What does Tribe teach about born blind?
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 being born blind starts with John 9 and a question the disciples asked Jesus: who sinned to cause this man's condition, him or his parents? Brian pointed out that the question itself reveals the hook they were hanging their hat on, a tidy system where suffering always has a guilty party. Jesus refuses that system entirely. He says it was neither, and Brian argued that this matters deeply: a fallen world produces hard things, and God is not the one who reached in and caused them. What Jesus points toward instead is that the man's condition was about to become the ground on which the power of God would be displayed.
The healing in John 9 was not lost on anyone who knew Second Temple Judaism. Restoring sight to someone born blind was a specific sign associated with the Messiah, which is exactly why the Pharisees treated it as a crisis rather than a celebration. Brian slowed the congregation down there, because what looks like a few quick verses was in reality a formal investigation, with subpoenas, scribes, and cleared calendars. The man's neighbors were skeptical, his parents were too afraid to stand by him, and the religious authorities threw him out of the synagogue altogether. Nobody around him was glad.
What the teaching kept coming back to was the moment after the expulsion. The text says Jesus heard what happened and went and found him. The man did not find Jesus. Jesus found him. Brian connected that directly to anyone in the room who feels pushed to the margins, because that is exactly the kind of person Jesus goes looking for. As Brian put it, "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 physical method of the healing, spit, mud, and a command to go wash, also came up: Jesus could have healed the man with a word, but chose a way that required the man to act in faith before he could see.
Taught from John 9:1-41 · 2 Corinthians 4:3-4 · Isaiah 35:5-7
“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.