4th Sunday of Lent: Holy Questions

John only relates seven of Jesus' miracles. We'll hear the greatest of them next Sunday. We've heard the sixth this morning. And John doesn't actually call them miracles. He calls them signs. We give thanks for the mighty work that Jesus does when he brings the healing of broken bodies. But why does God bring healing: for the sake of the healed and those who love them? Yes, but such healings are temporary. We will not take our bodies with us. Jesus’ miracles of healing will help us the most if we can see them as signs, pointing to those things of the spirit that we will take with us.

All those things that hurt our souls; our fear and our anger, our distrust; those things we will take with us unless we understand the signs of God's trustworthiness that Jesus gives us. And if the Good News of Jesus Christ is about more than getting well, it is also more than a list of do’s and don’ts. The confrontation between Jesus, the man born blind, and the Pharisees was about one of the biggest don’ts as the Pharisees understood God’s law.

Jesus' healing of the man born blind was a certainly a sign to the Pharisees. He didn't need to make mud by mixing his spit with dirt and rubbing it on the man's eyes to heal him. Certainly the voice of his command would have been enough to give sight to this man born blind. His use of these "props" -- the dirt, the spit, the mud -- were a sign to the Pharisees then and the Pharisees now about the danger of passing off man-made rules as divine commands for all time. They were a sign to the Pharisees then and now of the danger of reducing salvation to a checklist of do's and don'ts. Jesus freed the man born blind. And Jesus frees us to ask new questions of Him, and through our Spirit-led conversation to receive new answers. Above all, Jesus Christ frees us to trust that when we do our best to follow him, His grace will lead us home.

Specifically, it was Jesus rubbing the dirt and spit together that was a violation of the Sabbath commandment to rest. The Law of Moses had been right to ban the making of clay because that act recalled when the Israelites were forced to make clay bricks for the the Pharaohs' pyramids. The Sabbath was a day for the Israelites to celebrate their freedom from human enslavement. But more than a thousand years later, in this situation, the Sabbath command against making clay would have left a man enslaved by his blindness.

The Pharisees belived in the Law of Moses, all 613 individual rules of that law. If one man could go one day and keep the Law of Moses totally, all 613 rules, the Pharisees belived that God himself would come down and make his kingdom among men. But they forgot that God had given the law to a particular people at a particular time and a particular place. And by Jesus' time they had made those 613 rules something that had not been God's intention. By Jesus' time those rules had become a constitution that could never be amended. They had become a checklist of do's and don'ts with no understanding of the Spirit which had inspired them.

It's understandable that we should look for bright lines, like the green arrow moving out from the Fidelity office. As long as you stay on the line, your road to wealth and financial security is a sure thing. We are tempted to do the same thing with religion. Make the line clear as day, stay on it, not deviating one step away from that line, and the road to heaven will be as easy as the line to financial wealth. The truth is that neither line is as clear as we want it to be. What do we do when the line of righteousness and "doing the right thing" points in one direction, but the line of mercy points in another? And so begin the "Questions on the Way."

That's the book we've been reading and discussing in our Adult Sunday School. It's an excellent summary of how the Episcopal Church understands its particular expression of Christianity. There are answers to the questions asked in "Questions on the Way," which often lead to more questions. But that is how the life of faith must be. And I would rather live out my faith not fearing the questions, than picking one set of answers and barring the asking of any more questions, just to save myself the fear of my comfort being disturbed.

I will be wrong at times. But I will not make my answers into an unbreakable Sabbath law, because Jesus might be ahead of me, asking more questions. I will trust His grace to correct me in good time, and to lead me home.