“investigations – Fruitless or Not”

By Rev. Michael Stonhouse

Meditation – Monday, March 27, 2023

John 9:1-17 (Forward, p. 57) CEV p. 1113

Jesus had the audacity to do the ‘unthinkable’, that is, to disregard the elaborate and unwieldy and intricate ‘laws’ of the Sabbath and perform what was considered ‘work’. All He did was to heal a man born blind, to heal him of a malady that had plagued him for many long years. In doing so, He incurred the displeasure and the wrath of the official Jewish authorities.

As soon as they were apprised of this miracle, they immediately set out to investigate it. They queried the man himself, his neighbours and his own parents, but in the end their investigations got them nowhere. And why was that? It was because their minds were already ‘made up’, meaning that their investigations were doomed to fruitlessness from the very beginning.

But here we need to borrow a page from a couple of detective novels. Repeatedly in the “Death in Paradise” television series we see the St. Marie detective team stumped, faced with what seems, at the onset, to be absolutely impossible. And Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective, was heard to exclaim on more than one occasion, When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Sadly, the religious authorities did not see it this way. Their thinking, and their logic, ran this way:

-either the healing that Jesus performed was from God or it was not;

-even if God was not directly involved, as a kind of divine intervention, He would still have been indirectly involved if it was through the skill of some human or through some natural process such as a medicine, as it was God who created these things;

-and if God was indeed involved in some way, even if distantly, then it meant two things:

-firstly, that their Sabbath laws and regulations, the so-called ‘hedge laws’, were wrong and contrary to the will of God;

-and secondly, that Jesus was indeed sent by God and used of God in such a miraculous way. But this was not all that there was to it. A long-standing Jewish tradition held that there were four miracles that only the Messiah could perform. One of these, the third of them, was the healing of a man born blind. The rationale for this was that being blind right from birth was not simply a human happenstance, but was a sign of God’s displeasure, a curse you might say. And if God was truly behind it, then only God—or God’s anointed one, the Messiah, could undo it.

And, of course, the Jewish authorities were unwilling and unable to admit that they—or their thinking—were wrong and faced with the plain and obvious fact that a healing had indeed occurred, they could only conclude that it was not from God. So, much for their unbiased investigations! No wonder their investigations were fruitless.

We need to always be on the alert, alert as to whether our preconceptions, our already existing beliefs and assumptions, act in the same way as did the ones of the Jewish authorities in today’s account. We need to have open, unbiased, unsullied minds to properly and thoroughly investigate what God is up to. It may seem improbable, even impossible, but then, who are we to say that God can’t do that? Amen.

Forward notes: “As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth” (v. 1).

“I was in the Cow Hollow area of San Francisco a few years back with my son. We had eaten at a lovely restaurant and were headed to the car. We passed a man living on a particular street corner in front of a pharmacy.

“After passing him and crossing the street, I stopped, turned, and returned to him—not to give him a handout but to talk with him. With him, not at him. We shared stories, and I learned that we graduated from high school within a year of each other and that he had lived on the streets most of his years since. This corner was now his real estate, he told me.

“Later, upon reflection, I realized that the best I’d ever done was donate a dollar or two, here and there, to the hundreds of men and women I had passed on the streets over the years. I had never conversed. Not really. I’d usually just shrug my shoulders, feel helpless, and walk on past.

“As he walked along, Jesus truly saw a man who could not see. I wonder, how many people had passed this man and never seen him, never shared stories with him? Like Jesus, we are invited to see each person we encounter.”

Moving Forward: “How can you work to truly ‘see’ others?”