Sermon transcript:
I’m sure you’ve had the experience of walking into a dark room at night. At first, you can’t see anything. You slow down. Your hands reach out. You listen for the hum of a fridge, the sound of the cat’s paws, the scrape of a chair. When your sight is limited, you pay attention differently. You notice things you might otherwise miss.
You probably don’t remember the first time this happened to you—I don’t. But back then, we likely didn’t slow down. If you’ve always had vision and darkness suddenly surrounds you, you rush forward because you can’t imagine another way to move. You bump into things, knock them over, step on the cat’s tail. Mayhem ensues. That’s what the Pharisees do in today’s story. They find themselves surrounded by confusion and disorientation, yet try to move as if everything were still clear.
A little digression about the Pharisees before we go further: Rabbi and scholar Danya Ruttenberg describes them as laypeople devoted to living their faith amid daily life. She portrays Jesus not as an outsider attacking Judaism, but as an insider debating within it—a family argument born of love and care. The church, sadly, often turned these debates into caricature, painting Pharisees as hypocritical, rigid legalists. That distortion made Judaism seem lifeless and fueled centuries of antisemitism. Jesus wasn’t rejecting their faith but wrestling with it, speaking from within Jewish life about how best to live faithfully before God.1
Back to the story: A man born blind receives his sight. What should bring joy instead causes turmoil. The healing happens on the Sabbath, performed by someone (Jesus) the Pharisees already fear. It doesn’t fit their expectations of God’s work. They question the man and his parents, seeking answers that preserve their sense of order. When his story refuses to fit, they drive him out. The Pharisees rush through a darkened room insisting they know the layout—too certain of their own sight to adjust to a changed reality.
Their problem isn’t intelligence or devotion but certainty. They’re so sure they see things correctly that they can’t imagine they’re doing any harm. When they ask Jesus, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” he replies, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.”
In John’s Gospel, sin isn’t mainly about morality. Every Gospel reflects both Jesus’ story and the community telling it. John’s community was Jewish, living in the late first or early second century, struggling with rejection from the synagogue because they’d chosen to follow Jesus and had been expelled. That conflict shapes John’s view of sin.2 For him, sin is failing to recognize God’s presence in Jesus—spiritual ignorance, not moral failure.3
So when Jesus tells the Pharisees that blindness would free them, he’s saying that acknowledging limits is the first step to grace. To confess confusion is to begin to see. The real danger is certainty—the refusal to admit the need for guidance.
It’s easy to judge the Pharisees. But we often do the same. We move through confusing spaces insisting we see clearly. We rely on habit when we should pause. We cling to familiar patterns even when the ground beneath us has shifted and often cause harm to ourselves and others. The problem is not being lost; it’s pretending we aren’t.
That insight became vivid for me through stories from my wife, Andrea, who worked in public libraries for many years. Libraries have changed dramatically. For many, they’ve become the only safe public spaces left. People come not only for books but for warmth, shelter, rest, and safety. Andrea and her colleagues found themselves navigating situations they had never trained for—overdoses, sudden aggression, moments of crisis. Staff who had always relied on courtesy and politeness discovered those tools didn’t always work. They were trying to move through a disorienting new space as though nothing had changed.
That experience echoes the Pharisees’ dilemma. They, too, tried to use old maps to move through new territory. Their familiar world no longer matched reality. And even when they admitted some uncertainty—”Surely we are not blind?”—they clung to control. Yet in that question lies an opening, a hint of vulnerability. Jesus doesn’t ignore it; he leans in. “If you were blind, you would not have sin.” In other words, confusion isn’t failure. The grace begins right there—with honesty about what we cannot see.
That’s what Andrea discovered when her library brought in training from a shelter worker in Chicago. He’d seen too many painful encounters between staff and unhoused people—each side struggling to read the other, each convinced of their own clarity. Andrea calls that training the most important experience of her career. She learned how brains shaped by trauma or injury react differently. Anger can flare from nowhere, not as a personal attack but as a learned defense. She learned about “time horizons”—how for many surviving on the street, planning extends only an hour or a day ahead. Their concerns press hard: meals, shelter, ways to numb pain. A request to come back next week can feel impossible. And she saw how repeated indignities—being dismissed, shunned, corrected, ignored—pile up until a small frustration ignites an explosion.
These insights changed everything. She stopped taking anger personally. She learned to meet confrontation with calm neutrality, to slow down conversations, to pay attention differently. She learned names, noticed details she used to miss. Challenges didn’t disappear, but her posture changed. The same space, the same faces—but a new way of seeing. That shift began the moment she accepted her limits and let new understanding emerge. A shift that brought her into communion with people once distant. What is that but locating God’s presence amid confusion and disorientation.
That’s the invitation Jesus gives the Pharisees—and to us. He offers not condemnation but a way through disorientation and confusion. Grace hides in the confession “I do not see clearly.” From that humility, new sight can grow. The darkness itself becomes holy space for discovery.
The good news of John 9 is that Jesus goes after both kinds of people: the excluded and the certain. He seeks out the man cast aside and challenges those convinced of their vision. He doesn’t reject their questions; he meets them in the confusion. He opens eyes slowly, patiently, as people are ready to see.
We live in confusing times ourselves—socially, politically, spiritually. Familiar institutions falter; old certainties crumble. Churches, too, grope for footing in shifting light. It’s tempting to grasp for confidence, to protect what feels known, to insist, “We see.” But perhaps the invitation is to slow down, stretch out our hands, and listen for the quiet signs of presence—the hum of grace, the sound of love moving quietly nearby.
Maybe the light of faith isn’t a floodlamp but a slow dawn. Eyes adjust gradually. We learn to move with care, to notice small mercies, to find companionship in the half-light. God’s presence meets us not in control but in need, not in clarity but in trust.
The Pharisees’ mistake was not confusion but certainty. In our own lives, in ministry and community, we risk the same thing. When we charge ahead claiming sight we don’t have, we bump into others, cause harm, and lose track of the sacred already among us. The way forward begins by admitting that we can’t see everything and by asking for help to navigate by grace.
When love unsettles what we think we know, when events disrupt our tidy understanding, may we resist the comfort of being right. Let’s slow down and name our blindness. Let’s pay attention differently. The One who offered grace to the Pharisees offers it to us as well—quietly, patiently—ready to guide us through the dark rooms of our lives on this adventure we call the life of faith.
Rev. Joe Gaspar
1 Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, Jesus and the Jews: Part One, https://www.lifeisasacredtext.com/pharisees/, July 29, 2024.
2 William Loader, First Thoughts on Year A Gospel Passages from the Lectionary Lent 4, https://billloader.com/MtLent4.html.
3 Gail R. O’Day, Commentary on the Gospel of John, “New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary”, vol. 9, Abingdon Press: Nashville, 1996, pp. 663-664.