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 healing of the blind man in John 9 starts with the disciples' question and what it reveals about us. Brian pointed out that when the disciples asked Jesus who sinned to cause the man's blindness, they were looking for a tidy system where suffering always has a guilty party attached. Jesus refused that system entirely, saying the blindness came from neither the man nor his parents, and turned the conversation toward what God was about to do on that ground.
Brian held the harder edges of the text honestly. The grammar of Jesus' answer can make it sound as though God caused the blindness on purpose, and the congregation pushed back on that in real time. Brian's response was to widen the frame: a fallen world produces hard things, nothing surprises God, and God is fully capable of moving through what he did not cause. The whole of Scripture describes a good Father, and that character does not line up with a God who reaches in and blinds a child. What the healing itself signals mattered just as much. Anyone in Second Temple Judaism would have recognized restoring sight to someone born blind as a specific sign associated with the Messiah, which is exactly why the Pharisees launched a formal investigation, with subpoenas, scribes, and cleared calendars. The man did not get to celebrate. His neighbors were skeptical, his parents were too afraid to stand by him, and the Pharisees threw him out of the synagogue altogether.
That moment of expulsion is where the teaching lands with the most weight. Brian made the point that Jesus heard what happened and went and found the man. The man did not find Jesus. Jesus found him. Brian says, "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 congregation also sat with the physical detail of the healing, spit, mud, and a command to go wash, a method that required the man to act in faith before he could see anything. Spiritual blindness, Brian argued, works the same way: no amount of intelligence or open-mindedness gets around it. As he put it, "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 both cases, is something Jesus gives, not something a person works up on their own.
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.