I remember as a child wrinkling my nose and saying “Yuk!” when I heard the the story of Jesus healing a blind man. What prompted my response was the way Jesus went about getting the job done. Jesus, you see, spit into the dirt at his feet and rubbed some of the little puddle of mud he created into the man’s eyes. It’s not that I as a young boy objected to dirt, but the spit was another thing. I remember struggling with whether I would want Jesus to heal me or not if it involved him rubbing spit on me. Yuk!

As an adult I still have trouble with the way Jesus sometimes does things. It seems to me that often my ideas and my standards are so much more acceptable and appropriate than his. And, I confess, sometimes much more convenient and to my liking.

The people with Jesus were convinced there was a place to lay the blame for the man’s blindness. “‘Rabbi, who sinned: this man or his parents, causing him to be born blind?’ Jesus said, "You're asking the wrong question. You're looking for someone to blame. There is no such cause-effect here. Look instead for what God can do.” (The Message, John 9)

Have you ever wondered why Jesus used spit to heal the man? The Jewish believers didn’t wonder - they knew exactly why he did it. In the beginning God took the dust of the earth, breathed on it, and brought to life the first human being. Now Jesus symbolically takes the dust of the earth, repeats this act of creation and for the very first time the man sees.

Right before everybody’s eyes -- including the blind man’s -- Jesus was showing what God can do. By creating sight, Jesus was revealing that he was God the Son. Jesus wasn’t just a traveling rabbi, he wasn’t a small time evangelist who went from town to town putting on a carnival show of old fashioned revival meetings. Jesus was and is God’s only begotten Son who originally created the world, who still held the powers of creation in his hand, and who today brings healing and life to his people.

During lent we do a lot of talking about sin. Sin! That’s something I’m quite comfortable pointing out in the lives of other people. Facing the sin in my own life? Yuk! I’d avoid that like spit. We also talk about God’s solution for sin. It involved such nasty things as Jesus’ blood, cross, and death. Yuk!

As an adult I wonder if God couldn’t have done it some other way. Maybe it would have been more acceptable and appropriate to deal with sin by using nanotechnology, or holding a big fund raising rock concert, or having Congress pass a law. But bringing sight, forgiveness, healing and life by using spit, mud, a cross, and a grave? Yuk! I guess the question we must struggle with is whether we want Jesus to get the job done in our lives. If so, let’s stop wrinkling our noses, yield control of our lives to Jesus Christ, and be amazed as we “Look instead for what God can do.”

Pastor Jon