The following sermon was delivered by the Reverend John W. Howe at Truro Episcopal Church in Fairfax, Virginia on March 29, 1981. The title is, The Eyes of the Blind Shall Be Opened, and the scripture reference is chapter 9 of the Gospel of John, verses 1 through 13 and 28 through 38.

I think that most of us probably have the impression that Jesus' earthly ministry involved his going about doing miracles one after another, day after day. And it very well may be that that impression is correct. But when you look closely at the gospel record, you find that relatively few of them are recorded in any detail.

There are a couple of allusions to the fact that great multitudes came, and on a number of instances it says, and he healed all of them. Tremendous inclusive statement. But the actual ones that find their way into the record are relatively few.

And as a matter of fact, in John's Gospel, I don't know if you noticed this, but there are only seven miracles recorded in the whole Gospel. Four in Galilee and three in Judea. and you see immediately that John is being very selective.

These are hardly all the miracles Jesus did, but he picks these seven out because he's calling our attention to them and saying, these especially I want you to learn from. These are typical of the kind of things that Jesus came to do. And so as you move through his gospel, you read about the changing of water into wine, The healing of the nobleman's son, the healing of a lame man by the pool of Bethesda, the feeding of a multitude, walking on water, the raising of Lazarus, and the healing of this blind man.

And it's interesting to stop to think about it. It strikes me that each one of those seven miracles represents a phase of Messiah's work, which Jesus came to do. We could expand on that at some length.

I'm not going to this morning. I'm simply saying that John is asking us to pay particular attention to each one of these. Look at this and learn from it.

And of the seven, I think that is particularly true of this story of the healing of the blind man. He recounts this episode in greater detail than any other miracle. Spends a whole chapter.

I didn't read you. The whole story, I just summarized the beginning and the end of it. It stands right dead center in the middle of the gospel as if to say that the whole thing pivots on this.

You recall that the healing of the blind was one of the signs that the Jews were particularly instructed to look for in the coming of Messiah. For instance, Isaiah 29 says, The eyes of the blind shall be opened when Messiah comes. This is what he's going to do.

when John the Baptist sent word to Jesus and said, Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for somebody else? This is one of the things that Jesus particularly drew his attention to. The eyes of the blind are being opened.

Yes, I am the one who is to come. You can believe in me. This miracle, this very important central miracle, was performed in an extremely public place, just outside the temple, and it involved a particularly public figure.

This was not just any blind man. This was a man born blind. And the whole city knew it because he positioned himself outside the temple and begged for alms.

You could not get into the temple without passing by him. Everybody knew him. They knew his condition.

They knew that this was not some kind of late development in life. He was born this way. And Jesus singled him out.

And interestingly enough, like so many of Jesus' miracles, it was done on the Sabbath. I sometimes begin to suspect Jesus saved his miracles for the Sabbath. You notice that.

How many of them? That infuriated the Jews because it seemed to them to be breaking one of the Ten Commandments, the law against working on the Sabbath. Of course, that was their misunderstanding, their misinterpretation.

I almost think that one of the central things that Jesus was about was demonstrating that he came to be Lord of the Sabbath. And in the process, setting upside down, or maybe I should say right side up, Their whole view of God as a kind of a cosmic killjoy. You know, whatever gives you pleasure, He wants to crush it.

And Jesus particularly singled out healing on the Sabbath to demonstrate God is for you. He's not against you. He wills your well-being.

He wills your pleasure. Sunday is not supposed to be a day of a morbid, stained-glass expression. It's supposed to be a day of joy.

Rejoicing. Well, he picked the Sabbath for this particular day, and it was a most notable miracle, wasn't it? A friend of mine did a study some years ago.

He went through all four Gospels and analyzed all of the encounters that Jesus had that are recorded in detail. And he came up with the fact that out of those encounters, 25 of them involved people coming to Jesus specifically to request a healing. People that came to Jesus and said, My body is broken.

Would you heal me? How many out of those 25 times do you think that Jesus said yes? 29.

There are, in fact, more instances of Jesus healing than there are of people asking him to do so. And that, as I've already suggested, is in addition to those general comments about the whole city turned out and he healed all of them. May I draw the conclusion on the basis of the only evidence we have that Jesus is more interested in our healing than we are.

He's more anxious to heal us than we are to ask Him for it. He's readier to meet our physical need than most of the time we are to dare to believe Him for that. Not 25 out of 25.

29 out of 25. Jesus took the initiative on several occasions, didn't wait to be asked, but extended the gift of healing. And this is one of them.

The man was looking for alms, looking for pity, looking for charity. He wasn't looking for healing. Jesus healed him.

Pay attention to this, friends. Sometimes people come to me and they say, how do I know that God wants me to be well? And my answer is, look at Jesus.

he wants you to be well and he said if you've seen me you've seen the father matter of fact I think you could define Christian as one who bets his life that God is going to turn out to be like Jesus if you've seen me you've seen the father Jesus demonstrates that he wills our healing matter of fact that's the meaning of the word salvation did you know that? health Wholeness. God does not delight in broken bodies.

That does not give Him pleasure. He wills our health. Now, I frankly wish I could stop there.

But that's not the whole story. Part of the story involves the fact that when Jesus went to His own hometown, the Gospel records He could do no mighty works there because of their unbelief. part of the story then is that God's will can be hindered by our doubt by our unbelief by our unwillingness or inability to receive what He wants to give by persistence in disobedience by the refusal to repent by unconfessed sin by broken relationships within the body of Christ, by self-abuse, by the sins of the fathers being visited upon the children, and perhaps by a number of other factors as well.

It's not quite so simple as to say, He wills it, therefore it must be. I can say unequivocally, He wills it. I cannot say that therefore it will be.

For instance, I can say to you that God wills that you be free of cancer. I'm sure of that. If you go on smoking two backs of Marlboros a day, He may have trouble fulfilling that will.

You're making it harder for God, alright? He wills that my children have a healthy and supportive home atmosphere, but if I abuse them, they will be abused. he entrusts a frightening degree of responsibility to the parents doesn't he doctors are telling us medical doctors with no spiritual axe to grind are telling us that if you allow yourself to be consumed by anger or bitterness or jealousy or pride it may very well have physical consequences so God wills wholeness but there are lots of factors that may hinder his will.

Among them, unbelief. I'm interested. Jesus told this man to do something most extraordinary.

You know, why did he spit on the ground, make clay, and rub it on his eyes and tell him to go wash it off? He didn't have to. Lots of other times he just healed him.

He just spoke the word and he was healed. But in this instance, that's what he said. and for some reason beats me, the man did it.

Would you do it? You know, here you are begging for alms and somebody spits and makes clay and rubs it on your eyes and says, go wash it off. You'd probably want to wash it off, but you might not believe that would lead to your healing.

He did it. And he, see, he hasn't even laid eyes on Jesus. He's blind.

and when the sight comes he doesn't know who it was that did it because he hasn't seen him yet what would have happened had he not believed had he not been willing to obey I don't know what would have happened if the man with the withered arm to whom Jesus said stretch forth your hand didn't do it would his arm still have been withered what would have happened to the man by the pool of Bethesda when Jesus said stand up and take up your bed and walk. He had to be willing to risk rolling over and easing his weight onto those spindly withered little legs and risk falling on his face, making a fool of himself and perhaps hurting himself worse than he was already. And had he not done so, he might have lain there for the rest of his life.

I'm saying to you there are many, many factors which can hinder the will of God. put it this way I believe on the basis of the evidence that we have that his will is absolute but his willingness to impose his will is not can I say that again? his will is absolute he wills your health he wills your wholeness his will is absolute but his willingness to impose his will is not the same thing is true in the area of salvation itself isn't it his will is for all men to repent and come to the knowledge of the truth and yet some don't and he doesn't force it upon them scripture says he is not willing that any should perish but some will perish so his will is that all men all women be healthy and yet some aren't now that raised a real question for the disciples you see what's going on they've been with the master long enough to have learned at least part of the lesson they've come to believe that God wills people's wholeness that's what they've seen time after time Jesus is quick to heal.

God wills their health. And yet something is hindering the will of God. For this man's health, he remains blind.

And so they say, who sinned? This man or his parents? And they're operating on precisely the same presupposition that the Pharisees had.

When they dragged the guy in front of the Pharisees, what do they say? They say, you were born in utter sin. How do they know that?

Because you're blind. Blindness is the result of sin. You obviously must have done something really awful for God to let blindness come upon you this way.

Sickness is the result of sin, is their thesis. Who sinned? This man or his parents?

And Jesus, you see, rules the question out of court. Neither this man nor his parents. Now, I want to say two things about that.

Jesus is not saying this man is sinless. Not at all. He's saying that you cannot draw a one-for-one relationship between this specific illness and a specific sin.

Once in a while that might be possible. But you can't do that generally speaking. Sickness, brokenness, illness, crippled bodies, bereavement itself is part generally of the consequences of the fall.

We live in a fallen, broken world. And so in a general sense, sickness is the result of sin, but you can't do it on a one-for-one basis. Because He did this sin, therefore He's got this illness.

That doesn't work. Jesus denies that. Sins of the fathers may be visited upon the children, but you can't draw a one-for-one relationship between this sin of the father in this illness of the child.

The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, he says. Sometimes the wicked prosper and sometimes the righteous suffer. So it's not that this man sinned or his parents that led to this illness.

God forbid that we would say that when somebody fails to receive healing that it's because he's persisting in sin. That is not for us to judge. But, he says, God has allowed this to happen in order that His work might be manifest in the middle of it.

Sometimes we try to get God off the hook, don't we? We say God is responsible for everything that's good and the devil is responsible for everything that's bad. And what you end up with is two gods.

One good and one bad. God Himself doesn't wriggle off the hook that way. God doesn't duck the responsibility.

He says in essence, the devil may have done it, but I allowed it. And if He didn't allow it, He isn't God. He does not duck the responsibility, but what He says is, I allowed it that my work, might be made manifest in the midst of that situation.

I'm suggesting to you, we may not attribute a specific cause to a specific problem, but what we can say is that God wants to manifest Himself in the midst of it. Do you believe that? More often than most of us dare to believe, most of the time, He's prepared to do that by bringing a marvelous supernatural healing as He did in this instance.

He brings glory to Himself by healing this man's blindness. Sometimes He does it by supplying grace sufficient to cope rather than by removing the problem. In either case, His will is the same, to bring glory to Himself and to meet the needs of the persons involved.

I had a woman in my office this week who told me that she was converted to Jesus Christ when she met a young boy in South Carolina to whom God had supernaturally restored vision with no eyeball and no optic nerve. Now I read about that some years ago in the secular press. I couldn't believe it, to tell you the truth.

But it was substantiated by medical doctors who were not themselves Christians. Why didn't God simply repair the damaged eye? The eye was removed, the optic nerve destroyed, and God gave sight.

Because it brought more glory to Him this way. I mean, you see somebody whose eye was, you know, repaired. Well, that's lovely.

You see somebody who can see with no eye, you sit up and take notice. That got her attention and she became a Christian. Bishop Colin Baisley of Santiago, Chile, who was here a year ago and who will be here next month, by the way, told me that God has been doing something among the peasants in His diocese.

since he's been restoring their teeth. Terribly damaged, decayed, uncared for teeth, falling out, broken. And God has been repairing their teeth, but he's been doing it not by simply restoring the damaged enamel, but by filling them with gold fillings.

Supernaturally. I said, why in the world would he do that? And Colin Baisley said, because it brings greater glory to him.

You meet a peasant with a good, healthy set of teeth? That's nice. You meet a peasant who could no way afford it walking around with a mouth full of gold?

And it brings glory to God. God has a sense of humor, doesn't He? I told Ralph Gibson at the last service we're praying that God doesn't do that to his business.

And yet, I remember one of the most impressive things that happened when I was a very young Christian was meeting a young man who, like this one, had been born blind and who said that all of his life he railed against God. He shook his fist in the face of God. He said, how come everybody else can see and I can't?

until one day he was melted by the love of Christ in spite of that. And he said, I now thank God that I am blind because I know that the very first thing I will ever see is the face of Jesus Christ. Which one of those stories brings the greatest glory to God?

It doesn't matter. Which would bring Him greater glory? Healing Johnny Erickson, the young girl who broke her neck in a swimming accident and has been quadriplegic ever since.

Healing her. Or filling her with such an abundance of joy in the midst of being totally paralyzed from the neck down, that it's like liquid love pouring over you to come into her presence, and in spite of incapacity, she bears witness to the sufficiency of God's grace. It doesn't matter, you see.

Paul said, I've learned in whatsoever state I am therewith to be content. I know how to be abased and how to abound. Some of us have learned how to abound.

We haven't done too well on being abased. He says, I know how to enjoy plenty or to suffer want. That's not the issue anymore.

I'm prepared to live or to die for Jesus Christ. That's not the issue anymore. He says, three times I asked God to remove a certain thorn in the flesh, whatever that was.

He said, no. And that's not the issue anymore because he said, my grace is sufficient for you. I'm not going to take away that problem, but I'm going to supply all your need in the midst of it. That's not the issue anymore.

The issue is that Christ be honored in my body, in my life, in my ministry, in my relationships, in my joy. That's the issue. You see, we've got it all backward.

We say, when God heals my body, then I'll honor Him. He says, when you honor me, I'll supply all your need. That may lead to healing.

That may not. But I'll supply all your need. and bring glory to myself in the midst of it.

We pray together. Lord, some folks in this parish family, some sitting in this room, are living miracles. and we acknowledge that and we praise You for it.

And Lord, we dare to ask You to increase our faith and our expectancy to see You stretching out Your arm in healing and in miraculous provision among the members of Your body. May it not only meet their needs but bring ever-increasing glory to Yourself. Lord we'd be like the friends of that other crippled man who tried to push through the crowd and couldn't do so clambered up on the roof tore away the tiles and lowered their friend in front of Jesus we ask you to heal our friends the members of our families yet even more deeply than that Lord we ask you that we would be those who find your grace sufficient in the midst of whatever our circumstances might be we would be those who honor the name of Christ we would be those who believe that Your will in any and all circumstances is to let the works of God be made manifest to the praise of Your name, for Christ's sake.

Amen. Amen.