Now I See

John 9:1–41

There is a rhythm to the church year that helps us locate ourselves in God’s big story. As we stand on the threshold of Lent, many congregations mark this Sunday as the day of Jesus’ transfiguration—a moment of dazzling light, of glory revealed on a mountaintop.

But John’s Gospel, as it often does, takes us in a different direction. Instead of Jesus shining like the sun before Peter, James, and John, we get another kind of transfiguration: the transformation of a man who has never once seen light at all.

And in that transformation, everyone else in the story is changed too—or at least invited to be.

Because sight changes us. To see anew, to truly see, reshapes how we move through the world, how we understand God, how we understand one another, and how we understand ourselves. The question this text puts before us is not simply what did the man born blind see? But: What do we refuse to see? What truth have we avoided because it requires something of us?

John gives us this long story—forty‑one verses!—because seeing takes time.

This story follows a pattern that John’s author loves:

First, a need – wine at a wedding, a man who cannot walk, a man born blind.

Next, a miracle – something changes, something becomes possible that wasn’t possible before. 

Then, a testimony – someone has to speak the truth about what has happened.

And that testimony almost always makes some uncomfortable.

Jesus and the disciples meet a man blind from birth, and the disciples ask the question everyone asked in the first century: Whose fault is this? Who sinned? What caused this? Disability was assumed to be moral failure. But Jesus rejects that perspective, that interpretation of how God works, outright. This man is not a moral object lesson. He is not divine punishment. He is beloved.

Jesus says instead that this moment is an opportunity for God’s work to be seen.

He spits on the ground and makes mud—holy, earthy mud. And if we’re paying attention, we hear the echo of Genesis: of God forming humanity from the dust of the ground. Jesus is doing creation work again. He is creating new possibility, new life.

Then Jesus sends the man away to wash—away, not alongside him. Which means the man’s very first sight of the world will not include Jesus’ face. He sees light, people, color… but has not yet set eyes on the one who healed him.

Sometimes God changes us before we are fully aware of what God is doing.

The man returns home, seeing, and his neighbors cannot take it in. They argue about whether it’s even him.

People often resist believing that transformation, real life-altering transformation, is possible. Such transformation disrupts the status quo. It threatens the fixed categories we rely on. And so people resist. 

But the man knows what happened. He names Jesus as his healer even though he has not yet seen him.

The neighbors bring him to the Pharisees, and the author tells us that this healing happened on the Sabbath. Healing wasn’t forbidden on the Sabbath—but kneading was. Mixing was. And Jesus had made mud. The Pharisees, faced with an undeniable miracle, fixate on the rulebook. They cannot see the grace happening right in front of them.

Sometimes legalism blinds us to the movement of the Spirit. 

The Pharisees interrogate him. The man insists: all I know is I was blind, and now I see.

They call his parents, who confirm the facts but avoid taking risks. Fear keeps them silent. Fear keeps many of us silent when the cost of telling the truth is high.

The Pharisees return to the man again, demanding that he condemn Jesus. But he refuses to surrender his lived experience. He even asks them, maybe with a spark of holy mischief, “Do you also want to become his disciples?”

You can almost see their faces turning red.

They drive him out.

Because when you can’t control a testimony, you exile it.

After all that, Jesus seeks the man out—a detail I love. Jesus doesn’t leave him alone with the consequences of telling the truth. Jesus meets him, reveals who he is, and the man believes. And the Pharisees, still hovering nearby, ask a painful, honest question:

“Are we blind?”

Jesus replies that if they truly couldn’t see, if they truly didn’t know better, they’d have no guilt. But they do see. They do know.

And still they refuse to believe.
Still they refuse to change.
Still they refuse to let this healing expand their understanding of God.

That is where the sin lies—in refusing the transformation offered. 

I’ve said this over and over as we have explored this Gospel.

John’s Gospel is clear that belief is not about rational knowing, it is not about proof. 

Belief is relationship—ongoing, life‑shaping relationship with the living God.
And sin is that which disrupts or rejects that relationship.

The man born blind begins with limited understanding.
“Jesus is a man.”
“Jesus is a prophet.”
“Jesus is from God.”
And finally: “Jesus is Lord.”

His sight grows as his relationship deepens.

Meanwhile, the Pharisees—learned, faithful, certain—move in the opposite direction. Their vision narrows. Their fear increases. Their grasp on power tightens. They become more and more unable to see the work of God because they cannot imagine God doing something outside their expectations.

Beloved, spiritual blindness is real. 

Not the kind that comes from disability—John is not equating blindness with lack of faith—but the kind that comes from fear, from rigidity, from refusing to face the truth about ourselves or the world.

And we live in a world full of opportunities to either see or look away.

We can choose to see the growing inequity around us—how poverty is not the result of personal failure, but of systems that prioritize profit over people.

We can choose to see racism, ableism, transphobia—not as abstract ideas, but as daily realities our neighbors endure.

We can choose to see how the church, at times, has walked past people in need because the rules felt more important than compassion.

Or we can choose not to see.

We can choose comfort over truth, stability over justice, certainty over transformation.

But Jesus comes to open our eyes.

Not just to personal salvation, but to communal liberation.
Not just to personal healing, but to the healing of systems.
Not just to changing hearts, but to changing the world.

What would it mean, for you, for me, for this congregation, to say with courage:

“I once was blind, but now I see”?

To see that the Spirit is still shaping new creation out of dust?
To see that God is not bound by the categories we impose?
To see that transformation is possible in us and in others?
To see the places where God is calling us to speak our own testimony, even when the powerful would prefer we stay quiet?

Beloved, Jesus did not simply give this one man sight.
He invited an entire community to be transformed.
Some accepted the invitation. Some refused.

The same invitation stands before us today.

As we prepare to enter the season of Lent—a season of reflection, repentance, and renewal, a season in which we will focus on mending that which is broken in our midst —may we dare to pray for the power to see. Not the comfortable kind of sight that confirms what we already believe, but the challenging kind that reveals what is broken, what needs mending or healing, where God is leading next.

May we be a church that chooses to see:
the marginalized, the hurting, the overlooked, the systems in need of re‑creation, and the God who keeps kneading holy mud to restore us all.

And may our testimony, our lived truth, proclaim the good news:

“I was blind, and now I see.”

May it be so.

Amen.