Seeing and Being Seen

Reflection for the 4th Sunday in Lent

John 9:1-41

There is a question I used to ask every Sunday at my former congregation at Maximo Presbyterian Church in Florida. I would ask those wonderful, faithful saints: What has God been up to in your life lately?

It sounds simple. But over twenty years, that question did something remarkable. It helped people to pay attention. 

It invited them to move through their weeks not as passive observers but as people actively looking for the living God at work in ordinary moments — in a phone call from an estranged family member, in an unexpected healing, in a neighbor who showed up at just the right time. 

The presence of God in the congregation is alive and well, helping them stay resilient and strong, even in the midst of great challenges and inspiring triumphs. God abides with us always!

The question was an invitation to see. And seeing, it turns out, is exactly what John 9 is all about.

When Jesus encounters the man born blind on the road, his disciples immediately frame the situation as a theological problem to be solved: Who sinned? This man or his parents? 

It is a very human instinct. When we encounter suffering, we want an explanation. We want someone to blame. But Jesus reframes everything with a single answer: "Neither this man nor his parents sinned. He was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him."

This is not a comfortable answer. It doesn't resolve the problem of suffering so much as it redirects our gaze entirely. Jesus is not interested in prosecuting the past. He is interested in what God is doing right now.

And then he acts. He makes mud with dirt and saliva, spreads it on the man's eyes, and sends him to wash in the pool of Siloam. The man goes. He washes. He comes back seeing.

What happens next may be, in many ways, the heart of the story.

John's Gospel doesn't call these moments miracles. He calls them signs. This is the sixth of seven signs in what scholars call the Book of Signs, chapters 2 through 12. 

Each sign is chosen not because it is the most dramatic, but because it reveals something true about who Jesus is. John tells us as much near the end of the Gospel: "These are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing, you may have life in his name."

So what does this sign reveal? On the surface, it reveals Jesus as the light of the world — a title he claims himself just before the healing. But the deeper revelation unfolds in the long, almost comic series of interrogations that follows.

The neighbors can't agree whether it's even the same man. The Pharisees are more disturbed by the timing — a Sabbath healing — than by the miracle itself. 

They drag in his parents, who are so afraid of being expelled from the synagogue that they refuse to say anything beyond confirming he is their son. They interrogate the man twice. Each conversation goes in circles. And through it all, the formerly blind man sees more clearly than anyone in the room.

When the Pharisees insist that Jesus must be a sinner, he simply says: "I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see." 

He does not have a theology degree. He cannot resolve every doctrinal dispute. But he knows his own experience. He knows what happened to him. And he refuses to let anyone take that away.

This is bearing witness. This is what faith looks like in practice.

The deeper irony of the passage is that those who claim to see clearly — the religious leaders, the elders, the guardians of tradition, presumably the ones with all the answers — are revealed at the end to be the truly blind ones. 

"If you were blind," Jesus tells them, "you would not have sin. But now that you say, 'We see,' your sin remains." Certainty without openness. Expertise without wonder. These are the conditions that make us blind to what God is doing in our midst.

Friends, this text speaks directly into the life of Mission Presbytery.

We live and minister in a region where suffering is not abstract. Hunger is real. The vulnerability of immigrant families is real. The isolation of the poor is real. 

And the temptation — our temptation — is sometimes to get so caught up in the machinery of institutional religion, in our meetings and our debates and our anxieties about the future, that we miss the signs of what God is already doing.

But God is at work. I see it. You see it. We all see it.

We see it at Crestholmes Presbyterian Church, where the hungry are fed — not as a program, but as an act of witness to the God who satisfies. The Rev. Dr. Carlos Baladez is leading the charge and people are responding. The needs are huge and the people feel the love, care and compassion of our Lord Jesus Christ embodied in Crestholmes faithful witness.

We see it at Puentes de Cristo in Hidalgo. Our sister Letty Martinez bore witness as she told us their riveting stories at our most recent Presbytery meeting in Cuero. Her passion and love for the people was palpable, and her appeal for help was heartfelt and heartwrenching. 

Puentes de Cristo ministry attends to the spiritual, physical, and emotional needs of the most vulnerable people in the Rio Grande Valley, supported by Mission Presbytery, FPC-McAllen and Presbyterian congregations across our state. In that ministry, Jesus is making mud and spreading it on eyes that the world has given up on.

We see it in you — pastors and ruling elders who show up week after week to preach the Good News to people who are suffering, tired, and searching for light.

As a Matthew 25 Presbytery, we are called to see Christ in the least of these, and to be the hands and voice of Christ to them. That is not a program. That is a posture of the heart. It is the commitment to keep asking — in our congregations, in our Session meetings, in our daily lives — What has God been up to in our midst?

This Lent, and beyond, we would like to invite you to continue practicing the discipline of seeing.

Not the anxious seeing of the Pharisees, scanning every situation for threats and violations. But the open, trusting seeing of a man who was once blind, who simply and stubbornly testifies: I was blind. Now I see.

Look for the signs. They are there. God is not absent from Mission Presbytery. God is not absent from the Valley, from the borderlands, from Hill Country, from struggling congregations and the faithful small churches and the immigrant families sheltered by our people. God is present, and God is at work. Always remember, Emmanuel, God is with us!

Our call is to see it, to say it, and to join in.

What has God been up to in your life lately?

May we have eyes to see.

In Christ's service, 

Rev. Bobby Musengwa

Transitional General Presbyter

Mission Presbytery