Christ the King Epiphany Church, Wilbraham

The Rev. Martha S. Sipe

March 15, 2026 / Fourth Sunday in Lent

John 9:1-41

Some time in the last year, I don’t remember exactly when, Tricia and I were driving on the highway when we noticed that some cars have a small light in their side mirrors that comes on periodically.  Not understanding what we were seeing, we continued to pay attention and noted that those lights would come on as we approached the car in the passing lane, and we quickly figured out that the lights were a sort of warning system to alert the driver of our presence.  It’s called blind spot detection.  I guess we’d been living under a rock not to know that, because I’ve since learned that blind spot detection has been standard equipment on cars since 2020.  And the technology helps.  A 2019 study showed that blind spot warning technology provided a 23 percent reduction in lane change crashes with injuries.

Blind spots in driving are the areas around a vehicle that cannot be directly observed by the driver while looking forward or through either the rearview or side mirrors. They’re usually located to the rear-left and rear-right of the vehicle where the car’s frame blocks the view of other motor vehicles or bikes or pedestrians.  I suspect that even the most careful of drivers among us have had experiences of near-misses because of blind spots.  And even the new technology isn’t fail-safe.  The dangers of blind spots, while significantly reduced, still exist.  We still need to be mindful of what we may not be able to see.

This morning’s gospel reading exposes many blind spots among many people – not driving blind spots, of course, but spiritual ones.  Because all the people looked at the man born blind – but they never saw him.  Day after day he sat and begged.  They looked.  They walked by.  They wondered.  But they never saw.  The disciples looked at him and saw a theological question, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”  Their vision was distorted by the belief that suffering is caused by sin and you get what you deserve – a theological blindness.  The neighbors looked but couldn’t see past the image of the way things had always been, a blind man sitting and begging.  It’s all they had ever known him to be.  Theirs was a blindness of comfort with the way things had always been, with the status quo.  Two times the religious leaders called him in.  Two times they interrogated him.  Two times he gave glory to God.  But they could not see the prophet, the man from God, that this formerly blind man now sees.  They could not see the new life, the new man, the new creation created through Jesus’ healing.  Theirs was the blindness of power which tries to maintain an order that keeps people in their place – the powerful on top, and everyone else below.  Even the man’s own parents distanced themselves from him.  They could talk about their blind son but not about their seeing son.  To see him, the enlightened son, would have meant having to tell the story.  But they were afraid, and so they chose to deny what was right before their eyes.  The parents were blinded by fear.  They all looked but none saw him.

In the same way, sometimes we look and do not see.  Like the disciples, sometimes we are blinded by a theology that makes us preoccupied with right and wrong.  Any time we start looking for cause-and-effect – (No wonder she got lung cancer; she smoked for 30 years.  It’s not surprising that he has no money; he’s lazy.  It’s sad about all those people being detained and deported; but they had it coming.) – any time we look for cause-and-effect for the suffering of others, we’d better check our blind spots.  Like the man’s neighbors who couldn’t see anything other than what they had always known, sometimes we resist change.  And when we do, we ought to check our blind spots.  Like the religious leaders, we sometimes want to hold on to the power we’ve always enjoyed.  Honestly, that’s a problem with many of our elected leaders on both sides of the aisle.  As Christians, our power and privilege ought to be used to lift others up, not to maintain our own comfort.  And like the man’s parents, fear makes us look away from what we’d rather not have to address – injustice, oppression, and the violence of a war being waged far away which, as long as it doesn’t directly affect us, is convenient not to see.  We need always to be checking our blind spots.

And thanks be to God, Jesus is our ultimate blind spot detection monitor.  He alerts us to both our willful and unknowing blindness.  He opens our eyes to what we cannot see.  Where we are often blinded by bad theology, Jesus was not.  “This man is not blind because of sin,” he said – “not his own sins nor those of his parents.”  It’s less important to define why a person has come to suffer than it is to relieve that suffering.  That is God’s work.  Nor was Jesus blinded by a desire to preserve the status quo.  He came to change us.  Unlike the leaders, who were determined to preserve their power and authority, Jesus came to give them away, to turn the world upside down, to cast down the mighty from their thrones and lift up the lowly.  And I hardly need remind you that our Lord was not blinded by fear.  He entered into suffering willingly, his eyes wide open, for he could see beyond suffering to the eternity of peace and joy he would know, and would share with all of us.  Jesus had no blind spots.  Because of his vision, compassion, and love, he could see what the man would become:  a person of vision and faith.

And in the same way, Jesus truly sees each of us:  our faults and failings, our weaknesses and blind spots, to be sure, but also our belovedness.  He sees our struggling against all that would keep us from following in his way – all that holds us back from offering compassion and being open to change and leveraging our privilege and speaking truth to power – sees us and sends us the Holy Spirit to mold us to be more like him.  He sees our potential to be what we were created to be:  children of light.  So, let us “walk as children of light, for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.”  And let us give thanks for Jesus who sees us as we are, loves us, and then encourages us to open our eyes to a world he loves.