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Lenten Meditation for Sunday, March 26, 2017

lenten candles

This Sunday we turn to one of the miracles of Jesus, the giving of sight to a man while the Master was on the road to Jericho. According to John, the disciples and Jesus are ambling along the road when they are met by a blind man. He asks Jesus to heal him. Jesus makes a little potion, applies it to his eyes, and then, as the disabled man says, “I was blind but now I see.” The underlying lesson is that when we really seek out Jesus, we really get to see what he is about.

There was a man named John Newton who thought of this passage one day while writing. Newton had had tough times while on a sea voyage, and had been left stranded in Africa and taken into slavery. He was freed by a lucky link-up with a friend, but instead of escaping this cycle of misery, he becomes a slave trader himself. It was a strange moment in history—the height of the slave trade and the height of the Great Awakening, when a fervor for the gospel became the center of the Protestant movement. One day he finds and reads a Bible, surely read John’s passage, and as he writes in his famous hymn, “Amazing Grace,” he lost his moral and spiritual blindness and “was blind but now I see”. Newton renounced the slave trade and came to realize that Christ supplied the grace of which he wrote.

As we go through this Lent, let us too strive to really lose our blindness and really see Jesus. Think of the words of the Gospel, remember what He bids us to do in His Name. And then use that as we meet the blind and unknowing along the road of life. He will walk with us, and look out for us, and for the hurt and lost everywhere. Find Him there on that Jericho road. 

The Readings 

Psalm 23

1 Samuel 16:1-13

Ephesians 5:8-14

John 9:1-41

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