You Have Seen Him

Note: Services for Sunday March 15 2026 were cancelled due to a Winter Storm so this sermon is presented in written form.

You Have Seen Him (John 9:1-41)

If I was a better planner I would have planned a series of Sunday morning sermons for the season of Lent and it would have been called: Conversations with Jesus in the Gospel of John.

Two weeks ago, we had Jesus in a conversation with the Pharisee Nicodemus and it takes up most of John chapter three.  Last week we had a conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan Woman at Jacob’s well and that took up most of John chapter 4.  Today we have Jesus in conversation with the man born blind, and the whole miracle and fallout take up all of John chapter 9.

John let’s us go deeper with these encounters and we get more of the back and forth conversation. Not only this, we also see more of the resulting fallout as well.

Some might wonder, why didn’t Jesus perform even more miracles?  He had the power to do anything.  He could have multiplied bread every day at noon, why do it only twice?  Last week we read how he sent the disciples into town to buy food.  Why not just zap more bread into existence?

Well today’s reading may give us a big part of an answer.  Jesus gave sight to a man born blind.  And this was a beautiful act of mercy but it led to a lot of consequences. 

The man was basically put on trial, questioned repeatedly, even his parents were harassed and the parents end up distancing themselves from their own son.  Ultimately the man is expelled from the Synagogue, which was like a public shunning.  A miracle is never a simple thing.  There were always unintended consequences.

If Jesus had only been interested in healing miracles for their own sake, he would have opened up a clinic near the Pool of Siloam and just healed people all day.

So, a close reading shows us that each and every miracle performed was both an immediate act of mercy but secondly it was always a profoundly symbolic act filled with meaning connecting Jesus to centuries of prophesy and promise.

Listen to our Isaiah reading:

And I will lead the blind

in a way that they do not know,

in paths that they have not known

I will guide them.

I will turn the darkness before them into light,

the rough places into level ground.

These are the things I do,

and I do not forsake them. (Isaiah 42:16)

In that section of Isaiah God is speaking to a wayward Israel.  Israel was the unfaithful servant but God would send his faithful servant Jesus the Messiah and open the eyes of a blind Israel.

Now we have Jesus and we have an actual blind man there on the ground.  What is so interesting is both the disciples and the Pharisees get it wrong.  The disciples see the man as a curiosity, “Was it him or his parents who sinned so that he ended up this way?”  They saw him as a debatable theological point and not as a human being.  Let’s always be careful not to do that, every single person is made in the image of God, people are more than their characteristics.

The Pharisees viewed the healed man as a threat to good order. 

Only Jesus had it right, this man born blind was one in whom the glory of God would be revealed.

The Pharisees claimed to have sight, but were indeed blind.  This man was born blind, but now he could see.

But the miracle of restoring his sight was unimportant compared to this next part.

³⁵ Jesus heard that they had cast him out, and having found him he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” ³⁶ He answered, “And who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?” ³⁷ Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and it is he who is speaking to you.” ³⁸ He said, “Lord, I believe,” and he worshiped him. (John 9:35-38)

Who is he sir that I may believe in him?

Jesus said to him, “You have seen him.”

Before that man encountered Jesus he had never seen anything in his entire life.  Jesus was both the thing seen and the giver of sight.

This is a perfect example of how God is both the giver and object of faith. 

God had said he would lead Israel down a path they had not known, that he would open their eyes.

Now here is Jesus the fulfillment of every promise in the Old Testament and he is opening up this man’s physical eyes to sight but more importantly opening up his spiritual eyes as well.  This is what he was doing for all Israel and all the world. 

I was 19 years old when I went from spiritual blindness to seeing.  And it was God who performed this miracle, it wasn’t through my own effort.  I think If it had been a choice I was left up to make I would have made the wrong choice every time. 

The blind man made no choice to believe in Jesus, he was made to see him.  So many of Jesus’ miracles are an acting out fulfillment of the promises he was fulfilling. 

And the beauty of this is that we get to participate in a miracle every single Sunday morning when we participate in the Lord’s Supper… Do you believe… you have seen, touched and tasted the Lord.  How can this be? 

You know that man who was blind, it was a big deal that he was born that way.  The miracle felt less scary if he had like only lost his sight a couple of years back. 

But this wasn’t the case, for all we know the man was born without any optic nerve at all, or the part of his brain that interprets visual information was missing.  There was no possibility of healing, or cure, even with today’s medicine he wouldn’t have had a chance.  It was an utter miracle for Jesus to restore his sight.

We are all born blind like that as well… we have a birth defect called original sin.  Who is this Son of Man that I may believe in him?  We are born in a state that we cannot see God even if we tried, all we can see is our own selfish needs, our own insecurities, our own petty jealousies and on and on it goes… then here comes the Holy Spirit and he restores sight and we can see this God who loves us and wants to save us. 

As beautiful and as wonderful as the healing miracles are, they really point to something more important, the spiritual healing, the opening of spiritual eyes.  This man was healed, but more importantly he came to faith in the Son of Man… he lost everything in the fallout from this miracle but he gained so much more, salvation and life eternal.  Amen.