Fourth Sunday in Lent, cycle A

John 9:1-41

A miracle is when something happens for which there is no explanation.  In our age we can come up with explanations much more easily than those in Jesus' time.  After all, science now can answer questions that would have been impossible to answer years ago.  And if you know science and know something about statistics, you don’t have to worry about miracles -- you can make them go away.

Many years ago I had a patient with lung cancer.  Given his stage and general condition, he had about three months to live.  We didn’t have anything that worked in those days.  When I was discussing this with him, he said that all he wanted to do was stay alive until his granddaughter, whom he had raised, graduated from college.  That was seven months away.  He said he was praying for that.  Well, he made it, and he even got an extra month in.  At our last visit, he had lost about 50 pounds, needed oxygen, and couldn’t get out of his wheelchair by himself.  But he was cheerful, because he had seen his granddaughter graduate, but more importantly, he was convinced that he was the recipient of a miracle.  I wasn’t.  I knew that the prediction I had made was an average, and that there were people on both sides of that number, some who would die quickly and others who would go on longer than expected.  An average is an average.

But maybe it was a miracle.

I couldn’t come up with a scientific explanation for the man who was born blind and recovered his sight when Jesus smeared mud on his eyes.  So I asked my favorite artificial intelligence agent if she could find one (at least her voice sounds feminine) and sure enough after scouring the internet, she told me that psychological blindness was a very real thing, and there have been cases where a dramatic trauma cured the blindness.  So there you are. An alternative explanation.

And that’s what was happening back in the days of Jesus.  The apostles just accepted the fact that people with disabilities were probably sinners, or maybe their parents were -- after all some of the threats in the old testament suggest that curses on the parents travel down to the descendents.  Even though they had witnessed Jesus' miracles, a miracle for this guy was the last thing in their minds -- why would God work a miracle for a sinner, or the son of sinners?

The townspeople don’t believe in miracles either.  He looks like that blind guy, they say, but clearly he couldn’t be. No one has heard of a man who was born blind receiving his sight.  When they asked the man, he recounted his cure, but rather than believe, they brought him to the Pharisees. Our blind guy gives the same story, but the Pharisees answer that it couldn't be -- it happened on the sabbath, after all.  And God would never violate the sabbath, right?  So they ask the parents, who deny any involvement.  You would think they would be delighted, rejoicing that their son could see again.  But no, they say, “ask him yourselves, he is old enough to answer.  Their joy at their son’s cure was no match for their fear of being kicked out of the syinaogue.  

And back to the Pharisees.  This time on questioning the man born blind gives an argument that no one could refute logically.  “No one has ever opened the eyes of a man born blind.  If this man were not from God he could not do anything.”  That was the last straw.  They kicked him out the door.  

  Notice that the man born blind after being cured starts out  by attributing his cure to “a man named Jesus”.  As he is further questioned, he calls him a prophet. More questions, and he answers, he is someone from God.  And finally, he calls Jesus “Lord”.  

So maybe a miracle is not something that defies explanation.  Maybe a miracle is something that happens that challenges us to come closer to God, to know him better.  Maybe a miracle is when someone dear to us dies and we are challenged to make sense of the event.  Maybe a miracle is when something happens to us that requires all our efforts to stay faithfull, to trust in God -- and we do.  If that’s the case, God is working miracles all the time, miracles which are opportunities to become closer to Him.  In the story in the gospel, many people looked for other explanations rather than believe.  The man born blind does not.  He calls Jesus Lord, and will for the rest of his life.