Jon the freelance theologian delivered this community talk on 12 June 2005. The reading was John chapter 9: the healing of the man who had been born blind.

If you stopped anyone on the street and asked them what the Bible was they’d probably end up telling you it was a religious book. So, it always amazes me how anti-religious the Bible can sometimes be. It seems ironic that the real villains of this section of Scripture are in fact the people who should be ‘in the know’. They are the holiest men from among God’s chosen people and yet the ruling religious elite seems to get things awfully wrong.

Looking at this passage of scripture we see that the set-up, as is so common in the gospel accounts, is a question: “Who sinned? Was it this man or his parents?” (verse 2). Usually when a question is asked it’s prefaced by a comment like ‘some of the teachers of the law were trying to trick Jesus so they asked him a tough question’, but here this isn’t a ‘test case’; it isn’t a semi-philosophical conundrum designed to catch Jesus out. It’s a genuine question from his disciples.

The common theory of the time was that usually sickness was a result of sin. In many ways the ‘health and wealth’ prosperity teaching that we have inflicted upon us by fundamentalist Bible preachers and satellite television is nothing new. The claim that ‘real believers don’t get sick’ – and it’s flipside: that if you do get sick, then you’re not a real believer – were as prevalent in Jesus’ day as they are now. And yet like many discerning believers today, such blanket claims and such patently false teaching was often questioned by those who had experienced life and knew that good people got sick and died while bad people seemed to prosper. This question from the disciples is a genuine one. They want to know what Jesus really thinks about this situation, because it seems ridiculously unfair.

What could a person have done – what sin was so great? – that they would be struck blind from birth? What did their parents do and, more importantly, what does it say about God’s justice that this man may be suffering as a result of someone else’s sin? It’s actually a hugely open-ended question and one that must have puzzled the disciples. They were used to hearing the religious types castigating the beggars and lepers as sinners (conveniently meaning you didn’t have to feel compassion or pity for them – they must deserve whatever sickness they are suffering from).

And in this religious worldview, the disciples presented Jesus with the two options they had heard – it was either this man or his parents who had sinned. Jesus could have picked one and gone on to do something else. All the other rabbis were giving a simplistic answer to the conundrum that besets the believer when faced by seemingly random evil. He didn’t take the easy option and get judgmental. But he did make a judgment call.

The disciples question masks the real question: what is God doing in the world when things like this happen? Why is this man blind? And Jesus’ response is to say ‘this is what God’s doing. If you need some sort of proof that God really does care, here it is.’ And then he spits on the ground, rubs the mud on the man’s eyes and sends him away to wash the mud off.

I don’t really know what was going through the guy’s head when he heard the conversation about sin and stuff. He was probably used to it, thinking ‘oh, here we go, another “holy man” going to tell me I’m a sinner’. He was probably used to people spitting on him too, so hearing Jesus getting some spit together (getting ready to huck a loogie as our transatlantic brethren would call it) wouldn’t have been too much of a surprise. He was probably quite glad that when Jesus spat he missed his target. He wasn’t to know that Jesus was aiming at the floor.

When Jesus healed lepers he broke one of society’s taboos and touched people, and reaching out and touching a beggar was also unusual – they were obviously ‘sinners after all! And I think it’s interesting that this blind man heard Jesus’ command to go and wash and followed it through. The author of John’s gospel, traditionally the apostle John, notes that the pool the blind man is sent to is called ‘sent’. There is a direct correlation between the man’s healing and his obedience when he hears the command of Jesus. As with the ministry of the apostles whom Jesus sends out to do the work of the Kingdom, the effects of the Kingdom of God, in this case – healing, dynamically break through into ordinary life when the man is sent. [And note he is actually sent away from Jesus. He had to leave the place he was in, the begging station he probably knew so well and go to a different part of the city; perhaps somewhere he didn’t know well. I don’t know if there’s any significance in that, but it’s also interesting.]

And of course he’s healed. His friends and neighbours were mystified. Not even sure if he was the same guy. Was this some kind of trick? But note the reaction of the religious leaders as the news started to spread. The man had been taken to the Pharisees. We aren’t told why. Perhaps it was to have the miracle authenticated. We don’t know. But we do know that the Pharisees weren’t best pleased. I think there is something crucial here that I’d like to explore over three points.

Firstly: this healing has occurred, but there is scepticism at work, rooted in the fact that it’s happened on the Sabbath. This is an objection to Jesus’ actions that came up again and again – how could you do the things of God if it meant working on the Sabbath? We might think it’s a bit daft, but given that the Sabbath had been divinely instituted – it features in the core of God’s law as revealed in the early part of the Old Testament, when Yahweh God give his Ten Commandments to Moses – it throws up a quandary. If Jesus is healing through the power of Yahweh God, then why is he doing this ‘work’ on the Sabbath, as Yahweh God told people to preserve the Sabbath as a holy day of rest?

Well, perhaps it’s down to a misunderstanding as to what the Sabbath is really about and people not realising who Jesus really is. Elsewhere in the gospels Jesus tells the religious leaders that the Sabbath was made for man, not the other way around (see Mark chapter 2, verse 27). In other words the Sabbath is important because human beings need to rest and take time out to consider God’s priorities. The problem was that ‘observing the Sabbath’ had taken priority – the thing that was there to meet the needs of the people had become this thing that placed extra demands on the people.

Societal structures often have a habit of doing that. The welfare state is a fantastic, and I believe God-honouring idea, but too often those who depend most heavily on it have to spend far too much time filling in forms and going to interviews and examinations. What has happened is that something that was designed to serve vulnerable people has started making demands on those people and they have to jump through the various hoops imposed on them. The principle of government is another example. We vote for people who become servants of the people in their constituency, but our relationship with the ‘Government’ is one of oppression and being made to conform to certain rules. The institution that was created to protect and benefit society now demands we serve it.

But compared to religious structures, other societal institutions that exercise wrongful authority pale into insignificance. What has happened here? The religious leaders have substituted cast-iron rules and regulations instead of a personal love for the ways of God. It is the bane of religion that it is so much easier to create a checklist of do’s and don’ts that will dictate whether you are holy or not. It is so easy to substitute ‘morality’ (usually based on God’s ideals, but still only a way of living, when it comes down to it) for a genuine relationship with God.

And that’s what has happened in this situation. The religious leaders know that the Sabbath rules have been broken so they quiz the man. When they don’t get any satisfactory answers from him, they question his parents. I feel for his parents. They have suffered years of shame from having a son who was born blind – the whispers, the word ‘sinners’ muttered behind their back – and then when this incredible event happens, the religious people who had condemned them as sinful don’t even give these parents the opportunity to rejoice in their son’s healing before dragging them into the synagogue and giving them the third degree. The parents deflect the questions back to their son out of fear. (It’s sad, isn’t it, how religion intimidates people?)

So then the Pharisees ask the man the questions again and at this point he starts getting annoyed and eventually gets facetious, as all sensible people tend to when faced by hardcore religious dogmatists, asking if they’re interested because they want to be his disciples too (verse 27). And he gets sarcastic: “That’s really strange that you don’t know [whether he’s from God or not]. Well, God doesn’t listen to sinners, but he does listen to people who do his will” (verses 30-31). That’s a direct challenge to the Pharisees – ‘you say you know God, but you couldn’t heal me!’

Then they chuck him out, reaffirming that he’s a sinner. (“You were born in sin!” -verse 34.) Despite the miracle and despite the fact that the ‘evidence’ for calling him a sinner (his blindness) is no longer there, the things he says do not mesh with their worldview. And they aren’t willing to question their own doctrinal certainties. What a travesty. There is the comparison a few verses on when the insight of the ex-blind man is contrasted directly with the closed-mindedness of those who could physically see. The author of John’s gospel is a master of irony and he pulls this point out at the end of the chapter that we read earlier. Those who should have seen God’s hand in the day’s events, refused to recognise it, but a sinner and outcast truly saw what was going on.

It’s a salutary warning to those of us who engage in church. To give it a more contemporary feel, although this is old news for many of us, the divisions and arguments caused by the spiritual awakening in the early 1990s that was dubbed the “Toronto Blessing”, is an apt example. Those of us who were in churches at the time will remember the debate about whether it was really from God and, interestingly, the debate never really moved beyond the scenario in John chapter 9. Those who opposed it did so on the basis of their theological disposition towards charismatic phenomena. They had their ‘certain truth’ and they were positive that God wouldn’t move in a way that seemed to go against His own Word, as they interpreted it.

Now I’m not going to stand here and say that they were completely wrong because there were serious issues in the way some churches were affected by the hype and decided they wanted to ‘do Toronto’ too. Egos did get involved and the whole thing fizzled out rather quickly when they did. Some of the wilder claims concerning revival still haven’t come true and we would be wise to hold certain Christian leaders to account for that and bear it in mind if we’re asked to weigh future pronouncements. So, yeah, there were issues. But nobody has the right to tell God that he can’t act in any way he sees fit, just because we think we know everything there is to know about the way God does things. It’s a sad fact that the majority of opposition we will face when ‘doing the stuff’ will probably come from other Christians.

I’m not a name-dropper. But recently I was at a media conference and ended up in a small-group conversation with Joel Edwards, the head of the Evangelical Alliance. He was saying how the world needed to see more empirical evidence of the good news, either through acts of kindness like ‘Soul in the City’, or supernatural acts of kindness like miraculous healing, to pique people’s curiosity. But, he said, the cynicism of the media and our current culture would soon dismiss whatever ‘proof’ we had.

I challenged him on that, because I think if someone went out on the streets of Cardiff and healed 50 lepers (not that we have a huge amount of lepers in Cardiff, but you know what I mean), the general public would be amazed and the media would definitely want to know more. In fact, I said to him, I think the biggest cynics would probably be among that non-Charismatic element within his own organisation, the Evangelical Alliance, who so sneeringly dismiss stories of healings, spiritual gifts and other aspects of the Kingdom life. “When,” I asked him, “are you going to convince some Christians that God can work supernaturally?” Joel Edwards, to his credit, is a very gracious man and he didn’t slap me for being so cheeky, but it is a real issue. Let’s not kid ourselves. If we go out on the streets to ‘do the stuff’, some religious people are going to take issue with us.

The second point to draw out of this chapter is that the religious people completely lost sight of the human being at the centre of it. They were asking questions, they wanted to get to the bottom of it, but they didn’t realise the real miracle.

As we mentioned the blind man was sent… and he went. The response was unnatural. If someone had rubbed spit-mud in your eyes would you then do what he told you to do? I don’t know if I would. And when he gets shirty with the Pharisees, he asks them if they want to be Jesus’ disciples too. Think about that – ‘do you want to be his disciples too?’ There’s an identification going on there. This man now thinks of himself as a follower of Jesus. Hardly surprising, considering that Jesus has transformed his life, doing what no other rabbi or holy teacher had been able to do.

But, just like they cannot see God’s involvement in this situation, the Pharisees have also lost sight of the human being at the centre. That’s something that we can do too. We should never substitute seeing God at work for a quest for doctrinal correctness. What that means is, we should never demand that people sign a statement of faith before we grudgingly admit that God has worked in their lives. We have to realise that everybody starts somewhere and – I’m a theologian, perhaps I shouldn’t be saying this – you don’t need to know the Bible backwards to hear God’s voice; you don’t need to spend three years at Bible school to pray effectively; you don’t need to understand the Nicene Creed, or even know what it is, to know that you need God in your life. I’m happy to talk you through the tough bits of the Bible, I’m happy to explain the development of Christian doctrine and even what the Nicene Creed is, but those of us who are learned should never allow our learning to become a source of pride and a barrier to God’s intentions. Otherwise what we will end up with is an arid intellectual faith that is technically correct on all it’s points, but is fundamentally hollow.

All the learning in the world is no use to anyone if you don’t love people, value them, cherish them, spend time with them, encourage them, build them up and appreciate the things God is doing in their lives. The soulless hole we see in so much religion comes from insisting on a tick-box attitude to faith – replacing a love for God that often comes from a flawed and broken life, with adherence to precise and correct points of belief.

The mistake we make is assuming that if we attain doctrinal purity, then behavioural purity will follow. We say ‘believe the right things and you’ll act the right way’ and when we do that we put our own theological systems in the place of God. Meet God and you’ll act the right way! Do what he tells you and you’ll be doing the right thing! It’s true that we all need pointers into hearing God’s voice, and we need good friends who will ask us if we’re doing the right thing, and hold us accountable in our actions, but our priority has to be to do God’s will, not understand the finer points of theology to the very last detail. (And that applies for those of us who love theology and can’t get enough of it!)

Another mistake we make is forgetting that the people we are called to love; those who don’t know God as their father yet, are precious to God. I hate the term ‘friendship evangelism’. I think it is easily the most pervasive heretical statement of the post-Modern era. I know it doesn’t mean this, but it sounds like we only want to be friends with people because we have an ulterior motive. Let me say something provocative (just for a change): the people you meet every day, who you work with, who you live with – they need friends, not ‘evangelists’ who want to be their friends and try and convert them all the time. They need to be valued as human beings, respected as creatures made in the image of God, in whom that image still flickers faintly. We should never become friends with anyone for any other reason than that they are worth it and that God thinks they are worth it. Otherwise we lose sight of the precious human being that Christ died for and we become hypocrites.

My third point is a short one. The question was raised and the disciples gave Jesus two options – is it this reason, or that reason? And Jesus wasn’t happy with either. Instead he took the discussion off into a whole new dimension that ended with a huge miracle, a huge controversy and a huge number of seriously pissed off religious people. Hallelujah!

When we ask questions of God, we should only ever expect an answer that will confound our limited expectations. God doesn’t tend to answer our questions directly. Often he just asks questions back (“whose image is on this coin?” Matthew 22.20) or sets tough challenges of his own (“Let anyone without sin cast the first stone” John 8.7). But even though he doesn’t answer the questions we set, he still has an answer. He presents his solution to the problem – in this case he heals a man born blind, something that had never been done before.

As we think about this chapter more and get into it, we see these applications:
Firstly, to not allow what we think God can do to get in the way of accepting what he actually does and to not elevate our human knowledge above its station. Secondly, to not lose sight of the human beings in whatever situation we find ourselves in. Thirdly, to anticipate the answer we don’t expect from the God who does things that have never been done before.

Following on from the question posed by CF about creating a God-honouring society, JE from the United Kingdom engaged Jon the freelance theologian in the following dialogue.

On creating a God-honouring society I agree with your wise remark that people trying to blend religions together only end up creating a new one. I was wondering what other approaches there might be – perhaps less intellectual ones. Many people nowadays think in terms of common experience, rather than orthopraxis/doxy. There are the 12 step programmes, which work by thinking of a higher power, which can save us from addiction (and we are all actual or potential addicts). Generally, there is the idea that if we call out, there is someone who listens and who cares.

There is the approach of finding things we can all laugh about, cry about and dream about from the depths of our hearts. Living in pluralistic society one can look for the spark of life inside everyone and try and connect with others at the deepest levels one can. All this could sound rather new age-y, but what do you think about these ideas?

A reply from Jon the freelance theologian

Common experience can provide the grounding for a deep understanding of other human beings. However, the problem is that, sooner or later, people are called upon to make a judgment call regarding those experiences.

I’d like to illustrate this using the analogy of a ‘fairy ring’. In the garden of the house where I grew up, there was a ‘fairy ring’ – an almost perfect circle of mushrooms growing in the grass lawn. It was an interesting phenomenon, called a ‘fairy ring’ because of an old superstition that it was created by the faeries as they danced during the night.

To a believer in faeries, it was all the evidence needed to prove the existence of the little people. After all, it made a certain sort of sense and explained the phenomena quite neatly. Belief in the faeries meant that the ‘fairy ring’ was proof that they existed.

Now we could both stand in the circle, with me explaining what created the ‘fairy ring’. You, on the other hand, might think the idea of fairies living at the bottom of my garden as being preposterous. You might posit other theories to do with spores, fungus beneath the ground, animal activity, even just that it was a fluke of nature. Our shared experience, namely both of us standing inside the ring, will not mean we come to the same inevitable conclusion. Our beliefs and prejudgments, including our societal upbringing, will mean that we interpret the experience differently. We may initially agree that the ‘fairy ring’ is interesting, but our different responses to it will probably drive us further apart, if anything.

Incidentally, the ‘fairy ring’ analogy is one that explains why the classic arguments for the existence of God are so convincing to the believer, yet seem fallacious to the non-believer.

Even without common experience, seeing the humanity in other people and respecting them as fellow human beings is important, if difficult sometimes. However, there is an element within all human beings that works against this, namely self-interest. Unfortunately, a cynic would probably be right in saying that the unerring ability of most humans to assume they are right about everything precludes the idea of ever finding common ground.

This is the problem with looking for the ‘spark’ in people (which sounds more Gnostic than new age). In the Christian conception of the world there is the element of human sin, which would presumably cancel out that spark or lead humans off into blind alleys when it comes to honouring the divine. Human-authored religions (theosophy, scientology etc.) may have their adherents, but the history of religion shows that only those religions that claim transcendent authority through ‘revelations of the divine’ will survive.

Question from JF, USA

If you had a vision of Krishna that said you were going to be reincarnated would you believe it to be real or hallucination? If you had a vision of God where he told you that you were definitely destined to go to Hell would you believe it to be real or hallucination? If you had a vision of God where he tells you that Jesus is the true saviour and to put your faith in Christ would you believe it to be real or hallucination? How can someone differentiate between which religious visions are real, and which are hallucinations?

A ‘religious experience’, by virtue of its very nature, remains subjective. Without going into too much detail, there are some obvious tests relating to a person’s psychological state, whether the experience matches up to previous claimed phenomena and enquiries from an objective point of view.

If a person claimed to have had all three experiences listed in the question, or similarly a series of experiences that contradicted each other, then it would be legitimate to critique the experiences and the individual claiming them. Simple questioning would uncover whether the individual was telling the truth, in that they had really experienced something they believed to be true, or whether the person was psychologically unbalanced.

In terms of Christian theology, several ‘supernatural’ phenomenon are recorded in the Bible and Christian history. These include encounters with God (theophany), visions, interpretation of visions, prophecy, fore-knowledge or revelatory knowledge with no other means of verification, manifestations of God’s power (revivalism), personality changes, instantaneous transportation, healing through prayer, coincidental occurrences, the resurrection of dead people and changes in the physical world and the nature of things. The disturbing thing for some Christians is that most, if not all, these phenomena have been recorded in other religious systems as well. It seems arrogant, and a touch disingenuous, to dismiss the things experienced in other religions as being false, while ‘Christian’ experiences are true.

It is common now, within Christian theology, for many of these things to be explained in a scientific manner. Frequently the stories found in the Bible, or early Christian literature, are regarded as parabolic stories. So, for example, when Jesus heals a man who was blind from birth in John chapter 9, the author deliberately contrasts the restoration of physical sight with the ‘spiritual blindness’ of the religious leaders of the day (verse 30). Most of the miraculous stories found in the Bible may have this intent of revealing a certain truth and can be interpreted this way.

However, it must be noted that this modern way of interpreting supernatural phenomena is a product of the Enlightenment scientific rationale and deciding to interpret religious experiences using that outlook is a value judgment made by the individual. But the advantage of doing this is that it discounts phenomena experienced in all religions, leaving Christians arguing for the truth of their worldview on the basis of reason and historical accuracy. The only question that then remains is how true can a religion be, if it relies on manufactured stories of miracles to convey truth?

Accepting that religious experiences may happen, it is worth analysing those experiences from a critical standpoint. It is a noted fact that those undergoing ‘religious’ experiences are usually people who go looking for them. To illustrate this, the likelihood of a person ‘speaking in tongues’ (glossolalia) increases greatly if they belong to a church that actively encourages it, perhaps even claiming that it is a hallmark of genuine salvation. Precedent causes phenomena – whether that is visions of the Blessed Virgin at a Catholic shrine, or people falling down under the influence of ‘the Spirit’ in a Bible-belt tent meeting. Even people who would claim that they were not looking for a religious experience, may have been subconsciously desiring one. Unfortunately there is no way of analysing those subconscious desires after the event, because they will have been met and eradicated through the experience, so the thesis that there is a subconscious desire can never be proved.

Real problems start when individuals believe that they have received ‘new’ revelations about the nature of God. It is hard to contradict somebody who believes that God has ‘told’ them something – it is self-authoritisation of the worst kind. Perhaps the solution to the problem is to recognise that ‘religious’ experiences are valid, because the person who experienced them believes they had a religious experience. As it is a totally subjective event, it leaves other people free to accept or reject it, based on any means of judgement they choose. The safeguards for Christians remain 1) weighing experiences against Biblical accounts, 2) Christian precedent and 3) God-given reason.

Assessing experiences has been a problem for Christians since the earliest Christian communities formed (see Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, chapter 5, verses 19-21 and the first epistle of John, chapter 4, verse 1) and, in all honesty, as long as there are people looking for a religious experience, this will probably always be a problematic area for the Christian community.

Thanks for your question, JF.

Question from CF, location not given, but believed to be the USA

Jesus points to a spiritual way to heaven while clergy seem locked to Church tradition. Who can broaden our scope with an “Honor God Society” for a common bond among all whom have faith?

The very fact that we have so many religious traditions in this world seem to indicate two things: 1) human beings have an innate sense of something beyond the physically verifiable; and 2) few people agree on what that is.

A God-honouring society that encompasses all faiths seems like an excellent idea and many people have tried to put one together, usually to find that they have founded yet another new religion. The issue for anyone trying to adopt a pluralist approach is how do you take the common experience of religion and create something that is morally binding and yet redeeming in the life of the adherent.

To put this problem another way – it’s not enough to merely recognise the common ground between different traditions, there has to be a way of reconciling the uncommon ground as well. So, for example, how would we ‘honour God’? Would it be through prayer, particular worship patterns, offerings of food, sacrifices or something else? The questions of ‘ortho-praxis’ (correct action) are almost as complicated as those of ‘orthodoxy’ (correct belief).

On that note, many ‘clergy’ would argue that ‘Church tradition’ maintains, upholds and explains Jesus’ ‘spiritual way to heaven’. How would that viewpoint be accommodated in a pluralist movement?

The best that can be done in many respects is to agree to disagree, keep the doctrines and the dogmas open to discussion, answer people’s questions truthfully and respect the fact that other peoples’ beliefs may be different, which can be hard to do if you think those beliefs are pointless, daft or just plain wrong. From a Christian point of view, very few people are argued into the Kingdom of God, so telling them they are wrong about things seems to be a waste of time. Far better to honour the God who made all human beings through respecting his creatures, than to treat them with disdain and discourtesy, acting out of sinful arrogance and pride.