I want to ask you a question, and I've had this conversation with a lot of people this week. You know, we've been a series all summer long about the signs of Jesus in the Gospel of John. I've heard from a lot of people how much they like this, but I've been seeing Jesus differently through these passages. I don't know if you have to.
The conversations that I've been having with people are like, you know, this is just different. I've never thought about this before. I've never realized this. And I always tell people that you know, reading scripture, it's like an onion.
It makes you cry. No. But there's layers to it. And I don't know how many times I've been, I've read the Gospel of John.
I've been in full-time ministry for 10 years. I was reading the Bible pretty seriously five years before that to a class on John in seminary. I remember I think I read the thing in one sitting like 20 times. I've read this book a bunch and I've never seen it like I've seen it in this series.
I think what has been jumping out to me so much is that I feel we've been seeing the humanity of Jesus. We've been seeing the person of Jesus in this. We've been seeing what is it like when Jesus gets frustrated? What is it like when Jesus gets happy?
What is it like when when Jesus is compassionate? What is it like when Jesus just wants to get away from people? We did that for a couple of weeks. What is it like when Jesus sees people and he feels sorrow or he sees people and he feels excited?
I feel like we've just been seeing a side of him that for me, I've never really thought about that much before. And what's been going on is we're seeing the humanity of Jesus and the divinity of Jesus. And while he's 100% of both at the same time, fully God, fully man, the churches believe that for 2000 years, we've been seeing him dance around these stories of life in need. And today we're going to read a story of the sixth sign, the second to last sign.
We find it in John chapter 9 and we see Jesus expanding some things out. Let's open our Bibles and get you on the screen behind me. You can use your phone if you want to. But John chapter 9, we're going to start in verse 1.
This is what scripture tells us. Jesus was walking along, he saw a man who had been blind from birth. Rabbi, his disciples asked him, why was this man born blind? Was it because of his own sins or the sins of his parents?
It was not because of his sins or his parents' sins, Jesus' answer. This happened to the power of God, he could be seen in him. I'm going to quickly carry out the tasks assigned to us by the one who sent us. The night is coming and then no one can work.
While I'm here in the world, I am the light of the world. And he's spit on the ground, made mud with a saliva, spread the mud over the blind man's eyes. And he told him, go wash yourself in the pool with Saloa. Saloa means sent.
So the man went and washed and came back, seeing. So these signs of Jesus, these visible in-breaking of the divinity of God, just breaking into our human existence. We talked about how these are not miracles for miracle sakes, but this is what happens when the power and the presence of God comes into our world and how it resets things, how it makes the world operate differently because Jesus is there and the power of God is there. We read this second sign.
It takes up the whole chapter of nine. It's a fantastic way to spend the afternoon if you want to read this whole story. But what we find is if this is a dance of Jesus, that right here, the dance is in the steps, it's in the details and there's things that are subtle things that are going on that make this so much more than a story about one person. I make this a story about all of us.
It's just Jesus says that he's been sent. And from that point, we can begin reading this is so much bigger than just this one. So we see this healing right here. This idea of sin that disciples immediately get into it.
They're asking Jesus, well, is this God blonde because he's sinned or just got blonde because his parents sinned. And while we might kind of look at that and think, oh my goodness, what are we going to do with that? The disciples are simply working on something in the Old Testament where God says that he will make the parents pay for the sins of the people who pay for the sins of the previous generations and because the parents sinned, the generation and the offspring will be under this burden. But what God is talking about in these people, these disciples, they're getting, you've heard the phrase, you had their blinders on, you're getting just too internally focused on yourself.
The bigger story that's going on here is God has said these things hundreds of years beforehand about the covenant that he had made with his entire people. But what happens when entire nations break the covenant? We see the cycle work down the Old Testament where the nation of Israel split into two and was overtaken by foreign armies and was hauled off and were Jerusalem's destroyed and they go spend time in exile and they come back from exile and they build the temple and then they try to fix things and turn things around and a couple hundred years later Jesus comes. The disciples are trying to find why is the reason this guy has hurt?
What did he do to get himself into this position? But Jesus razz his power. Kind of very different outcomes in this moment. That Jesus makes sure that his disciples know that this healing is much bigger than what they're going to expect.
This healing does not just involve a blind person. That Jesus' words in the story are significantly bigger than one person. In fact, at the end of chapter 9 it wraps up in verse 39 and says, Jesus told him, I entered this world to render judgment, to give sight to the blind and to show that those who think they see that they are blind. The disciples want to find out what that person had done that was worse than them.
And Jesus turns it and flips it over around. Jesus talks about sin here and Jesus talks about suffering. The disciples are trying to get Jesus involved in a petty religious debate. They're trying to figure out, well, who is at fault here?
They're thinking about the individual. They're focused on the individual. But as far as sin goes, Jesus was refusing to name a culprit here. When you saw this man, he did not see a culprit.
He saw a person that's in need of healing. Talk about the humanity. How many times have you gotten yourself into a pickle and you've immediately begun running through thinking, what did I do to cause this to myself? How is this an outcome?
Why am I such a bad person that this happens? We get in these situations where in need of healing and the danger is that we can easily become self-judgmental and self-referencing and start beating ourselves up. Jesus is not naming a culprit here. He's naming himself as a solution.
The suffering only exists because sin exists. That if we want to imagine a world without sin, we have to imagine a world without suffering. Jesus is asking his disciples to have a bigger picture of what sin actually is. If this isn't just a list of do's and don'ts that we learn when we are a kid, the threat nuts.
But instead, Jesus is naming, these are the things that will kill us. And I've come to make sure that you don't get hurt anymore. That sin is not something that we're not supposed to do because someone tells us, but sin is something that we heard to avoid and stay away from at all costs because it's the exact opposite of what a healthy life and what a healthy relationship and what a healthy being is. Suffering happens because sin happens.
And Jesus says I'm coming here to fix the sin problem. And suffering is going to be fixed as a result of that. That Jesus is greater than all suffering in this world because he attacks it in solidarity with our salvation. He comes and says I'm going to why is he fully God fully man?
Why did Jesus have to come to this world? Why did Jesus have to do all the things that Jesus did? He said I'm going to come here and stand here with you to go through every single thing that you're going to have to go through. And I'm going to break this cycle free.
And by me and because of me and through me, we're going to break this destructive pattern of what's been going on. It's a stance is in detail. There's one thing that Jesus says that helps us realize this is much bigger than us. And non-for, he says something that might not initially make sense to us.
He says we must quickly carry out the tasks assigned us by the one who sent us. Now in my ring, I'll read this. I'll read this all so quickly thinking. I would think that this would read that I must carry out the tasks assigned by the one who sent me.
We're used to Jesus talking about himself. So here we have a man in need of healing disciples are judging him trying to figure out what did he do that was so bad that got him into this position. And Jesus saying that's completely different. But we have things that we need to do because we have been sent.
I would expect this to be Jesus's problem. Jesus says, no, this is all of our mission though. This is a plural statement here that we are part of what Jesus is supposed to be doing here. That's a little different than what I would natively think.
I don't feel like I'm qualified or I have that little responsibility or I would know it to do in that situation. I wonder if the disciples were kind of getting freaked out by them too or maybe they just seen him do so much stuff. They were just rolling with it. You must do the things by the one who has sent us.
We're part of this to be sent. It's to be dispatched for a purpose. It's to be sent to do something especially in a relationship with another person. There's a couple of different folks involved.
There's you that's doing the task. There's also your relationship and your responsibility to the person who sent you. And then there's the whole task thing. This is not something that just one person can do.
And Jesus is here saying that my father has sent me to help you do this. They were called to be part of this process of sending that detail here. So think about this. So Jesus is in Jerusalem.
And he's there for the feast. And it's called the Feast of the Tabernacles. Most of the time when I hear feast, I want to be involved in said feast. It's like Turkey leg day.
I don't think you would like this feast. The Feast of Tabernacles. You might but not in July. So the Feast of Tabernacles is when everyone to remember the Exodus builds like a sketchy little lean to outside of their house and they live in it for a few weeks.
Do you want to live outside right now? I've never read a summer boy scout camp like a screen door house. That was miserable enough. So they're in the Feast of Tabernacles though.
They go and they draw water out of this pool. It's so low. They carry the water, the temple and they pour it out. This is part of the prophecy in Ezekiel to where it says that one day that the river of life will flow from the temple.
So they go there and they grab this water and they pour it out in some very specific place and they pour it out in a specific place to envision this future where God's providence and God's peace and God's goodness and God's justice. Everything that he has promised when it flows like streams of living water. But this pool is interesting too though. I don't know how many others we are excited.
I had an interesting weekend. I told somebody setting up this morning, I said, man, no matter what, there are three things I'm counting on right now. Jesus is big enough. Barbecue is good and Game of Thrones comes on tonight.
We're all familiar. We can think of an analogy. We know what a siege is, right? We've seen enough movies.
The idea of big army comes in circles. The castle keeps everything from coming in and coming out. If you live back in pre-gunpowder days, I've been listening to a podcast about the follow-room. If you live back in the days before gunpowder, the absolute worst thing could happen to you or the best position you could put yourself in militarily, it's not a word.
What's to go under siege? And the king has a kai, an Old Testament. It was one of the last good kings. One of the last godly kings, one of the last true kings.
He realized that the king of Babylon was going to come and lay siege to Jerusalem and that bad things would happen and the greatest fear in a siege is having your water supply getting cut off. And so what he realized they could do is they could divert this stream, they could make it run underground, they're going to build a tunnel and send the stream completely from outside of the city gates, under the walls, through the mountain and have it come out in Jerusalem. And no matter what, no matter who put them under siege, they would have a clean water supply. And that hezekiah's tunnel is what it's called.
You can read about it in the Bible or you can go to Jerusalem and see it. You can crawl through it if you want to crawl through it. I don't want to crawl through it. I'm not a person made for small tight spaces.
But this pool emerged, it's slow. So think about this water that's been sent. That's what's slow. It means sent because it was sent from outside.
It was sent from on a high to where it goes underneath, where you can't see it to where you're not aware of it. And it emerges to provide sustenance and healing and every single thing that we're going to need. The story of God sending Jesus. He's sending him to us.
And we encounter him and experience him in ways that we cannot understand. Sometimes the best way to describe grace is I really needed it. I don't know where it came from. But all of a sudden every single thing I needed was right there for me.
It was sent to me. And as marvelous as that sending is, we are part of this, of being sent. Just like Jesus is. How amazing is that?
Just think about it, that Jesus did not want to do this on his own. That Jesus, because of the relationship that's just inherent in God as Father, Son, Holy Spirit, that Jesus perhaps, think about this, he could not do it on his own. Because he refused to not involve us in this process. He's messed up and is janky as we can all get.
He said, I'm not going to do it without them. The last thing, kind of weird thing. The whole mud and spit business. Is this freaking anybody else out?
Just gross. Can I tell you my favorite spit story? When I was in kindergarten, Jenny Williams fell down on the parking lot, on the playground. And man, she was crying with kindergartners.
And outside that I was going to help fix Jenny Williams. Bobo underneath. I've seen something on a movie recently that I figured would be the best way to fix Jenny Williams. Let me show you what it was.
I'll let you name the movie. I took my hands on it. I put him underneath. That's what I'm missing from you.
Jenny Williams' week. Well, Mr. Boone, the principal found out that Chad Brooks spit on Jenny Williams. And I got drug in the principal's office five years old.
This is 1985 in Rapids Parish. What do you think Mr. Boone did? He got that big paddle.
What he had drilled out two and a quarter holes on the drill press for greater airflow. And oh man, I got three licks because I tried to miss from you. Jenny Williams. Nobody wants to get spit on.
Even if it's well meaning. So Jesus spits on the ground and makes mud out of it and puts it on this guy's eye. St. Irenaeus.
He led the church roughly about a hundred years after Jesus' death. This is what St. Irenaeus said to say about this. He said, if we think about the story of God, our mind and this story should instantly go back to Genesis.
To God forming man out of the dust in the ground, out of mud and breathing his life into us. That Jesus in his action is showing us that through his sentence and through our participation with this sentence that he is resetting the cycle of Genesis. Jesus coming saying, I am pushing reset on everything. It's like on that old school 8-bit NES reset button was powerful.
He's saying I'm hitting reset on this whole endeavor because I'm here. It's going to be very, very different. But for us to grasp what this reset means, what this salvation means that Jesus offers to us, we have to grasp what it means to be sent because they're one and the same. We can't have one without the other disciples.
We're focused on their individual faith. And sometimes we get focused on our individual faith. And the problem when we become two individual and two internal focus, we forget the key part of the whole program and plan is that we are sent. That our faith and our salvation is not even worth it.
If we don't understand that we've been sent, that we've been called, that we've been given the ability to do even greater things than what Jesus has done. The disciples wanted to point out what was wrong with one person. Jesus refuses to take a position. When it comes to you and I, Jesus refuses to take a position.
Instead, Jesus sees through that position. Sees through and gives us and infuses us with what we were made to be and what we were called to be our own unique place in this whole mission. Our problem is our own invitation to be part of this greatest rescue mission on Earth. So we have to ask ourselves a question.
Where do we get past ourselves? Where do we get done with pointing out ourselves as the blind person who is sent or who's parents have sent? We point out our problems and think that those will roadblock us to our potential. We disciple ourselves.
The second thing is we ask, how does Jesus need to put mud and spit in our eyes? As gross as that sounds, everyone of y'all need to get spit on. I need a lot of spit. I need a lot.
Because I want Jesus to hit that reset button completely. I don't want to be able to live into that and know what that means and see that and work inside of that. And each of us need to be praying for what that sending looks like. Where's that pool that we need to wash at?
What is that washing then going to send us off to do? How's that washing going to help us find that thing that we've been chasing and trying to understand our entire life and we've been looking forward in many different places? We might even know it in the back of our mind what that is. We might be avoiding it.
We might be saying that we don't have the ability or the power to do that. It might scare us too much. But Jesus has sent us. And as part of his mission that you're uniquely called to be.
Jesus, thank you so much for putting up with us. Thank you for putting up with me. If you can give God gray hairs, I've done it. But also thank you for the ways we understand what you're doing and the ways that we just sometimes for brief moments we see and we experience you.
And we realize what these places are that we are called to and how they're different. And we find ourselves in line with your will and beautiful ways and ways that we cannot explain to other people that we might not be able to understand ourselves but just to utter that answer. I'm right where I need to be right now. Jesus help us to see this, understand this.
Help us for those of us who are still just trying to figure out what it means to trust you. Help us take one more step into you. Help us understand. For someone who might take a big jump or leap.
God for some of us in life that we're looking at things that require a little faithfulness that means we just have to jump off a cliff. Help us see where that pool is for every single one of us. Thank you so much. And we pray.