As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. Now there’s something in itself. That he who was walking along is Jesus. John uses irony to get us to see. Look, the one man who can see sees the man who can’t see. And in seeing the man who can’t see, he lets us see that God sees. He also lets us see what God sees and whom God sees. More still, he let’s us see how God sees. Note: no one else sees this man until Jesus sees him. And even when they see him, what they see is not him per se; they see his unseeing—they see a blind man while Jesus sees a man.

Ever feel invisible? Ever think you wouldn’t be missed if you all of a sudden disappeared, since you don’t appear to appear to anyone much? Or when people do see you, do you sense they see you as nothing more than the particular malady you bear, the stigma, the handicap that keeps them from seeing your full humanity? Or maybe you have internalized all that yourself. Maybe even you have come to think of yourself more as a birth defect, or a divorcee, or a victim of this or that—as the sum of your failures—rather than as a child of God that can do the works of God in the world while it is day. Here’s a clue: God doesn’t see you that way. Jesus is the one and only one who can open your eyes to the way God sees you. Only he can heal and transform you.

But how does he do that? Let’s see. First, he doesn’t get into dead-end discussion about causes. Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind? Isn’t this just like us? Whenever or wherever we encounter a problem, we rush to ask about cause. It must be something we did or something our parents did or something society did. But look how fruitless that is. How does that change anything? What if the man’s parents had sinned in some way to bring about his blindness? What if his mother smoked three packs of Camels a day during pregnancy and drank a fifth of Scotch every Friday before the Sabbath? The man would still be blind. Even more absurd is the idea that the man born blind was the one who sinned. So what is this, a new category of original sin: fetal transgression? Was he was cursing his mother with every kick as a fetus in the womb?

Isn’t it enough sorrow for parents to have a baby born that doesn’t come out as expected, with challenges visible or invisible but real either way? Do disciples of Christ need to pile on with theological speculation about who is at fault? We can do the tests, check the science, learn whether something can be prevented the next time, but the question is how you will bring God into this.

Here’s the way Jesus does: he says that it did not have to do with sin, but with the will of God. Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind SO THAT God’s works might be revealed in him. Now, one way to take that SO THAT of Jesus is to aim the blame at God. God made the man blind in order that God might be revealed in the man.

And maybe that is just what Jesus means. I don’t know. Could be. But it doesn’t seem to square with other things I believe about God’s goodness and mercy. I don’t think God needs to make darkness in order to show light. When God created the world to begin with, it simply says before anything else existed except for God, God said let there be light, and there was light. If darkness was there before light. We are not to attribute that to the work of God. So a man born into darkness, it seems to me, is not the creative work of God. It falls into the mystery of those things we simply cannot explain and which God has not seen fit to show us. We simply cannot see into this mystery well enough to say we know.

But sometimes I will confess that some who are so afflicted makes their own claims about these things. Like Stevie Wonder, whose mother used to cry about her boy being so talented and yet blind. Stevie said to her, Mother, maybe God made me this way so that God could show his wonders. Maybe. I wonder. But when someone believes that deeply, I have learned not to correct him as if I know more than that one who must bear up under it all. Fact is, some of us who haven’t suffered much in our lives ought to be slow to speak with certainty about such things.

I received a letter a few months back from Cecil Sherman, one of my heroes in the ministry. His wife, Dot, suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. His world has gotten smaller nowadays as he keeps his vow to love her in sickness as well as health. She knows him less and less as time goes by. He knows her, though, and he loves her faithfully nonetheless. The image Nicholas Sparks gave us in his novel turned movie, The Notebook, comes to mind. If you cannot weep when reading or seeing that, you need to check your pulse. Cecil said in his report that he has had much time to think, and he can say that while his faith has not changed, his theology has. He did not say how that is, but my take is that you can truly know certain things only by going through them yourself.

There’s another way of taking Jesus’ SO THAT. What if Jesus is merely pointing to the “what for” of the man’s blindness? What if the point is what might be instead of what might not be? What if Jesus is attending to what is left instead of what is missing in this man or in any of us? What if he wants us to see that there is much to be seen yet about our lives because God sees us and will see to us?

Now, for this man born blind, that meant that Jesus, who is himself the light of the world, would shed light on his darkness. He would heal him and see to it himself. Sometimes that is the way God works God’s works in us. Sometimes God fixes things altogether, restores us fully, or transforms us completely. God is still doing miracles in the world and in our lives. When something inexplicable happens, though, why are people of faith so afraid to give God the glory? Well, I know why. It’s the same reason I am so slow to. Because I don’t want to seem like those people who always prefer a supernatural explanation to a rational one. As if something can’t be both at the same time, don’t you know?! Somehow it makes them feel like their faith is specially validated if they can claim it was a miracle. But, friends, sometimes they are right! Sometimes it is a miracle. As Hamlet said to his friend: There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.

Sometimes God heals people so that they might glorify God through their healing. Sometimes, however, God uses our limitations to focus the way God wants to work some good work that would not happen if we were healed. Our suffering shapes our service. As the French mystic scholar, Simone Weil, said, The supreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.

Some suffering is useful to us and may also be to God. The great short-story writer, Flannery O’Connor, was stricken with lupus in young adulthood. She longed to be among the great writers of her age in New York. But it was only after her affliction, after she was forced to return to the cramped confines of Milledgeville, Georgia, that she found her Southern voice and her stories really came to life. She offers us this wisdom: "I have never been anywhere but sick.  In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it’s always a place where there’s no company, where nobody can follow.  Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don’t have it miss one of God’s mercies.” [28 June 1956, O’Connor, Letters, p. 169.]

I know that I am missing one of God’s mercies by not being so afflicted by sickness. Yet. But I am watching you, some of you who have learned from Jesus and the blind man, from Flannery O’Connor, and even from Stevie Wonder. I am waiting my turn, but doing the best I can now with the nagging nicks of flesh and spirit I suffer before then.

See what Jesus does for this man. He spits on the ground and grabs a handful of mud, rubbing it on the man’s eyes. You’d think there would be an ABRACADABRA or something. At least he might lay hands on him and pray, huh? But, no, just a little home-baked medicine— enough to get the man to go wash in the pool of Siloam. John tells us that the name of the pool means SENT. That’s sent as in the meaning of the Latin word missio, from which we get our church word MISSION!

Have you ever noticed how often when a person dies of cancer or heart disease or whatever, the family asks for donations to cure that malady? Or when someone is struck with illness, all of a sudden everyone they know finds out about that and is mobilized to fight it? Ask any hospital development officer. People become passionate about what afflicts them or those close to them. And the outcome is, oddly enough, lots of good works for lots of people. Not only is there nothing wrong with that, but it’s a way of interpreting Jesus’ so that. God gives purpose to those who suffer in order that it becomes redemptive suffering for more than just that one.

Not all maladies that shape a mission are physical, however. Martha Stewart starts her new life out of prison this week. Will she carry anything of that experience into her new life? Charles Colson started Prison Fellowship after his jail time from the Watergate scandal. Recovering alcoholics help other alcoholics recover. Those who have known the grief over a lost child or a suicide or any number of other sadnesses help others going through the same things.

This is also why new converts to Christ are the best witnesses to those who need Christ. They are most passionate about how Christ can transform a person.

But one can also jumpstart the passion again and again. I heard the testimonies of five students from Duke Divinity School this week. Each one told of a story of how their lives had been changed by working with a church in South Africa or in a low-income housing project in Durham or on a mission trip to Costa Rica. When you obey Jesus and participate in his mission to the world, you start to see the world with his eyes. Your eyes are opened and you see. And what would be the point of having your eyes opened if all you could see was still yourself? God wants to open your eyes to see Jesus and others. But you have to wash in the pool of Siloam; you have to dive into mission; you have to become immersed in the work of God.

At the end of the story in John 9, the blind man is not only healed; he becomes a believer in Jesus as well. God wants us all to see. God doesn’t want blind faith. God wants us to see our own salvation in Jesus Christ and see others who are yet blind to Christ. And if it takes a malady to find our mission, then glory be to God even for that.