What does Tribe teach about born blind?

At Tribe, the teaching on being born blind starts with John 9 and the question the disciples brought to Jesus: who sinned to cause this man's suffering? Brian walked the congregation through how that question itself reveals the hook people want to hang their hat on, a tidy system where pain always has a guilty party attached. Jesus refuses that system entirely, saying the blindness came from neither the man's sin nor his parents'. Brian held the tension that creates honestly, acknowledging that the plain grammar of the text can sound as though God caused the blindness on purpose, but he pushed back on that reading by widening the frame. The whole of Scripture, he argued, describes a good Father who would not intentionally blind his own child. Things happen in a fallen world, nothing surprises God, and God is fully capable of moving through what he did not cause.

The physical blindness in John 9 runs alongside a spiritual one, and that is where Brian pressed hardest. The Pharisees, who had their own hook in the rule against healing on the Sabbath, could not see what was right in front of them. The man's parents could not bring themselves to stand by him. The neighbors debated whether he was even the same person. Nobody celebrated. Brian made the point that spiritual blindness is not a matter of intelligence or education. 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." The healing that Jesus does in this chapter is a sign specifically associated with the Messiah in Second Temple Judaism, and yet the people most trained to recognize it were the ones least able to see it.

What the congregation kept coming back to was the moment after the healed man gets thrown out of the synagogue. He did not find Jesus. Jesus heard what had happened and went and found him. Brian connected that directly to anyone sitting in the room who feels cast aside. 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 method Jesus used, spit, mud, and a command to go wash, also drew attention. He could have healed with a word, but he chose a way that required the man to act in faith before he could see. That pattern, grace meeting a person exactly where they are and calling them to respond, runs through everything Tribe has taught from this passage.

Taught from John 9:1-41 · 2 Corinthians 4:3-4 · Isaiah 35:5-7 · Romans 3:23 · Romans 3:10