A Fresh Perspective

In 1972 songwriter and singer Johnny Nash, made it to number one on the pop chart singing: I can see clearly now the rain is gone. / I can see all the obstacles in my way. / Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind. / It’s gonna be a bright, bright sun-shiny-day. Rarely though, do we see so clearly. Rarely do we see all the obstacles in our way or all our blind spots that prevent us from seeing. Paul says in his beautiful poem on love in First Corinthians: “For now we see in a mirror dimly.” The Gospel of John equates seeing with believing, and believing, as I have said so often, is about trusting and serving and loving. Believing is about being faithful to the way of Jesus. So seeing is trusting, seeing is loving, seeing is serving. Our capacity to see greatly impacts our capacity to trust God, and love and serve others. Our Gospel text today says that as Jesus went along he “saw” a man blind from birth. What did Jesus see? Jesus sees a man who is very vulnerable and at a grea...

Last week a prominent Jewish religious leader had a meeting with Jesus where Jesus talked about wind and Spirit and eternal life. Nicodemus approached Jesus from a place of theological and religious privilege. Jesus told him in no uncertain terms that his privileged religious heritage did not make him any better than anyone else – he still needed a spiritual awakening, he needed the Divine Spirit to touch his human spirit in a way that would lead him into participation in God’s life and love, which is what this Gospel calls eternal life. This week we read about another person who has a conversation with Jesus about spiritual reality who is, for the most part, the opposite of Nicodemus. Jesus’ conversation partner today is a woman. From the perspective of most Jewish males in Jesus’ day that alone would have disqualified her from receiving religious instruction from a rabbi, just as in a number of Christian circles today being female disqualifies one from certain types of ministr...

Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night. In this Gospel most everything has some symbolic significance. Words have multiple meanings. Nicodemus coming by night points to where he is in his own spiritual journey. He is in the dark, but he is drawn to the light. He clearly recognizes something real and authentic in Jesus: No one can do the things you are doing, Jesus, unless God is with us. Nicodemus recognizes that Jesus is of God, that he connected to God. We know this, says Nicodemus. But what Jesus knows is that there’s a lot that Nicodemus does not yet know. What Jesus knows is that Nicodemus, who stands in the text as a representative of so many religious and secular people today, has a major obstacle to overcome in his quest for the truth. And what Nicodemus needs is what so many Christian and non-Christian people need today, namely, a birth from above or a new birth (the Greek word can mean either above or anew). Many Christians, I believe, miss the intent of this story because th...

I may have told you about the minister’s wife who was shopping one afternoon and a dress caught her eye. They were on a fairly tight budget and it was quite a bit more than she could afford, but she bought it anyway. She told her husband that she had no intention of buying it, but when she tried it on, it looked and felt so good that she could not resist the temptation. Her husband said, “Why didn’t you say, ‘Satan’ get behind me.” She said, “I did. And he said it looks even better from that angle.” Some of you may remember Flip Wilson of “Laugh in” fame popularizing the old saying, “The devil made me do it.” We poke fun at the Devil, but in scripture the Devil is the symbol for that which is deceptive and manipulative and adversarial to the kin-dom of God. Our text today says that the Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted or tested by the Devil. The “wilderness” is a common scriptural theme and reference to Jesus fasting forty days and forty nights recalls the story ...