The Muddy Work Of God

Darkness. Blindness. Not being able to recall what 'sight' even is. Zero vision. I'm describing those times in life when nothing seems to be working. No amount of prayer or devotion or effort on your part will produce even a ray of insight into the deep cavern you feel within your chest. Not only is there an absence of light, but there is a smothering sense of the absence of anyone else. Aloneness. Questions receive no answers or acknowledgement. Prayers echo off the walls. And the thought that becomes most prevalent and repeated is one word..., 'why?' (or as it's most often pronounced, 'WHY!!!'). I know you can relate (as I certainly can) to being in that place of utter blindness. If you can't, just wait awhile. Your night will come.

We all find ourselves struggling with blindness at some stage in life. The duration varies for all of us. Days, weeks, months, sometimes years go by without so much as sensing one glimpse of light penetrating our hearts. So what are we to do? Start by closing your eyes. Imagine having never seen one single thing. Blind from birth. Not even the memory of light. John 9 gives us the account of Jesus and His disciples encountering such a person, and the lessons drawn from it can literally be eye-opening for us.

The story starts with Jesus crossing paths with a man who has never seen anything. His disciples want to know whose fault this is (we love to do this as well!). Who sinned? The man or his parents? The first 'Why?' has surfaced. And here's where the miracle begins to unfold. Jesus says that no one has sinned. 'This happened so that the work of God might be displayed in [this man's] life.' What is this 'work of God'? One perspective of this term is: what God can and does do. However, three chapters earlier, in John 6, we find another slant on what this means. Verse 29: 'Jesus answered, 'The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.' This is the human side of the work of God. So the work of God is what He does and our subsequent belief in Who He is revealed to be.

Now, there's no back story here of this man born blind. Whether he was bitterly railing against God and the injustice of his life, or if there was a testimony to God's faithfulness and years of steadfast, unrelenting faith in the face of this tremendous hardship, we don't know. But, as is the case today with you and with me, it doesn't really matter how we've handled things up to the point when God shows up. Whether you've been a whiner or a winner, the power of the story comes in the present, not the past. How will you respond now? So, let's allow the story to roll forward and see how this 'work of God' reveals both God's actions and the man's (and hopefully ours) in the darkness.

'[Jesus] spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man's eyes.' What? What kind of healing is this? Doesn't this fit your experience of God showing up on our scene? We're locked in darkness. Jesus is the 'Light of the world' (v. 5). He'll wave His hand, brilliant lightning bolts will shoot forth from His fingertips into my eyes, and BANG! I can see! Yes!..........No. 'Why?' makes it's second appearance in the story. Why is Jesus doing what He is doing? Here's why: this is the 'work of God'. He will do it the way He chooses. If you're grappling with and groping through a blinding situation right now, I pray you'll hear these next words. You won't want to, but here they are: God rarely (maybe never) delivers us from our desperate darknesses in the way we want Him to or hope He will or think He should. We must remember our side of the equation. We are to believe in the Answer He sends.

The miracle continues to unfold in the next verse. ''Go,' he told him, 'wash in the pool of Siloam' (this word means Sent).' Notice the irony. Why does the man need to go wash? He's got mud-spit on his face. How'd it get there? The One telling him to wash, put it there! You can hear him thinking, 'Lord, if You want me to be clean, why the mud bath?' And so 'Why!?' rears it's ugly head for the third time. Here's the take away from this part: Don't despair in the darkness even as your lack of understanding deepens. Our role is not understanding, but belief. A belief that obeys. And here I pray that we will show as much obedience as this man does in the midst of his darkness. 'So the man went...and came home seeing.' I find some significance in the name of the pool in this story, Sent. Much like the story of Naaman (2 Kings 5), it wasn't the reputation or fame of the water that mattered, but the emphasis remained on the man's belief in God's direction. In this case, the man was sent to Sent, and he went where he was sent. And the work of God continued to be unveiled.

The story here takes us into the new perspective of the healed man as he returns home and encounters those he's only known as voices until now. First, his neighbors inquire about what has happened, and the man gives his simple, sweet testimony. '[Jesus] put mud on my eyes, I washed, and now I see!' I fear much of our trepidation about sharing our testimony of the work of God in our lives stems from the amount of material that we have interjected into it. This is our attempt to make more sense of what has happened, but it usually just makes the story more complicated than it needs to be. In our effort to explain away the mystery, we diminish God's role in the story, and inflate ours. Brothers and sisters, let us follow the example of the man in this story, and simply stick to the truth as mysterious and God-centered as it is. After the man's neighbors are done with him and can't figure out what's happened, he's taken up the food chain to the Pharisees. Here he's given opportunity after opportunity to give credit where it isn't due in order to explain away the mystery, but thankfully he keeps the truth of the work of God at the center of everything. In the end, because he won't offer any more palatable explanation than the truth, he is thrown out.

Jesus reappears at this point. 'Jesus heard that they had thrown him out, and when he found him...' I love the last three words there: He found him. It stands to reason that the man wouldn't recognize Jesus (he never saw him), so Jesus, in the continuation of the work of God, seeks him out and goes beyond the opening of the man's physical eyes; He opens the 'eyes of his heart' (Ephesians 1). Earlier, as the man was testifying before the Pharisees, he was asked who he believed Jesus was, and his answer was, 'He is a prophet.' Now Jesus draws near to take the man beyond his experience of Jesus's power as a prophet, and reveals to him His identity, his person, as the 'Son of Man'. He draws the man into fellowship with Who He is. This is a deeper place than What He does for the man (or you or me).

And this is the 'work of God'. He reveals Who He is by What He does in our darkest times, and we believe in the One He has sent. And what is born is worship - the perfect ending to the perfect picture of the work of God in our lives. In the darkness, God muddies, we believe, we see, we testify, He draws near, we know Him, we worship Him.

Lord, You are the Light of the world, and You find me in my darkness. You reveal Yourself in Your time and in Your ways. You heal my blind eyes and heart. You rescue me from the dominion of darkness and bring me into Your Kingdom, Your Presence. Thank You for the work You are doing in and through the circumstances of my life. I believe Who You are, and I worship. Amen.