What does Tribe teach about blind man healed?
Drawn from the messages where it was actually addressed: the words said from the front, the passages taught, and where to hear the whole thing.
At Tribe, the teaching on the blind man healed in John 9 begins with a question the disciples asked Jesus: who sinned to cause this man's blindness? Brian pointed out that the disciples were reaching for a familiar hook, a tidy system where suffering always has a guilty party attached. Jesus refused the whole framework. He said it was neither the man's sin nor his parents', and turned the conversation toward what God was about to do rather than what anyone had done wrong. Brian was careful not to smooth over the tension in the text. The grammar can make it sound as though God caused the blindness on purpose, and he held that honestly. His argument, drawn from the broader witness of Scripture about the character of a good Father, was that hard things happen in a fallen world, nothing surprises God, and God is fully capable of moving through what he did not cause.
The healing itself carried its own weight in the teaching. Brian noted that anyone in Second Temple Judaism would have recognized restoring sight to someone born blind as a sign associated with the Messiah, which is exactly why the Pharisees opened a formal investigation. The congregation was also drawn to the method Jesus used, spit, mud, a command to go wash, a way of doing it that required the man to act in faith before he could see. What followed the miracle was not celebration. The neighbors were skeptical, the parents were too afraid to stand beside their son, and the Pharisees threw him out of the synagogue entirely. Nobody around him was glad.
The moment Brian kept coming back to was what happened after the expulsion. The text says Jesus heard about it and went and found the man. The man did not find Jesus. Jesus found him. Brian connected that directly to anyone sitting in the room who felt overlooked or cast out, saying, "If you feel alone, abandoned, rejected, outcast, like you don't fit in, you, my friend, are a prime target for Jesus to find you right where you are." The thread woven through both sessions was about what it truly means to see, because spiritual blindness, Brian said, has nothing to do with intelligence or education: "It doesn't matter how smart you are, how much you read this book as an intellectual, how learned you are, how open minded you are, you're blind." Sight, in this story, is something only Jesus gives.
Taught from John 9:1-41 · 2 Corinthians 4:3-4 · Isaiah 35:5-7 · Romans 3:23 · Romans 3:10
“If you feel alone, abandoned, rejected, outcast, like you don't fit in, you, my friend, are a prime target for Jesus to find you right where you are.”
From Open Blind Eyes
The passage taught · 2 Corinthians 4:3-4
3 Even if our Good News is veiled, it is veiled in those who are dying;
4 in whom the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving, that the light of the Good News of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should not dawn on them.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- August 5, 2024 Open Blind Eyes Brian Hunter walks through John 9, the healing of a man born blind, exploring physical and spiritual blindness, what Jesus reveals about suffering, and how he finds the outcast.
- August 4, 2024 Open Blind Eyes A man born blind receives his sight, and a Jackson Hole congregation talks through what that miracle means for anyone still in the dark spiritually.