolutely certain about anything. The story of the blind man teaches us; you do not have to understand everything to believe something. Amen.
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