There was a time in the late 19th and early 20th century when the Bible had come to be looked upon as nothing more than a book. Just a book. And then in the first part of the twentieth century, a Swiss pastor and theologian named Karl Barth came along and started talking about what he called “the strange new world of the Bible.”

The way Barth talked reminded the church that we read the Bible not just for information…but for revelation. We read it to know God, we read it because God uses it to show himself to us. Not for information, but for revelation. Information is something we accumulate. Information is analyzed, categorized, handled, used and under our control. But if the Bible reveals God…it is out of our control…we are surprised, caught off guard and pulled into encounters with God. We’re not sure what exactly might happen if we crack open these pages.

This morning we continue our Lenten sermon series on The Hands of Jesus, and we’ll read one of the finest stories in the New Testament. It’s found in the gospel of John, chapter 9. I’ll invite you to think of this as a drama, a play that unfolds in five acts.

Jesus seems to have a thing for getting his hands dirty, doesn’t he? Last week he wrote in the dirt with his hands, tracing the words of forgiveness into the life of a woman whose very life was at risk. Today he makes mud pies with his own spit, and uses them to heal a man. The funny thing is, Jesus seems to have been surrounded by lots of people who needed healing.

Jason McElwain. He’s not a household name. Not a politician, not a celebrity, not some big-time musician. He’s a kid, just 17 years old, 5’6”. A teen who is autistic, and so has some major challenges. Jason is the manager of the boys basketball team at Greece Athena HS in Rochester NY. A manager is someone who goes to practice or sits on the bench in street clothes, ready to be a go-fer for the coach, water, towels, clipboard, whatever needs doing.

The last game of the year, the coach added him to the roster so he could suit him up with the team one time, hopeful he could maybe sneak him in for few seconds as a special gift to him if the score allowed. Sure enough, with 4 minutes to go Greece Athena had a big lead. In goes Jason. Crowd cheers, student body stands. Great moment! Jason instantly fires up two shots, misses them both badly, the first one a total airball.

Then it happened. Some of you probably saw the home video that was all over the place a couple weeks ago. The next time down the court, Jason fires up a three-pointer…it goes in! His teammates on the bench are highfiving and screaming. Everyone cheers…what a great moment! They get the ball back, he shoots again…three pointer! Amazing! Then he does it again! And again! With every shot that goes in, the home video catches his teammates sitting on the bench.

The first time they jump up and cheer. The second time they erupt. The third time they are besides themselves, doing the “high chest” bump-thing. The bench is in bedlam, his teammates cannot believe it. Again. Jason’s teammates are holding their heads, their mouths are open, it is amazing! Again. Six three-pointers and a 2-point shot, 20 points in four minutes. Unbelievable!

When the game ends, the crowd erupts onto the floor, Jason’s teammates carry him around the court, he’s laughing and pointing, HE can’t even believe this has happened, he never dared think about it. The coach says: “I’ve never seen something like this in all 25 years of coaching.”

I wonder if that’s the way this man felt that Jesus healed. Mouth open, disbelief, running around, pointing, shouting, waving. Remember…he had never seen anything, never. He’d never glanced at the person next to him. Never seen trees, mountains, not the faces of his family. Never. Think about that. He had been blind since birth. Lord, he needed healing. (In the New Testament there are several words translated “healing,” but they all share this common thread of “wholeness.” Restoration, the bringing of something in pieces or incomplete…to wholeness). He needed healing.

But he’s not the only one. What about Jesus’ disciples who started the whole story by asking the blame question: what was the cause of the blindness? Man, or Parents? Who messed up? Jesus answers by telling him what the purpose of it will be: God will reveal Himself in this. They wanted cause, Jesus gives them purpose. Jesus pushes right by the question, and in essence says “I wonder how God will use this…to bring good?”

The disciples may have just been asking a question, but I wonder if they and we needed healing…from the need to assign blame. My niece, Katie, just was in a very serious car accident. She’s pretty banged up, but okay. But I realized that when I talked to my brother, her dad, that almost before I really found out everything about how she was…I was asking “whose fault was it?”

Some of you are big fans of the movie Napoleon Dynamite. You’ll remember maybe my favorite character, “Uncle Rico.” Uncle Rico is a pretty shiftless, conniving guy, about 40 years old, but he still talks about his high school senior year when he was a bench sitter back-up quarterback, and laments that the coach never put him in the big game. Throughout the movie he blames the coach, it would have changed his whole life, he would have been a big star, gone to college, gone to the pros, become a millionaire.

Some of us are right there, looking for places to put blame rather than wondering with Jesus…what God might do with this now, how God might redeem it. We need healing.

The man’s neighbors were so taken back by what had happened, they weren’t even sure they could believe it was the same guy. They’d known him, some of them, forgoing on thirty years. But see, they knew a blind man couldn’t see. Couldn’t believe their own eyes. Didn’t believe God was in the healing business. They needed, in fact, to be healed of unbelief. “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief,” a man cries to Jesus in a different story. We often do it, don’t we? We think God can only act in the way we believe, that we know what God can and can’t do.

The religious were in need of several kinds of healing. First, they needed to be healed of some bad theology. In that day, some rabbis thought a problem like blindness at birth was caused by the child sinning while still in the womb. Others assumed that it was the parents’ sins being revisited on the child. Sometimes we need to be healed of bad theology. Wrong, or incomplete ideas of God. We’re not so different from these leaders. I find myself thinking “if I behave a certain way, only good things will happen to me.” Some of you do that too. It’s not reality. It’s not biblical. It’s not good theology. And isn’t it interesting that Jesus didn’t waste any time correcting the bad theology…he just put the good stuff out there: “I wonder how God will use this now for His glory?”

The religious leaders also need some healing in regards to the Sabbath. The first objection they had to Jesus was that he had healed on the Sabbath, and that was technically against the law, which made Jesus a sinner. Like the rest of them weren’t?!

Can you imagine following after a God who looked down at someone who’d just received his vision for the first time in his life, his face so lit up you would’ve thought he’d just hit 6 three-pointers…can you imagine following after a God who disapproved on the grounds that technically, when Jesus mixed the spit and saliva, he was “kneading,” which was forbidden on the Sabbath! Can you imagine?! Of course not. They’ve totally missed the point on the intention of the Sabbath.

So have most of us. But instead of missing the point of the minute details of how to keep a Sabbath rest…most of us have missed the whole point of keeping a Sabbath at all ! Our world is 24-7. We’re all about productivity, efficiency, we work and work and we ignore this amazing gift that God provided from the very beginning: Sabbath. Rest. A day to rest, to play, to pray, to read, to take a walk, to cease from our labors and be renewed and rejuvenated and reminded of who God is, and who we are. We’ve totally missed it. There’s bunches of us that need the healing on what Sabbath is about.

More than anything else, though, the religious leaders needed to be healed…of thinking they didn’t need healing.

And then there’s the man’s parents…they needed to be healed of their fear. They are living in fear. Yes, their son has been given his sight, but they tremble at the questions of the religious leaders. They are scared to death that if they say something wrong, if they sound like they’re even interested in this Jesus…they can be put out of the synagogue. Ostracized from their friends and family. They are scared. They need healing. They need some assurance that God will catch them if they step out, that what other people think or say is not the final word. There’s a lot of people afraid in the Bible, isn’t there? Hundreds of times when God acts, appears, speaks…the first thing that must be said is “Don’t be afraid. I’ll be with you.” At their core, many of our fears are just that. The fear that something will cause God not to be with us. We need our fears healed.

And finally, back to the man who received his sight again. That wasn’t the only kind of healing he needed. Since the predominate thinking of the day said his blindness was certainly either his own fault or his parents, that it was a punishment, he had ALSO carried around that shame as well, convinced that God disapproved of him. It’s all he had ever known. And so when God’s religious leaders so venomously argued with him, mocked him and ridiculed him and drove him out of the synagogue, SURELY those same tapes started playing in his head…sure, he could see…but God was still against him.

Which brings us to Jesus. Interesting that through almost all of this story, Jesus doesn’t appear again…until near the end. And when he does, it’s one of my favorite parts in all of scripture. It’s so understated. It just says “When Jesus heard they had driven the man out…he went and found him.”

Jesus hears that they have thrown the man out…and goes to find him. The early church father John Chrysostom says “the religious leaders cast him out of the temple…but the LORD of the temple found him.” Now you’d think that Jesus would have more important things to do at this point, like straighten out some Pharisees or make sure his own disciples are following all this. Instead, as the sun is going down, Jesus slips away from the crowd, looks down a couple side streets…and seeks the man out. And looks at him. And lets the man look at him…for the first time. Remember, he hadn’t received his sight until he went to the pool. He’s never seen Jesus!

The truth is that Jesus has sought him from the beginning of the story, and now in a way that is relentlessly personal. And now, gradually, this man has gone from being a partial person in society’s eyes, a beggar at the gate, an outcast from God…he has been healed into someone who is becoming whole, who know God cares for him, who can see, who can in fact see so well that he knows who Jesus is. It took a while. He first called him “The man named Jesus,” and then called him “a prophet,” ( an extraordinary man) and finally calls him “Lord,” and worships him.

What a lot of healing could go on in our lives if we could grasp even a small sense of this persistent love of God that seeks us out, that goes out to find us.

Sometimes people talk about their faith journey and ask things like “When did you find Jesus?” But here the better question seems to be: “When did Jesus find you?”

And it is as we are found that our healing begins. It doesn’t happen all at once, but when the hands of Jesus touch us and start to put the mud on us, the healing starts: our blindness…our need to blame…our unbelief…our bad theology…our fears…and most of all, our idea that we don’t need to be healed.

When it begins, it’s so right, so good, this being moved from partial people towards wholeness…it can feel like, well, like hitting six threes and being carried off the court. It moves us onto our knees in worship. Who would have thought? Who would have thought?