Fourth Sunday in Lent | March 15th, 2026 | The Rev. Jim Friedrich
As he walked along, Jesus saw a man who had been blind from birth.
In the very first sentence of this gospel passage, Jesus sees a man. He sees him. No one else in the story sees him, not really. If they noticed him at all, they saw nothing but just another blind beggar thrusting out his hand at the city gate, prompting them to avert their eyes and put him out of mind. We know this because as soon as he was healed, no longer blind, no one seems to recognize him as the same person.
For a moment, the dialogue gets pretty comical. Is this the blind guy? He can’t be the blind guy—his eyes are fine. But he looks kind of like the guy. But he can’t be the guy! They keep talking about him like this, as if he weren’t even there, until finally he cries out, “Hey! I am the guy!”
The crowd feels no joy at his healing. He’s just become a different kind of problem. A miracle challenges the way they are used to looking at things. And seeing reality in a new way is just too uncomfortable for them. They prefer their own form of blindness to the possibility that the world is vaster and wilder than they had ever imagined. A world teeming with divine possibility makes them nervous.
They take the man to the religious experts, who turn out to be just as blind as the crowd. We like our version of reality just fine, they say. Don’t try to make us see things differently. We don’t want to live in a world of wonder and surprise. That kind of stuff gets out of control way too fast.
So they badmouth Jesus the healer and throw the man born blind out of their church.
Now I don’t think this story wants us to be smug about that stupid crowd and those rigid, uptight religious experts, as if we would never be that blind. I think the story wants us to ask, where are our blind spots? What are we not seeing? And how can we regain our sight?
All of us, deep down, want the light that opens our blind eyes. All of us need that light. But sometimes we resist it, or run away from it, or shut our eyes to it. There are things we’d rather not see, in the world or in ourselves. Illuminating our dark places can feel like a judgment, as if the light were accusing our shadows.
St. Gregory of Nyssa, in the fourth century, was one of many theologians who have described the human condition as one of persistent blindness.
“Humanity was created for this end, that it might see ‘good,’ which is God; but because humanity would not stand in the light, [in fleeing from the light] it lost its eyes… We subjected ourselves to blindness, that we should not see the interior light.”
In other words, we are all stumbling in the dark. That is the human condition, until God brings us into the place of clarity.
St. Augustine talked about the inner eye, our capacity to see the things of God, as being “bruised and wounded” by the transgression of Adam and Eve, who, he says, “began to dread the Divine light [and] fled back into darkness, anxious for the shade.”
Refusing to stand in the light… subjecting ourselves to blindness.
Is this what we do? Are we truly so “anxious for the shade?”
Arthur Zajonc is a quantum physicist who became fascinated with the literal dimensions of this question, examining case histories of blind people who recovered their sight. In his book, Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind, he tells about an 8-year-old boy, blind at birth from cataracts, who underwent surgery in the year 1910. When the time came to remove his bandages, the doctor was very hopeful. He waved his hand in front of the boy’s eyes, which were now physically perfect.
“What do you see?” asked the doctor.
“I don’t know,” the boy replied.
“Can’t you see my hand moving?” said the doctor.
“I don’t know,” said the boy.
The boy’s eyes did not follow the doctor’s slowly moving hand, but stared straight ahead. He only saw a variation in brightness before him. Then the doctor asked him to touch his hand as it moved, and when he did, the boy cried out in a voice of triumph, “It’s moving!” He could feel it move, and he could even, as he put it, “hear it move,” but it would take laborious effort to learn to see it move.
As that first light passed through the child’s newly clear black pupils, it called forth no echoing image from within. His sight, Zajonc tells us, began as a hollow, silent, dark and frightening kind of seeing. The light of day beckoned, but no light of mind replied within the boy’s anxious, open eyes.
“The sober truth” says Zajonc, “remains that vision requires far more than a functioning physical organ. Without an inner light, without a formative visual imagination, we are blind.” This echoes Augustine’s description of our “bruised and wounded” inner eye. What is it that makes us so unable to process what is before us, to see what is being offered to our open eyes?
The mystical Anglican poet Thomas Traherne framed an answer in the ornately vivid language of the seventeenth century:
“As my body without my soul is a carcass, so is my Soul without Thy Spirit, a chaos, a dark obscure heap of empty faculties ignorant of itself, unsensible of Thy goodness, blind to Thy glory.”
And what are the causes of this abysmal state? he asks. He names several:
“[The Light within us is eclipsed] by the customs and manners of [others], which like contrary winds blew it out: by an innumerable company of other objects, rude, vulgar and worthless things, that like so many loads of earth and dung did overwhelm and bury it: by the impetuous torrent of wrong; … by a whole sea of other matters and concernments that covered and drowned it…”
“Contrary winds” blowing out the Light within us… being overwhelmed by “an innumerable company… of rude, vulgar and worthless things”… “the impetuous torrent of wrong desires” — does any of that sound familiar in this age of consumerism, social media, and widespread disinformation?
Not long after Traherne wrote those words, another English writer, John Bunyan, told the story of two pilgrims, named Christian and Faithful, who came upon Vanity Fair, a kind of shopping mall where all the transitory pleasures of this world were on seductive display.
“What will ye buy?” cried one of the merchants.
And Christian and Faithful replied, “We buy the truth!”
This was clearly the wrong answer, for the two pilgrims were immediately set upon, beaten, smeared with mud, thrown in a cage, and finally put on trial. The jury was rigged, led by Mr. Blind Man and Mr. Hate-Light. “Guilty,” they cried, and Faithful was put to death. But Christian managed to escape, and his journey into God continued.
Bunyan’s allegorical constructs seem quaintly archaic today, but Vanity Fair is still with us, with its endless commodification of unsatisfiable desires. And Mr. Hate-Light? He’s still at work, generating the ceaseless illusions and lies that blind us to the beauty of holiness, the beauty of one another, the beauty of loving community.
I was born 40 days after D-Day, just a few weeks before the liberation of Paris, when the evils of Nazism and fascism were on the run. Once and for all, we thought. But now, eighty years later, Mr. Hate-Light himself is making a comeback. And millions—millions!—of people are just shrugging their shoulders. So many of the children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the generation who shed their blood to stop fascist tyranny, seem kind of okay with the return of Mr. Hate-Light.
Lord have mercy, we are stumbling in the dark.
So what happens to Christian in Bunyan’s allegory? He escapes Vanity Fair, but he still has to pass through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where the light is so scarce, and the path so narrow, that he’s in constant danger of stumbling into the ditch on his right or the quagmire on his left.
But Christian is not without hope in that dark valley. As Isaiah said, the God of light travels with us:
I shall lead the blind by a road they do not know…
I shall turn the darkness into light before them,
and turn the quagmire into solid ground. (Isa 42:16)
All of us, deep down, want that light. All of us need that light. But sometimes we resist the light, or run away from it, or shut our eyes to it. There are things we’d rather not see, in the world or in ourselves. Illuminating our dark places can feel like a judgment, as if the light were accusing our shadows.
In Franco Zefferelli’s beautiful 1977 film, Jesus of Nazareth, we meet another blind man at the pool of Bethsaida in Jerusalem, but unlike the man born blind in today’s gospel, he tries to push Jesus away. “Leave my eyes alone!” he shouts. “Stop touching my eyes!”
After analyzing sixty-six cases of blind people who had recovered their sight, Arthur Zajonc would concur with Zeffirelli’s portrayal of our resistance to having our eyes opened.
“The project of learning to see,” he writes, “inevitably leads to a psychological crisis in the life of the patients, who may wind up rejecting sight. New impressions threaten the security of a world previously built upon the sensations of touch and hearing. Some decided it is better to be blind in their own world than sighted in an alien one… The prospect of growth is as much a prospect of loss, and threat to security, as a bounty.”
In other words, opening our eyes to a more truthful clarity can be scary—no more fictions or illusions about the state of the world or the state of our souls. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us (I John 1:8).
Seeing—clearly and accurately—the fallenness of our broken world—and our wounded selves—is a painful revelation. Once we face facts, transformation is the only way forward. We must change our life. A new way of seeing demands a new way of being. We can either fight that divine summons, like the man in the Zeffirelli film (Don’t touch my eyes!), or we can surrender ourselves to it, like the man born blind who knelt humbly and thankfully before the Light of the world.
But it’s not just the wrongness of things which is hidden by our blindness. The truth is, there is also so much blessing and beauty in this world, eagerly waiting to be discerned and embraced.
And whatever our doubts and fears about losing our protective blindness, the beauty revealed will be worth the price. It’s the beauty of God’s future—what Jesus called the Kingdom. We often think of the Kingdom of God as impossibly distant, but it is possible to glimpse it even now, in this present age, in this very place, this very moment, if we have the eyes of faith, the faith that enable us to live in the light, and see as God sees, until even the Way of the Cross is seen to be “none other than the way of life and peace.”
There is a beautiful passage from Willa Cather’s novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop, which perfectly expresses our Christian conviction that we are not destined to remain in the dark—that we can, by God’s grace, recover the divine light within us. The novel’s protagonist, Jean-Marie Latour, a nineteenth-century missionary bishop to the territory of New Mexico, is discussing visions and miracles with his Vicar.
“Where there is great love,” he says, “there are always miracles. One might almost say that an [epiphany or a revelation] is human vision corrected by divine love .… The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is about us always.”
Human vision corrected by divine love.
Pray for that, my friends, pray for that.
“Lord, remove this grievous blindness,
Let mine eyes behold the day.”
Straight he saw and, won by kindness,
Followed Jesus in the way. [from the shape note hymn, Bartimaeus]
— The Rev. Jim Friedrich