Thursday | Week 8
Light and dark. Blindness and sight. These themes have come up before, and here they are again. Clearly, the topic of vision matters to Jesus. Clearly, there is something important about seeing correctly that Jesus wants us to understand.
In this passage we saw the healing of a man who had been blind since birth. Jesus gave him sight for the first time in his life! Just stop for a minute and think about what that would be like…amazing and overwhelming, I am sure. Jesus gave this man sight, but if you peel back the layers you realize that Jesus gave him more than that—He gave this man an opportunity to live a whole new life! This man no longer has to sit at the city gates and beg, he can engage in society and see what it’s like to really live!
On the surface it seems like all this talk about seeing in the light and not stumbling around in the darkness, this healing from blindness, is about vision with our physical eyes. But it’s more than that. It’s always more with Jesus. I think Jesus is inviting us into a deeper, different kind of vision. It’s less about what we see with our physical eyes, but what we know and believe in our hearts and minds—what we stand on. Even in the case of this miraculous healing, I believe there are three greater take-aways for us:
Jesus can right any wrong.
Seeing clearly affects the way we engage God and the world.
New life is ours if we let Jesus show us how to see.
Think about “vision”—not just with your eyes, but with your mind and heart; Invite Jesus to show you if there are any areas of your life that you are blind to. Invite Jesus to show you if you are not seeing clearly the way God works in the world, and even how He sees you! It is important that we walk in the light and see things the way Jesus intends for us to see them.
“Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now I’m found, was blind but now I see.”