4th Sunday in Lent
Texts: John 9:1-41;
Ephesians 5:8-14
YouTube: https://youtu.be/Gdbr_mHsQFI
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Excerpt Page from John Dear
Excerpt Page from James Alison
TWO ENCOUNTERS WITH JESUS HEALING HUMANITY’S BLINDNESS
I’d like to begin this morning by reading the brief highlighted passage from the John Dear Excerpt Page. He keys in on the fact that, in the Greek, John the Gospel writer makes an important word-choice for “man” in the phrase “man born blind.” It’s not the simpler word for a single male man, which would be andros — our word android comes from it. No, he uses the word anthropos, which can mean all of humanity. Here’s what John Dear has to say about that:
Jesus walks by and sees “a man born blind from birth” — the word anthropos meaning not just a single “man” but also all of “humanity.” John takes us into deep water again. He places an allegory on our hands. He’s portraying the human moral condition: we are all of us blind from birth. When the visionary Jesus heals the blind man, he heals all of us from darkness into the light of vision that we might see one another and live in peace.1
What if, as John Dear implies, this story in John chapter 9 is about Jesus coming to cure a blindness that humanity has lived with ever since our civilizations were birthed? That we are enculturated into a blindness to the truth? What if we have been blind to what keeps us fighting with each other all the time? And what if Jesus can heal that blindness and help us to truly live in peace?
I have come to see this story of healing the man born blind in exactly this way — not just once but perhaps twice. The first time happened thirty years; the second time just this past week, so I still at the beginning of it, trying to get my head around it. Let me briefly recount both times.
Thirty years I was at the beginning of having my world rocked by the discovery of René Girard’s anthropology around mimetic desire and scapegoating, which I’ve mentioned frequently in my time here. I was still trying to grasp how it integrated with my Christian faith. Then I met the first great Girardian theologian James Alison. We became friends, and he handed one of his first books, not-yet-published but on computer diskette (the ‘hard’ diskette since we’d already graduated from the ‘floppy’ disks). It’s a book on Original Sin called The Joy of Being Wrong,2 and John chapter 9 is its centerpiece Bible passage.
I’ve given you a second excerpt page this week with the four pages from James Alison’s book on John 9, highlighting the main points so that it is easier to get the gist of it. Let me summarize briefly, that a Girardian reading of John 9 should make sense from my preaching these past two years. Girard proposes that the core of our nationalistic cultures is a scapegoating structure, where we’re constantly looking for the enemies, the sinners, to cast out from our midst. But this scapegoating structure doesn’t work as well unless it remains hidden from us. We must remain blind to it. We need to think of ourselves as doing God’s work in casting out sinners. It doesn’t work if someone like Jesus were to come along and cure our blindness to our scapegoating as scapegoating and suggest instead that casting out sinners is not what God wants. No, God actually desires loving forgiveness of sinners and working to bring them healing.
John 9 shows us exactly this latter version of who God is. Jesus refuses to see the man’s blindness as connected to sin and heals him. But that’s not the end of the story. The Pharisees cannot accept the sinlessness of either the formerly blind man or Jesus. They need to see them as sinners. Notice it even says they’re divided. Well, when we’re divided, we find scapegoats, a common enemy, to unite us, and Jesus and the formerly blind man are it. They cast the formerly blind man out. They will deal with Jesus shortly, casting him out on the cross.
The story of healing the man born blind is a preview of Jesus’ own journey to the cross, where he exposes the real sin. The most pernicious sin of human beings turns out not to be some defect in character or behavior, signaled by something like being born blind. No, God can forgive and heal such things if need be. What God cannot heal is the sin of casting others out. God cannot forgive our insisting on being right about someone else’s sin such that we scapegoat them. In those cases, when we think we see clearly, we are actually blind to our own sin.
But something else happened just this week in encountering John 9 once again. Some of you know that I lead a weekly Bible study on Zoom for those interested in reading the weekly lectionary scripture passage from a Girardian perspective. This week one of the participants brought up a book that I’ve constantly seen referenced by other writers but have not yet read myself. It’s by British scientist Iain McGilchrist, titled The Master and His Emissary, subtitled The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.3
At this point in the delivered sermon, I extemporized a briefer description of McGilchrist’s work to spend more time with John Dear’s new book Universal Love to end the sermon. I’ve placed the planned, longer version on McGilchrist, the next four paragraphs, in brackets followed by the transcript of the sermon’s ending. To be honest, I knew I was tying together too many threads and wanted to jump to an ending that emphasized the story of contemplative prayer per John Dear’s new book.
[Now, how can this book about neuroscience possibly be related to this story of the man born blind in John 9? Well, it’s really a story about two different ways of seeing the world, right? It’s not really about blindness, per se. Jesus doesn’t declare the Pharisees to be literally blind at the end. He declares that their way of seeing the world in terms of righteous people vs. sinners to be cast out is not a truthful way to see the world. It is ‘blind’ to the way that God sees the world in love, where God can forgive and heal the things which they see as sins to be punished. The Pharisees represent the way we are taught to see the world in terms of Us vs. Them. Jesus is teaching us God’s way of seeing the world in love, such that there it’s not a matter of Us vs. Them; there’s only Us. Two opposing ways of seeing the world, one more truthful and faithful to God’s way.
This book by Iain McGilchrist is about two ways of seeing the world, rooted in how our brains work. We are familiar with the terms Left Brain, Right Brain. A lot has been made about the fact that there’s two hemispheres to our brain structure that tend to be very different. McGilchrist’s book is about a twenty-year study of our “divided brain.” He debunks a lot of pop psychology rendering of Left Brain, Right Brain. He shows how both sides of the brain are always engaged, both operating with similar patterns. But there are real differences not so much for what each hemisphere does but for how it does them. The left brain tends to operate more analytically, while the right brain tends to operate more wholistically. I’ve got a long way to go in reading the book myself. But a main proposal in the book is that which side of the brain tends to be in control has made a huge difference in human history. It has made a huge difference in favoring one way of seeing the world as opposed to the other. He argues that Western history is the product of the Left Brain being master and the Right Brain being servant, and that history would likely be different if the Right Brain was master. Because we end up with two differing ways of seeing the world.
The question in my Zoom study this week involves how the working of our brains might affect the two ways of seeing our world and God. Has left brain dominance given us a way of seeing the world that tends to Us vs. Them? Would a right brain dominance tend toward seeing the world more faithful to the way of Love that God teaches us through Jesus?]
I don’t know whether these expectations will be met in reading McGilchrist’s book. But what I do know something about — which fuels my excitement for studying this book — is that there is a Christian practice which helps us to get more into our right brain, where we aim to have our right brain in charge. And that is through silent prayer and meditation, where we seek to be grounded in experiencing God’s love. And then to try to go from that practice to actually live in God’s love. We go from experiencing God’s love in prayer to experiencing the loving connection with everyone, so that we might better live in peace.
Especially in the last century those leaders who lead us into the way of peace — like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi — have found this kind of prayer to be essential. The person we’ve been reading and talking about as a follower of these peacemakers and present-day leader is John Dear. And I picked up his latest book called Universal Love (also featured on your Excerpt Page).4
It’s the story of an interesting spiritual journey that begins during COVID when his gym workout coach, a young man in his twenties, says to Dear “I’ve been reading about you and your work online, and I would like you to be my guru.” Dear is like, “Guru? Oh, spiritual director. Sure, I’ll be your spiritual director.” And so the whole book is about the spiritual journey with this twenty-something guy, who doesn’t go to church and says he doesn’t even believe in God. He says, “I believe in truth and love and compassion.” And John Dear replies, “That works for me. I’ll be your spiritual director.” The remainder of the book details their journey of practicing to live in God’s Universal Love, the title of the book.
That’s two quick sketches of where my study is going in the weeks ahead. Do you see, then, how over the past thirty years I’ve come to see two ways of seeing the world, one which is more faithful to the way of God’s love, and one which is not so much, because it gets mired in a constant Us-vs-Them and then subsequent scapegoating? These two ways of seeing the world might even be grounded in the ways we’ve been trained to use our brains. The best way Christians have known to get out from under the bad thinking is prayer, silent prayer that seeks to live in God’s love. It occurs to me that this is not only what the world needs more of, but also a way to connect with our young people again, like the young man in Dear’s book. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, March 15, 2026
YouTube: https://youtu.be/Gdbr_mHsQFI
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Excerpt Page from John Dear
Excerpt Page from James Alison
Notes
1. John Dear, Lazarus, Come Forth!: How Jesus Confronts the Culture of Death and Invites Us into the New Life of Peace (Orbis Books, 2011), 28.
2. James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes. John 9 is featured on pages 119-25.
3. Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale University Press, 2009; New Expanded edition, 2018).
4. John Dear, Universal Love: Surrendering to the God of Peace (Orbis Books, 2025). The excerpts are taken from pages 3-5.
