John 9:1-7, 13-17, 34-39 - Jesus Brings Blind Justice - March 15, 2020

We’ve all heard of “blind justice.” “Blind justice” is the theory that judgments handed down by our legal system are fair and impartial because judges and juries are forbidden to take into account the gender, race, religion – or any other external factor – of the person being judged. That’s why Lady Justice is often depicted as being blind-folded. Of course, everyone knows that justice dispensed by men is never truly blind – every judge and juror is affected by a lot of baggage that skews their sense of fairness. Today’s text is about blind justice…not man’s, but God’s. And when it comes to God’s justice, it’s not he who is blind – no, he sees everything (Proverbs 15:3). It’s we who are blind and need him to open our eyes to see the justice of what often seem to be his unjust judgments.

Take our text for example, in what universe is it just for a baby to be born blind? Is there anything more heart-wrenching than a poor little blind baby? It’s bad enough when someone goes blind on account of age or disease, but a baby has never had the chance to see anything in the world around them. Now imagine being born in a society without schools for the blind, braille, Seeing Eye dogs, and Social Security. From the darkness of the womb you’re born into a world of darkness – a world whose size and scope you will never be able to grasp. You would need someone to care for you your whole life. The only thing you would be able to do for yourself was what the blind man in our text did: find a road where people walked and beg.

How is what happened to this man justice? The disciples think it’s retributive justice. Passing by this blind man on the road, they ask Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind? Now remember, these disciples had seen Jesus turn water into wine (John 2:1-11), heal a dying child (John 4:43-54), feed 5000 people (John 6:1-14) and walk on water (John 6:15-21) but they are neither seeking nor expecting him to do anything for this blind man. Why not? Because in their minds either he or his parents had sinned and so he was simply getting what he deserved.

You know what we call that line of thinking today, right? It’s called karma. What goes around comes around. You get what you deserve. It’s a popular philosophy because it’s intellectually easy – it doesn’t require much thought. Do good – get good; do evil – get evil. Sounds fair, right? In practical terms: if you don’t smoke, you won’t get lung cancer; if you wash your hands and stay away from large gatherings, you won’t get Covid-19; if you exercise and eat right, you won’t have a heart attack or a stroke. But there is a catch. The catch is that sooner or later reality blows up the notion of karma. It becomes clear that God didn’t get the memo that good things should happen to good people and bad things to bad people. People who have never smoked get lung cancer. People who bathe in hand sanitizer get Covid-19. People who diet and exercise religiously have heart attacks and strokes.

Ok. So karma’s out. What’s left? Chance. Fate. Bad things happen to people at random. Some get cancer; some get Covid-19; some have heart attacks and strokes. Sure, diet and exercise and genetics and lifestyle may play some role, but in the end it all comes down to some factor that no one can understand or quantify. Anyone who’s been to the doctor can attest to this. They do tests and run scans and even do genetic testing – but the best they can give you is a percentage-based prediction – when your real question is: what determines whether I will actually get the disease or not? What is the governing principle of life? Can it really be something as mystical, unpredictable as dumb luck? Is that all that life is? One giant roll of the dice?

What does Jesus say? It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that God’s works might be revealed in connection with him. Is that answer satisfactory to you? If you were this man or his parents, would you accept that he was born blind for no other reason than so that one day the Son of God could walk along and heal him? Is that how God works? Is that divine justice?

One thing is for sure, not many people believed or saw Jesus as light of the world in this miracle. Most were blinded by the light. When the Pharisees got wind of this miracle they launched an all-out investigation. They interviewed the man, his parents and neighbors. But because Jesus had broken their law, they could not see Jesus as the light. Jesus had performed this miracle on the Sabbath day – strike one. He applied saliva to this man’s eyes (at that time, apparently, the accepted treatment for an eye infection[1]) – strike two. He made mud – strike three. All three acts were considered “work” by the Pharisees and strictly forbidden under their Sabbath laws. The interesting thing is: we know Jesus could have healed him without a word or a touch (John 4:50). He didn’t need to heal him in this manner. He did it this way intentionally. He deliberately violated their man-made Sabbath laws to force them to confront the fact that he was doing things only God could do. Sadly, they were blinded by the light and refused to believe.

God violates our laws all the time, doesn’t he? People who work hard, save up, and invest wisely can have financial struggles. People who eat right, exercise, and follow their doctors’ advice down to the letter get sick. People who obey traffic laws have their lives snuffed out by drunk drivers. Innocent children get cancer. Lifelong Christians have strokes and heart attacks. And it doesn’t seem fair, it doesn’t seem right, it seems anything but just. Many, even many Christians, get upset when God appears to be breaking our “laws” of right and wrong. We too are often blinded by the light.

But the Pharisees aren’t the only ones blinded by the light. In the verses we didn’t read, the man’s parents see the miracle, but they won’t testify to what they have seen and know because they are afraid of the consequences. The Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed that Jesus was the Christ would be put out of the synagogue – excommunicated. Are we ever afraid to confess the truth that God is in control of everything that happens in this world? Do we ever try to take God out of the equation by blaming karma or lifestyle or chance or China for the bad things that happen? Do we miss out on opportunities to confess the one true God to family and friends by failing to point out that every disaster, be it manmade or natural, is a call to repentance (Luke 13:1-5)? Do we lack the faith to believe that God uses suffering to purify our faith by loosening our grip on things of this world (1 Peter 1:3-7)? Any hesitation to confess the truth is evidence that our sinful nature still has us partially blind to the light of God and his ways.

The divine irony is that the only one in this story could see was the man who had been blind from birth. Although, if you read all of John 9, you see that even he struggles to see the truth. First he says he doesn’t know anything about him (John 9:11-12). Then he calls him a prophet (John 9:17). Then he simply says one thing I do know: I was blind, and now I see and drew the obvious conclusion that this Jesus must be from God, because if [he] were not from God, he could do nothing. But he’s still feeling around in the dark. Even being the subject of a miracle didn’t give this man faith. He didn’t fall down and worship Jesus until Jesus had tracked him down and created faith in his heart. And how did Jesus do this? Through his Word!

So what’s the lesson here for us? It’s that we will never be able to make sense of God’s justice, his activities in our world and in our lives, on the basis of what we can see through our reason, our intuition, or our investigation. We will never know why one person contracts Covid-19 and dies and another person never gets it. We will never understand why some couples can’t have children or some people have strokes or some good people have some really bad things happen to them by a careful investigation of the circumstances. We will never understand this world apart from God. Proverbs says evil men do not understand justice, but those who seek the LORD understand everything (Proverbs 28:5). And how does God give this understanding? How does he open our eyes to see? Only and always through the Word (Romans 10:17).

God has given us two distinct “words.” In the Law, God reveals what justice should really look like. It should be immediate death and a one-way trip to hell for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:9-18, 23). Short of that, it would be divine justice if we were all born physically blind. Since Adam and Eve sinned with their eyes lusting after the forbidden fruit, it would have been fair if from then on all humans were born blind. Could we complain? On what basis? That God’s not being fair? Adam’s sin is our sin (Romans 5:12). To prove that, look at what we’ve done with the seeing eyes God has graciously given us. We’ve lusted, hated, envied, and coveted with them. And if that weren’t bad enough – our eyes have also led us to desire the things of this world more than the things of God, so that we have despised the gifts God gives us in his Word and Sacrament. According to the Bible, the wages of sin is everything up to and including death (Romans 6:23). No one could complain that God is being unjust if he were to damn us all to hell, no questions asked.

But God didn’t do that. In his mercy, he gave us another “word” – the Gospel; he planned to execute his justice in another way: he determined that he would punish his Son, Jesus, in our place. No suffering we’ve seen or experienced can compare with Jesus’. In our reading of the Passion History in our midweek Lenten services we are reminded of what happened when the gavel of God’s justice fell on Jesus. In Gethsemane, his eyes were blinded by the bloody sweat that poured from his skin as he struggled to stand up under the weight of our sins (Luke 22:44). While Jesus was being held in custody they covered his face and struck him with their fists (Mark 14:65) and kept asking him, “Prophesy! Who hit you?” (Luke 23:64) On the cross, Jesus’ burden of our sin, our guilt, our shame was so disgusting that the sun refused to shine (Luke 23:44-45). And in the midst of suffering the hell we deserved he cried out my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Matthew 27:46) God’s justice blinded Jesus to the extent that he could not even see his Father’s loving face.

Do we still want to blame God for being unfair or unjust? It wasn’t fair that sinless Jesus should suffer the punishment we sinners deserve. It wasn’t fair – but it was our only hope. His payment on the cross, his taking our place under God’s judgment won him the right to heal our blindness. And the healing we need most is not physical but spiritual – which is why we need to gather to hear God’s Word and receive his Sacrament now, during this widespread panic and chaos, perhaps more than ever. Because you can’t see the light, you won’t understand what is going on in our world, unless you focus on God’s clear Word instead of his mysterious actions.

You can be physically blind and still see spiritual truth; but if you are spiritually blind you don’t even see the physical things properly. You see a miracle involving spit and mud as nothing more than the breaking of some manmade law. You see going along with the crowd as safer than confessing Christ. You see the water and Word of Baptism as nothing more than a quaint ceremony and the sacrament of Holy Communion – in which Jesus promises that his body and blood are truly present (1 Corinthians 11:27) – as nothing more than a snack; or worse, as something to be avoided because of the potential for contamination. Today, you see the senseless fear, the panicked reaction of millions to a viral pandemic as evidence that God has lost control.

But when God opens your eyes, then you can truly see. You see that Jesus truly is the Light of the World. You see that because he is the only one who has come from heaven (John 3:13) he’s the only one who can illuminate the reality of life in this world for us. Where these eyes can only see a man pouring water over a baby’s head and muttering some words, God shows us that he is performing the spiritual operation of taking a child who was born dead in sin and breathing the life of faith into him. Where these eyes and these hands and this tongue see and feel and taste only bread and wine, he shows us that we are receiving the only medicine that can cure all of our troubles, the medicine of immortality. And where the unbelieving world sees only a reason to panic and hoard hand sanitizer and toilet paper, we can see this Covid-19 outbreak as God’s clear call to repentance and faith. Because when we focus on the clear word of God rather than on the mysterious works of God in the world, we are led to see the clearest demonstration of God’s justice ever given to the world: the cross of Christ.  If you want to understand God’s justice, look to the cross. There you see God’s Son dying in your place. There you see how much it cost God to cure your spiritual blindness and answer your prayer to deliver you from evil (Matthew 6:13). In Jesus we find the justice of God which blinds those who see and gives sight to the blind. Amen.  

[1] Edersheim, Alfred The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah (Hendrickson Publishers, Inc. 1993) 506; 600