Who is Blind?

Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgement, so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” (John 9:39)

It has to be one of the most confronting things Jesus ever said. We love the idea of Jesus helping the blind to see but simultaneously blinding those who can see …! What are we supposed to do with that?

We’re in John’s Gospel, of course, where Jesus regularly plays with words. In John three, Nicodemus misunderstands Jesus’ call to be “born from above”, hearing instead, “born again”. In John four, the Samaritan woman hears “flowing water” when Jesus offers her “living water”. Now, in John nine, the confusion centres on blindness and sight—sometimes literal, sometimes spiritual.

A man born blind receives physical sight, but the real blindness in the story belongs to those who refuse to see what is right in front of them. The Pharisees in this story are not visually impaired; they are spiritually impaired. They cannot see what God is doing because they are too committed to their ideology—to what we nowadays call their ‘dominant narrative.’

We live in a world of competing narratives, each claiming to interpret what’s really going on, and sometimes these narratives can blind us to the obvious!

We saw that during the pandemic, I believe. There was an official narrative—emergency measures, lockdowns, masks, and a massive vaccine rollout. Then there were the counter‑narratives—claims of government overreach, pharmaceutical manipulation, and long‑term control. What concerned me most was not which narrative was correct, but how little space there was for open, rational debate. Dissenters were mocked, silenced, or criminalised.

I’m sure we all remember Prime Minister of New Zealand declaring to her people that her government was their “single source of truth”—language I’d never heard used before outside of dodgy religious contexts.

John nine plays out in exactly this way. A man born blind is healed. The townsfolk, his parents, and the religious authorities all try to make sense of it, but instead of celebrating the miracle, they panic as this healing threatens their dominant narrative.

Jesus healed the man on the Sabbath, and, therefore—according to the Pharisees—He must be a sinner. The man who was healed offers a counter-narrative: “If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” (John 9:33) The Pharisees respond, not with argument but with force! When the dominant narrative is threatened, the dissenting voice must be silenced.

Yes, this feels familiar. America and Israel recently declared war on Iran to prevent them from getting nuclear weapons, or was it to stop an imminent Iranian attack on the USA, or maybe was it to bring democracy to the Iranian people? It’s not clear exactly what their rationale was, as it keeps shifting, but it most definitely was NOT an attempt by the US President to distract from revelations in the Epstein Files that might land him in prison, and, as in our Gospel reading, if you don’t accept that dominant narrative, you risk being criminalised!

Last week, you may remember, I attended a memorial service for the late Ayatollah of Iran in support of my many Shia Muslim friends, and I was genuinely surprised to wake and find that people were petitioning the Australian government to take legal proceedings against me and my friends because we had apparently ‘supported a terrorist organisation’ by attending the memorial service. Praying can be dangerous!

Jesus said, “I came… so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” (John 9:39)

Of course, He’s not talking about punishing people with literal blindness. He is talking about exposing the blindness that we refuse to acknowledge. As Kierkegaard said, “All obscurity is a dialectical interplay of knowledge and will.” In other words, we don’t see partly because we can’t see and partly because we don’t want to.

It’s like a game of Jenga, with the various different blocks that form a tower of belief. Some beliefs are foundational to the tower. Remove them, and the whole edifice starts to shake!

Years ago, I watched a 9/11 documentary with a young American volunteer at our youth centre. When she saw footage of Building 7 collapsing, she became visibly distressed. “That can’t be true,” she said, “because if it is true, then my government has been lying to me. And if they’ve lied about that, how can I believe anything they say?” She couldn’t let go of her belief in her government, not because there was anything solid supporting that belief but because so much other stuff rested upon it!

We all have towers like that. We believe ‘we are the good guys’. We believe our culture’s values are basically right. We believe that our media tries to tell us the truth, and the older we get, the more blocks we stack, and the more invested we become in making sure that our tower doesn’t fall. Jesus comes both to expose and to liberate. He comes to help the blind see but also to blind the seeing by dismantling our false confidences that keep us from recognising our own blindness.

The Pharisees’ problem was not ignorance. It was overconfidence. They knew how God worked. They knew who was righteous and who was a sinner. They knew what the Sabbath law required, and because they were so sure they could see, they were unable to recognise God standing right in front of them.

The man born blind, on the other hand, begins the story knowing nothing. He doesn’t know who Jesus is. He doesn’t know why he was healed. He doesn’t even know what Jesus looks like. But he is open. He is willing to learn. And because he knows he is blind, he becomes the one who truly sees.

This is the invitation of our Gospel—not necessarily to adopt a new narrative, nor to replace one ideology with another, but to recognise our blindness—to admit that our towers are fragile, our assumptions limited, and our certainties often misplaced.

Jesus does not expect us to see everything clearly, but He asks us to look at Him, and when we do that, everything else starts to come into focus.

Shine your light on us, O Lord!
Give us eyes to see the truth and the courage to choose it! Amen.

Our Sunday Eucharist

We had another wonderful Sunday Eucharist last weekend. Thank you, Rob, and thank you, Doug, and thank you to everybody who joined in.

I got a bit carried away with the discussion on this Gospel reading – the story of ‘the woman at the well’. We went for nearly twenty-five minutes, and I can’t use AI Saint Paul as an excuse, as we kept him on the virtual reserve bench last week. Even so, Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman in John 4 is a beautiful story, and I think we had to try to do it justice. You’ll find the recording at the end of today’s newsletter.

As usual, you’ll find last week’s most popular shorts below. See all our shorts on the Sunday Eucharist Instagram page and all our content—long and short—on YouTube

This coming Sunday I’m looking forward very much to welcoming Dr Andrew Madry and Rev. John Queripel back onto the panel, and I must remember to get John to share with us the details of his new book, “In Wisdom and in Passion—Comparing and Contrasting Buddha and Christ.”

Please join us at noon on Sunday. You’ll find us on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Faithia, Streamyard and TheSundayEucharist.com. Invite your friends by directing them to the Facebook event, the YouTube link, or the Streamyard registration page.

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What’s On?

Saturday, March 14th – Hands Off Iran rally. 4pm at Sydney Town Hall (details)
Sunday, March 15th – Our Eucharist from noon @thesundayeucharist.com, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Faithia or Streamyard
Monday, March 16th—‘Prayers for Iran’ webinar at 7.30 pm (Sydney Time) @ Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn and Streamyard
Tuesday, March 17th – Boxing at the Mundine Gym in Redfern from 7 pm
Thursday, March 19th – Online Bible study group meeting from noon @ www.thesundayeucharist.com/bible
Thursday, March 19th – Boxing at the Mundine Gym in Redfern from 7 pm
Saturday, March 21st – Boxing at Legend’s Gym in Kensington from 3 pm

If you read the events listed above, you’ll have seen that there’s no boxing today (Saturday) as I’m heading into the city to participate in the Hands Off Iran rally organised by the Anti-AUKUS Coalition (details here).

We’ll be focusing again on Iran on Monday evening (Sydney time) and I’m hoping that as many fo you as possible will join us. I’ll have two good friends with me, both of whom I think you know:

Dr Tim Anderson
Dr Maram Susli (aka Syrian Girl)

Both these good people are expert political analysts, and it will be a privilege to hear their insights. You’ll be able to post questions and comments as usual. I really hope you can make it, and if you can register in advance here, that would be great.

Before I let you go today, I need your help getting this fight happening with former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, check out the video below and take a good look at today’s header graphic.

I’m happy to say that the challenge has already been published by 7 News (see here), and that might help me get the message through to my hoped-for opponent.

I know I had his phone number or email address at some point, as I challenged him to a bout around five years ago. He said ‘no’ then for the reasons I outline in the video. He may still say ‘no’, but I want to give it my best shot, and any help you can give would be appreciated.

Share the video, please. and share the graphics too if you can. I’ve posted each of the graphics to the Press Release page. Right-click on the individual images there and choose ‘save image as’ to download a copy.

Okay. I’ll let you go now but I hope to link up with you again very soon – at the rally, the Eucharist or the webinar, and hopefully at all three.😊

Your brother in the Good Fight,