Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Fourth Sunday of Lent 2026

The lengthy gospel story of the man born blind is unique to John’s gospel, along with other lengthy, compelling encounters between individuals and Jesus that we have heard in recent weeks; like the woman at the well whom we now know as St Photini, or Nicodemus. These encounters are lively and questing; they show Jesus taking seriously the serious questions that are put to him; using them to draw his interlocutor towards a deeper understanding of his person and his purpose, and towards their own healing. We even catch hints of humour. These sustained encounters portray faith in Jesus as a journey in relationship; an accompanied process of discovery and learning, rather than any single decisive encounter or knock-down argument. Jesus is interested in people, in individuals and in their seeking after something. Jesus engages with people with all their doubts and struggles and grievances. People like you and me.

St Augustine interpreted this story as an individual’s spiritual journey, but with universal application – the man born blind is every one of us, and is humanity as a whole.

He journeys from complete physical and spiritual blindness to the anointing (mud and saliva) and washing in the pool of Siloam, both of which mirror the anointing and washing of baptism, towards a spiritual sight that enables him to see Jesus as first prophet, then Son of Man, and then Son of God – Lord, I believe. He journeys from seeing nothing to the vision of heaven. May we all hope to do the same.

It is a journey, but not a smooth one. The man born blind is repeatedly questioned, doubted, and ultimately rejected. Recent interpreters of this story, following the thought of Rene Girard, suggest that this is a story about violence, exclusion, scapegoating; that dark story of humanity, to which we are largely blind, and which the whole gospel brings to light. In this story, we see the parents of the man born blind anxious about being expelled from the synagogue, and the man himself cast out to resolve tensions between factions in the religious establishment.

There are ominous rumblings here of the human dynamics that will eventually propel Jesus to the Cross; rumblings that we do well to consider in ourselves and in our world as we journey through Lent.

This story all begins as an enquiry about sin. The disciples want to know whose fault it was that this man was born blind – who sinned? The culture of blame was as alive and well then as it is now. Who can we pin this on? Someone has to pay, as long as it is someone else.

Jesus refuses to play this game. This is not about sin, this is about God and what God does and is doing in a world of blindness and suffering and marginalisation. And, by the way, this is not a call to idle speculation on the worthiness or otherwise of others, this is a call to work.

We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.

This is about the work of God and our part in it.

Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light – so we heard in the letter to the Ephesians.

We may be people on a journey, we may not have the full vision of heaven, we may have our doubts and struggles and grievances, but in the Lord we are light, and called to shine in lives that are fruitful; in lives that generate more light.

Jesus said ‘I am the light of world’ – one of the seven ‘I am’ sayings in John’s gospel that illuminate his identity and his mission; his work, the reason he was sent.

They are categorical sayings – they are not ‘I am like the light of the world’, ‘I am like the bread of life’ not because they aren’t metaphors, but because we are applying created things to the Creator, to God – God who is not a thing among things, but the cause of all things – the ‘I am’ that gives all things existence. Jesus is the Word of God incarnate, by whom all things were made – if he isn’t then we really should all pack up and go home – and he says ‘I am the light of the world’ to remind us that this metaphor refers to him in a way it couldn’t refer to anything else – because it refers to him as its source, its cause, its reason and meaning.

The whole language of blindness and sight in our gospel story today, although it relates to a physical miracle, must also be understood metaphorically – as a vehicle for us to understand spiritual truths about ourselves and our divine calling in Christ.

Those who live with sight-loss or who were born unable to see might rightly feel aggrieved to be treated merely as living metaphors of an unenlightened, sinful state. The disciples wanted to treat the man born blind in that rather detached way. Jesus, instead, engages with the man as a person, physically, seriously.

Light, seeing, is not the only way we sense the world, and certainly not the only way we come to know God, but it is a powerful metaphor. The letter to the Ephesians states boldly:

everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that becomes visible is light

To the eye there is nothing unless light illuminates it; unless light is reflected from it and it is made detectable by the eye. So, to the eye, there is nothing but light – all that is seen, in the mind, is light; you, me, this building. So light is a wonderful metaphor of the Divine life, which makes all things and makes them all seeable, knowable. Without the Divine life, just as for the eye without light, there would be nothing and darkness.

But just as no eye sees everything, perfectly, so even what we see implies a not-seeing, a failure to see, that we rarely acknowledge.

So Jesus ends this story in a dispute with the religious authorities, about seeing and not seeing.

'I came into this world for judgement so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.' Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, 'Surely we are not blind, are we?' Jesus said to them, 'If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, "We see", your sin remains.'

In Augustine’s sermon on this text he rather charmingly empathises with his congregation, saying that after all the twists and turns of this story, all their effort to understand its meaning (and, believe me, Augustine has put them to work!), we end with perhaps the most difficult, tortuous part of the whole passage. Bear with me, Augustine tells them, and perhaps I might ask you to do the same. We are nearly there!

The story began with a question about sin, and only now does Jesus answer it. Sin is a blindness to our blindness; a refusal to allow our eyes to be opened when and as God wills; to accept the process, the sometimes slow journey to understanding; being too quick to say ‘we see’ and imagine that there is nothing more to be seen. 

If we say ‘we see’ then our sin remains. May we trust the Lord not just to open our eyes, but every creaturely faculty we have, to discover his divine nature and his divine call, that we may share in his divine work and be brought, at last, to the beatific vision of his glory.