Homily March 15, 2026, Rev. Holly Cardone

The Fifth Sunday Of Lent

The Miracle Right in Front of Us

March 15, 2026

Jesus is walking along with his disciples when they come across a man who has been blind since birth. The disciples see the man and immediately start trying to figure out who to blame. “Rabbi,” they ask, “who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Someone must have sinned. That’s the assumption. There must be a reason this man’s life turned out the way it did. Someone must have done something wrong. Maybe it was his parents. Maybe they committed some terrible sin and now their son is paying the price. Maybe it was the sins of previous generations—the sins of the father passed down, you know how that goes.

Or maybe the man himself sinned somehow. Because surely there has to be a reason. It’s a very human question, really. We still ask it today. When something terrible happens—when someone is sick, when someone is poor, when someone’s life falls apart—we want to know why. We want a cause. A reason. Someone to blame.

Jesus doesn’t hesitate. “No one sinned,” he says. No one. He was simply born blind. Then Jesus says, “His condition will become the place where God’s grace is revealed. Let’s get this done while it is still daylight. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world. While we still have time”

Then Jesus does this gross thing. He makes mud with his spit and the dirt, and he smears the mud across the man’s eyes. It’s not exactly the healing technique most of us would expect from the Son of God. No glowing light. No dramatic prayer. Just mud. Spit and dirt.

Then Jesus tells the man, “Go wash in the pool of Siloam.” John tells us the name means “Sent.”

The man goes and washes. And suddenly the man who has never seen anything in his entire life can see. He sees everything. Things he has never seen before. Light, shapes, color, movement, faces, sky, trees, everything. A true miracle. The blind shall see.

Here come the neighbors. The neighbors cannot mind their own business. It’s pretty funny actually, when you imagine it. The rumor mill turning.  The neighbors are completely baffled. “Wait a minute,” they say. “Isn’t this the guy who used to sit and beg?” Some say, “No, it just looks like him.” Others say, “No, no, it’s definitely him.” But the man keeps saying, “Yes! It’s me! I’m the one you’ve seen every day. The same guy.”

You can almost hear the irritation in his voice. For years they passed him by without noticing him. But now suddenly everyone is very interested. “How did this happen?” they ask. “The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and told me to go wash in Siloam. I went. I washed. And now I see.” “Where is he?” they ask.  “I don’t know.”

So, what do the neighbors do? They take him to the Pharisees. Because that’s the kind of neighbors they are. Oh, and Jesus healed him on the Sabbath. A big no-no. The big news is not that a man who has been blind his whole life can now see. No, the real problem is that Jesus did the healing on the wrong day. According to their interpretation of the law, healing counts as work. And work on the Sabbath is forbidden.

So the Pharisees question the man. “How did you receive your sight?” He tells them again: “He put mud on my eyes, I washed, and now I see.” Some of the Pharisees immediately conclude, “This man is not from God, because he does not keep the Sabbath.”

But some of the neighbors want to know,  “How can a sinner perform signs like this?” And the group becomes divided. So they turn back to the man and ask, “What do you say about him? It was your eyes he opened.” The man says, “He is a prophet.”

But the Pharisees still aren’t convinced. They don’t even believe the man had been blind. So they call his parents. “Is this your son?” they ask. “Was he really born blind? And if so, how does he now see?” The parents are terrified. They know what’s happening. Word has already spread. Everyone knows Jesus is being talked about as the Messiah, and the religious authorities have made it clear: anyone who says that out loud will be thrown out of the synagogue.

So the parents play it safe. “Yes, this is our son,” they say. “Yes, he was born blind. But how he now sees—we don’t know. Ask him. He’s an adult.” So they call the man back again. This time the Pharisees try to pressure him. “Give glory to God,” they say. “We know that this man Jesus is a sinner.”

The man is upfront, “Look, I don’t know if he is a sinner or not. But one thing I do know: I was blind, and now I see.” The Pharisees are getting riled. “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” And now the man starts to get a little sarcastic. “I already told you,” he says. “Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples too?”

That does not go over well. The Pharisees explode in anger. “You are his disciple! We are disciples of Moses! We know God spoke to Moses, but we don’t know where this man comes from!”

And the man says something astonishing. “Now that is remarkable. You don’t know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. Never in the history of the world has anyone opened the eyes of someone born blind. It is only because this man is from God that I now see.”

That’s the final straw. “How dare you teach us!” they shout. And they throw him out of the synagogue, the community, the one place he sort of belonged.

You know Jesus hears about it. Because word spreads fast. He hears about the whole thing. The nosy neighbors. Bringing in the Pharisees, then parents. Then the man being expelled from the synagogue.

Jesus goes looking for the man because that is what Jesus does. When people are pushed out, Jesus goes and finds them. When people are excluded, Jesus brings them in. When people are told they don’t belong, Jesus pulls up another chair for them and invites them to sit at his table.

The man started the day blind. But by the end of the story he sees more clearly than anyone else in the room. The religious authorities had the law. They had the rules. They had the power to decide who belonged and who didn’t. But they could not see what was standing right in front of them.

Jesus says: “I came into this world so that those who do not see may see, and those who think they see may become blind.”

Some Pharisees overhear him. “Are you saying we are blind?” they ask.

And Jesus says, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.”

The tragedy of the story isn’t the man’s blindness, but that his neighbors, family and the religious leaders, who supposedly could see perfectly, missed the miracle standing right in front of them.