The Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 15, 2026

The Gospel readings for the Second through the Fourth Sundays in Lent are taken from the Gospel of John. In John, Jesus is frequently shown teaching by means of word-play. That is, Jesus uses a word or phrase that can be understood in more than one way. The person Jesus is speaking with takes the word in the easy and obvious sense; but then Jesus comes back with the other, more unexpected sense. The conceptual gap between those two senses creates what in process thought is called a “proposition”: a novel combination of experiential elements, a “tale that might perhaps be told,” a “lure for feeling.” The proposition invites the learner to make a leap of imagination between meanings – and in that creative act of imagination, the Spirit can join to co-create in the learner a new wisdom, a new consciousness, a direct experience of God’s presence and God’s gift. In these Lenten Gospel readings, Jesus interacts with four different characters, in each case using a word-play to bring them into a deeper, more life-giving relationship with himself.

The key teaching element in this story of the healing of the main blind from birth is a play on variations of the word “see.”

Jesus tells his disciples, and also us his readers, that “I am the light of the world.” Jesus is the means by which and the medium in which we “see.” He also says, “We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day”; that is, while we have the light, when we have the capacity to see, we must choose how we will see and how we will respond to what we see. Seeing here is not just a passive sensory response; seeing is an active co-creation between the data of the world we receive and the creative aims God gives us to enact.

Each group of characters in the story must therefore make choices about how deeply they will see, how creatively they will make the leap from physical sight to spiritual insight.

The crowd in the marketplace who witness the miracle have a hard time making that leap. They know they’ve seen a blind beggar before. They know they see a man now who can see. They know the blind beggar and the seeing man look a lot alike. But they’re not quite willing to see it’s the same man; they’re not quite willing to say they’ve seen a miracle. They can’t quite choose between sight and insight – they’re left teetering somewhere in the middle.

The Pharisees, as John presents them, are quite sure what they’ve seen: they have seen no kind of miracle, what they’ve seen is some sort of stunt by this anti-authoritarian upstart Jesus, and they want nothing to do with it. All they can see is that the entire situation is soaked with sin, whether it be the man’s sins or the sin that Jesus did work on the Sabbath – and since Pharisees hate sin, they hate the man and Jesus too, and they drive the man out of their synagogue. The Pharisees make their choice what to see, and all they can see is what they hate.

The man’s parents, who are interrogated by the Pharisees, aren’t entirely sure what they’ve seen. They can see their son, and they can see it’s really him, and they know he used to be blind, and they can see that now he sees – but they can’t yet see the connection between all those facts, they can’t yet see the work that Jesus has worked. They’re not being willfully blind, but neither are they entirely willing to see.

The man himself, whose eyes are opened, keeps on seeing more clearly all through the story. At first he receives his sight; but gradually he develops insight as well. The more he reflects on what has happened to him, the more he answers other people’s questions about what has happened to him, the more clearly he sees what Jesus means: first he sees Jesus as a man, then he sees Jesus is a prophet, then Jesus as one who comes from God, and finally he sees that Jesus is one he worships. The man’s insight becomes more and more clear, as the sight of his eyes was cleared, and he moves from blindness to the sight of Jesus as the one who gives him life.

And then there’s the disciples. Those wonderful, thickheaded, misguided, always-learning disciples. They only appear at the beginning of the story; but in a way, they get the whole ball rolling. Their choice between sight and insight is the most subtle choice of all – and I think it is their choice that gives us the key to understanding the whole story.

The story begins with the disciples and Jesus walking through the marketplace, and they see a man who has been blind all his life. And the disciples ask Jesus, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, to make him be born blind?” At face value it seems like a simple question; but there are several assumptions behind the question, and those assumptions themselves deserve to be questioned.

First is the assumption that God causes suffering – blindness, illness, accidents – as a punishment for sin. The man is blind because he’s being punished, they think; but is he being punished for his own sin, sin he presumably committed in the womb; or is he being punished for his parents’ sins committed before he was born? For the disciples that is an interesting conundrum of moral theology; but that blindness is a punishment is an assumption that deserves to be questioned.

Second is the assumption that, if you want to know the truth of something, you need to know its cause, you need to know the reason why it happened – in some cases, you need to know who to blame.

And third is the assumption that we are controlled by our past, that this man’s situation is what it is because of what happened before, and nothing in the now is going to be able to change that.

So with those assumptions hovering in the background, the disciples ask, “Who sinned, back in the past, so that God had to punish this man now with being blind?”

Jesus hears the disciples’ question; but instead of answering at face value, he turns the question around. He questions the disciples’ assumptions, and invites them to see the blind man’s situation in a whole new light. “He’s not blind because of sin,” Jesus says, “but so that the works of God might be made visible in him.” Instead of assuming this blindness is a punishment for sin, Jesus assumes this blindness is an opportunity to reveal God’s light. Instead of assuming this thing’s truth is in its cause, the reason why it happened, Jesus assumes its truth is in its effect, its outcome, what God will do with it next. Instead of assuming this man is controlled by his past, Jesus assumes that God can give the possibility of calling forth a new future beginning now.

Jesus turns the disciples’ assumptions around, and puts to them the proposition of seeing the blind man in a whole new light, to see in him the new work that God is doing, the new possibilities that God is opening, the new life that God is offering. And more than that: Jesus invites the disciples to join in God’s new work: “We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day,” Jesus had said at the outset, and as the disciples watch the characters’ various responses unfold, they are offered a clearer insight into how it is we can join in God’s works.

The story never tells us whether the disciples accept Jesus’ invitation, whether they really do learn to see the man born blind in a whole new light, whether they really do learn to join God’s works in co-creating new sight. After that first scene in the story, the disciples never come back on stage again; so we don’t know what they did.

All we can know is what we would do. If we want to be Jesus’ disciples, will we learn to see in a whole new light? Will we choose to see God’s works in our worlds? Will we have the insight to see not just the blame and sin and limits of the past, not just the fear and hate and self-preservation of the world, not only the violence of empires and empires’ temptations to us to engage in violence in return – but to see the new possibilities God opens up to call us toward God’s future? If we want to be Jesus’ disciples, how will we make the leap from sight to insight?

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The Rev. Dr. Paul Nancarrow is an Episcopal priest, whose theological work has focused on process-relational interpretations of religion and science, spirituality and liturgy, and especially on the co-acting of divine action and human action and natural action in sacramental work and worship. He is a co-author of The Call of the Spirit: Process Spirituality in a Relational World, and contributed essays to Preaching the Uncontrolling Love of God and Renewing Faith: Reigniting Faith and Ministry Through Process and Open & Relational Theologies. Other reflections and sermons can be found at paulsnancarrow.wordpress.com. He can often be found contemplating the Adventure of the Universe as One from the saddle of his bicycle on back roads and rail-trails in the Midwest.