Sighted By The Shepherd: A Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent (A)

Preached at all Saints, Collingwood, on Sunday, 15 March, 2026.  Readings for this Sunday, the Fourth in Lent (A):  1 Samuel 16:1-13; Psalm 23; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-4

Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. (Jn 9.32)

If you’ve been coming regularly through Lent this year, you will remember that we’ve heard a series of long readings from John’s gospel.  Today’s, about the man born blind, may be the longest of these readings.  Indeed, I felt for Father Gordon as he read it, and thought that if there was ever the church equivalent of the military fitness tests that he and I once did, then reading this gospel would probably be part of that test.

At the heart of today’s gospel is a story of healing which serves as a sign of Jesus’ identity as the son of God.  Healing has been much on my mind lately, because as some of you know, healing was the focus of this winter’s Après Ski series, which ended last night.  Every Saturday from mid January to last night, we heard healing stories and prayers from both the Old Testament and New Testaments.   We learned that healing miracles were a particular focus of Jesus’ ministry, and that Jesus and the Holy Spirit give power to the disciples and apostles to heal in God’s name.

At each of the Après Ski services we heard meditations from members of the regional clergy team as well as laypeople, and so today, I’d like to draw on some of those meditations to help us understand our gospel reading and what it might mean to us who in are turn are looking for all kinds of healing.

So let’s begin the elephant in the room, skepticism.  We are blessed with more medical resources than any generation in human history,.  These resources are there to mend us and cure us, but we should not put our faith solely in MRI machines, or in drugs or an excessive concern with wellness.   As Sharon Goldsworthy noted in her talk last night, it’s good and right to believe that God can work through the skill of medical practitioners, but from time cures and recoveries happen that can’t be explained.  Our skepticsm shouldn’t overcome our belief that God can and does heal in answer to prayer.  In our gospel story today, the Pharisees refuse to believe that Jesus has acted to heal the man born blind, despite his testimony.

Second, tesimony and belief are important.  The climax of the story is not the curing of the man born blind, because you don’t put the climax of the story at the beginning.  Rather, the climax of the story is when the man says “Lord I believe” and worships Jesus.  Scripture reminds us consistently that healing begins with belief.   Belief can take many forms.  In her meditation, Rev Sharon pointed to the nameless Hebrew slave girl who encourages her master, the Syrian general Naaman, to seek healing from theSo Jewish prophet. Elisha (2 Kings 5: 8-14).   Even though she is enslaved and far from home, this girl trusts that her God is still merciful and good, even to her captor.    

And in one of her meditations, Rev Amy reminded us that sometimes healing is about taking the hand that Jesus offers us, as when Jesus asks two other blind men, “Do you believe that I am able to do this?”   So faith that Jesus wishes to be with us and to help us is part of healing.   It’s noteworthy that at the end of today’s gospel, Jesus calls the Pharisees blind, in a spiritual sense, but also signifying that they do not want what Jesus has to offer.

In today’s gospel reading, physical healing is in this case the restoration of sight, but as Rev Amy and others noted in their Apres Ski meditations, healing can take many forms.  Sometimes it can be an afflcition like being mute, or lame, or paralyzed, and sometimes it can be freedom from demonic influence.  In all the gospels, healing begins with Jesus seeing and caring for the burdens that we carry.   These burdens can be various.   Rev Amy noted that healing can be more than spiritual - it can come when we are feeling hopeless, or as she noted in a passage from Matthew, when we are “helpless and harassed”.    In our gospel reading today, the man is harassed and oppressed by the religious authorities when he refuses to deny that Jesus has done a good thing by healing him.

Sometimes, healing is about Jesus bringing people out of isolation.   Rev Gordon and others noted that often in the gospels, healing returns people to their families and comunities.   The healing of lepers in is one example.   In today’s gospel, the man born blind pays the price for speaking up for Jesus because he is expelled (literally thrown out, ekballo) from his synagoge community (this is a common Johannine theme, tensions between Jews who decide to follow Jesus and those, the majority, who don’t recognize Jesus as Messiah).   So what I think is the most important line in the entire gospel comes at verse 35:  “Jesus heard that they had driven him out, and when he found him he said”.  This is Jesus acting out his mission as the Good Shepherd (see Jn 10), who has come to bring the lost back to the fold,

Being “helpless and harassed” can be because of  physical or mental illness, or depression, or poverty, or addiction, or being unhoused.    In such situations, our situation is inevitably worse when we are isolated.   We feel that no one cares, that no one can help us, and we give way to despair.   Healing begins when Jesus searches for us as a shepherd searches for a lost sheep.   

Likewise healing begins when the church as a community of disciples joins in that search, makes room for the lost sheep, and sees them as a valued member of the community.   On Thursday night, the Rev. Maggie Helwig gave a talk on her book about an unhoused community, Encampment.   She said that the church’s mission includes firmly believing and acting on the principle that all people are created equally by God, that all people bear the divine image, and that all people are worthy of love.

To summarize, healing is about God’s desire that we flourish in our lives.   In our gospel reading, healing is about sight, but as we’ve seen throughout our Après Ski series, healing can take many forms.   Perhaps the best way to understand healing is not necessarily health, as in an end to a disease or a disability, but wholeness, meaning inner peace and trust that we are loved and upheld by God.

I would say too that our prayers for healing should not just be for ourselves, but for God’s work in bringing the created world to a better place, to be the world that God always intended it to be.  When Jesus spits on the earth and turns it into mud, that is surely an echo of God’s act of creation in forming Adam from the clay.  When we pray for healing, we are praying to God the Creator, trusting that God is not finished creating good things. In a world where so much energy is devoted to hate and destruction, our prayers for healing align us to God’s good creative purposes, and our prayers express the hope that God’s good work is not yet finished.   When we pray for healing, we are joining our thoughts, energies, hopes and actions to those of God, the same God who loved the world into being, and who will not stop until that world is healed.