Universal Blindness, Universal Healing
March 15, 2026 • The 4th Sunday in Lent • Year A
1 Samuel 16:1-13 • Ephesians 5:8-14 • John 9:1-41
Around the world, there are an estimated 1.4 million children who are blind. Not all of them were born blind or became blind as infants, but many of them have never known what we would call normal sight. In developing countries, the leading cause of childhood blindness is vitamin A deficiency. Perhaps ironically, the leading cause in wealthy or middle-income nations is retinopathy of prematurity—ironic because it is a condition most often seen in premature babies that receive neonatal intensive care, during which supplemental oxygen interferes with the normal development of blood vessels in the eye. Babies born in countries where advanced neonatal care is not available are less likely to suffer from the condition.
Another cause of childhood blindness is measles, which has traditionally been associated with poorer countries but recently has been on the rise in this one. Sometimes children develop cancer, specifically retinoblastoma, which often results in the removal of one or both eyes if affected. Occasionally a child is born with an inherited condition, like Leber’s Congenital Amaurosis, which is passed on from one or both parents and which is now being treated with gene therapy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_blindn). But do you know what is not on the list of the causes of childhood blindness? Sin. Or is it?
“Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” When the disciples ask Jesus that question, they articulate a theological perspective that makes us wince. Thankfully, Jesus’ answer is, “Neither of them.” We don’t associate sin with blindness. We don’t believe that people who are born with a disability are being punished for their sins or for anyone else’s. God doesn’t work like that, and anyone who says otherwise has an understanding of God that I find repulsive—one that cannot be reconciled with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
But, if we think of sin not as something an individual does—an act of disobedience—but as a condition that plagues us all—our universal state of being—we quickly see that sin is exactly why anyone is born blind. Sin is not the cause of illness; sin is our illness, and its symptoms are legion. Understanding sin as a flaw in human nature rather than a flaw in human performance helps us hear this passage from John’s gospel account not as a story about one man’s blindness but as an episode about the blindness that all of us share and, therefore, about our universal need for a savior.
“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” Jesus says. “He was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” But with those words is Jesus not merely trading one terrible interpretation of disability for another? On the surface, it sounds like Jesus understands disability to be a mechanism for divine intervention, and I want you to know that I don’t like that any more than disability as a means for divine punishment. God doesn’t make babies to be born with congenital disease because God wants to show off when either Jesus or the miracle of medical science heals them. God doesn’t trade in human suffering for show. That’s not who God is.
We need to remember that this man’s blindness is not unique. His inability to see is just the version of the world’s brokenness that is manifest in his body. You carry your own version. We all do. In each person’s life, the imperfection of the world is manifest in particular ways, which is to say that the consequences of sin show up in all of our lives and only sometimes are they manifest in ways that other people can see. What Jesus says about this man being born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him is true for all of us. We were all born with some version of blindness so that God’s saving love might be revealed in us.
But that’s not easy for everyone to hear. I think there are two kinds of people who have a hard time believing that both sin and salvation are universally distributed among the human race, and they struggle with it for opposite sides of the same reason. First, we have the Pharisees—an imprecise label used by the authors of the New Testament to depict a faithful group of people whose faithfulness was misdirected. They were the Jewish leaders whose religiosity was regularly challenged by Jesus and his teachings. And they are still the religious people in our midst who cannot live with ambiguity or contradiction.
Repeatedly, they questioned the man and his parents because they could not understand how Jesus could have performed this miracle. Jesus had healed this man-born-blind on the sabbath, and, in the eyes of the Pharisees, that made Jesus just as sinful as the man whom he had healed, and they were convinced that God doesn’t listen to sinners.
First, they questioned whether the man had actually been born blind or whether it was just a temporary condition that resolved itself. Then, they attacked the means of the healing itself, as if to prove that Jesus hadn’t done what they were convinced he could not do. Finally, exasperated by their inquiries, the man turned the tables on them and began to teach the religious experts how anyone who had the power to give sight to a person born blind must be on the side of God. Quite naturally, the leaders panicked. “You were born entirely in sins,” they exclaimed, “and are you trying to teach us?” And they drove him out—because those who cannot imagine how the God of holiness would go outside the rules of religion to share that holiness with sinners cannot tolerate a living example of divine grace and mercy. They would rather push it away.
The second group does the same thing. Like the Pharisees, they, too, struggle to believe that God would break the rules of polite and religious society to save the sinful and the lost. But, in their case, it’s because they’re the ones who are sinful and lost, and they’re convinced that God would never want to come and find them. When that’s us, we instinctively push ourselves away every time God tries to draw near.
You don’t have to be a Pharisee to struggle to make sense of God’s love. None of us understands it. It doesn’t matter that sin is universally distributed among humanity if it feels like your sins are piled up higher than anyone else’s—so high that God would have to throw all the rules away to come and save you. But thanks be to God that that’s exactly what God does for each one of us in Jesus Christ.
We are all sinners. We are all equally sinners. And we are all equally loved and redeemed by God. We were all born with the equivalent of salvation blindness—the inability to find our way back to God—but that blindness is an opportunity for God’s work to be revealed in us. The religious rules we have can help us stay on the right path, but alone they cannot get us where we need to go. Our blindness—our sinfulness—is too profound. We take the rules and make them something that keeps sinners away from God rather than something that draws us back to the Father. But God won’t let that keep us away. There is no rule that God will let stand in the way of God’s salvation coming to us. Jesus shows us that there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. In him, God will always come and find us and carry us home.
© 2026 Evan D. Garner
