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Lent 5
22/3/2026

Psalm 130
John 11:1-44

In a sentence:
Most strangely, we are told this story of a miracle, so that we might stop “believing in miracles”. We are rather to become a miracle.

Last week, I began and ran with the notion that miracles are pointless. This was rightly contested. My point should have been more precisely put: stories about miracles are pointless, to the extent that they are accounts of marvellous things which others once “received”, told so that we might believe that such marvellous things might happen to us.  Faith is not believing in miracles.

Miracles, whether such things happen or not, matter to us because they constitute the power to be somewhere else. A miracle is transport to a different reality – a reality where I’m not sick, where she’s not dead, in which the exam has been cancelled or where our team has finally won a premiership. In our imagination, miracles are about what we’ve lately called “relevance”. They are about relief: a restoration to life in greater fullness. The prayer for a miracle is always a prayer for life in the face of the very real presence of death and all his friends. If we think less about miracles today, it’s because we have found other means to this kind of relief; the power to perform miracles in the way of the magic trick has given way to social and mechanical technologies which do what once we prayed to the gods that they would do. It’s partly for this reason that the miracle stories of the Gospels are strange to us today. We would love such things to break into our lives here and how, but most of us have already ruled out the possibility of such delight and made ourselves responsible for delivering the good things we long for.

Last week we heard the story of the miraculous healing of a man born blind; this week it’s the raising of the dead Lazarus. This is perhaps the greatest of all the miracles recounted in the Gospels, apart from the resurrection of Jesus himself, which should be bracketed out as something in a category of its own.

In both stories, the Evangelist John goes into considerable detail. This is itself remarkable; it’s clearly not enough in John’s mind simply to say, “And while he was in Bethany, Jesus raised a man who had been dead 4 days”. This would have been enough if the point were just to say that Jesus could do such things. Rather, the miracle is recounted with all the interactions of the actors and their interpretations. It seems that the raising of Lazarus is not quite the central takeaway of the story.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 11:1-44)

Word: Proclamation

From one perspective, and at the risk of saying something absurd, there is nothing particularly relieving – relevant – in the raising of Lazarus, in itself. It would be, of course, a surprising and remarkable thing to happen, but Lazarus will die again. Grief has given way to joy for a while, but Martha or Mary or someone else will again stand outside Lazarus’ tomb and grieve, perhaps all the more so because of this miracle’s limited effect. If all that happens is that Lazarus is resuscitated, then our concern for relief from death is only postponed. This is surely nice, but death’s shadow lingers still.

John’s point in telling the story is deeper. Lazarus is not the only one raised in the story. Just as important as a man who lived and died might live a little longer is that life might be breathed into those dead who are still breathing, entombed in a dark world. Martha is such a one, as is Mary, and as are we. The reported raising of Lazarus catches our attention, but the raising is not the main point of telling the story. Just as miraculous is the possibility that faith might be resurrected in Martha. Just as Lazarus is roused from ‘sleep’ (v.11f) so also is Martha called to faith. They are, in the story, co-hearers of the same word: “Come out”. The story is told, then, not to suggest that we will believe in Jesus all the more strongly if he should raise one of our dead. The point is that we – still living – are dead with Lazarus, and Jesus would raise even us, here and now.

And so we need to be explicit about another thing. Lazarus comes forth, not as a basis of Martha’s faith, not as a reason for her belief, as if her belief were that Jesus could do such cool stuff. The raising of Lazarus is rather the illustration of what it means to confess properly Jesus as ‘Messiah’, and ‘Son of God’, and ‘the one coming into the world’, as Mary did earlier in the story (v.27). Or to put it differently, the point of the story is not that, by raising Lazarus, Jesus proves to Martha that her doctrines about him are true. If that were the point then it merely leaves us with nothing but a story about what happened to someone else, and implies that we couldn’t come to belief without a similar spectacle. Rather, and most strangely, we are told this story of a miracle, so that we might stop “believing in miracles”. “I am the resurrection”, Jesus says, not “I will be raised.”

It’s interesting – even surprising – that, despite the lament of Martha and her sister, we don’t hear of their response to the raising of their well-dead brother. Perhaps it’s obvious, at the personal and emotional level. Yet the whole exchange has not been about grief and joy, not about a particular loss and restoration, but about unbelief and belief. Jesus rebukes Martha when she protests at the opening of the stinking tomb: ‘Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?’ There is a promise made here to the faithful, along the lines of last week’s lesson: ‘believing is seeing’ (which is not ‘seeing is believing’).

But we should push this a step further: believing is not affirmation that there “is” a God or that Jesus could do glorious and miraculous things. To believe is to become the glory of God. The human being unbound by death – whether our own or the death of someone or something we love – such a person is ‘the glory of God’. And so Jesus says the very odd thing: ‘Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die (11.25f)’. The hearts of such faithful ones will one day stop beating, but such death is as nothing(!) to those who are truly alive before death finally arrives. This is the miracle which is hardest of all to believe in: the possibility of life in the midst of death, the possibility of life even though Lazarus has died. This is hard to believe because when Lazarus dies, so also do his sisters, Martha and Mary. We are part of each other in that way, such that the death of those we love is an amputation, a laming, a marking of our continuing lives with death.

The story of Lazarus addresses just this: what are we to do with the death that is ever in our midst, and debilitates us so? The answer is not, “Believe in miracles”. The answer is, “Be Lazarus”. Strange as it seems to say it, the “faith” which matters in the story is that of the dead Lazarus himself. He is the first one to make a faithful response to the call of God in Christ, awakening from his ‘sleep’. As one raised from the encumbrances of death, Lazarus is the true believer. His faithful response to Christ’s command models what should be Martha’s, and our own response: to rise, to shine, to bask in the glory of the God who calls us forth, and to become that glory in a world which cries out desperately, ‘Lord, if you had been here, he…she…we would not have died.’

We are not to be Martha, waiting for a miracle. We are to be Lazarus, the miracle, the glory of God.

Sleepers, awake; Stop. Being. Dead. And become the glory of God, which is the Body of Christ alive, dead and alive again.

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Lent 4
15/3/2026

John 9:1-42

ForeWord

A thesis to consider: were Jesus among us today as he was among the Judeans in Palestine 2000 years ago, any miracles he might perform now would be pointless. By this, I don’t mean that he didn’t then or couldn’t now perform miracles. I mean that, even if he did, here and now, they would be irrelevant, and irrelevant in the sense we considered a couple of weeks ago: they wouldn’t help, wouldn’t relieve.

For us with our generally modern and scientifically informed minds, the notion of miracle poses a particular problem: the violation of what we now call the “natural order”. We’ve already banished God from the world we inhabit, so that faced with the claim that a miracle has occurred, our response will typically be that the observation is wrong: what looked like a miracle was, in fact, not one at all. There is something we didn’t notice or take into account. A dead person raised was not really dead; a blind or lame person healed was simply released from a psychosomatic condition by a clever therapist.

Even if we can’t imagine why something has happened, we don’t then conclude that, indeed, God has been active. We are more likely to assume that our theories about how the world works are not yet extensive enough to account for what we’ve seen. There are yet more mysteries to be penetrated, equations to be written. Far from being a crisis which causes us to rethink our banishment of the miraculous God, what we can’t explain often causes great excitement, indicating new understandings to be discovered. We deal with the amazing and the unexplained by deferring understanding until more comprehensive theories are developed.

Responses like this suggest that it would be a waste of God’s time for God to bother with miracles these days because we have built-in means of explaining them away. We are very, very hard to impress. Or perhaps more to the point, we quite simply have no means of even processing the notion of a miracle, because our world is such that God can’t disturb it. In this, we imagine that we’ve outgrown the credulity of those who went before us, who believed that God can and does wilfully disrupt the natural order.

Perhaps we are right about this, we moderns. But this does not mean that we’ve dealt with the miracle stories, or at least all of them. What we don’t entertain is the possibility that if the miracles did “really” occur as described, they wouldn’t tell us anything useful.

That a miracle might have happened and be recognised but then dismissed by those most likely to believe in miracles seems to be what happens in our Gospel text today. Taken from John’s Gospel, the story illustrates John’s scepticism regarding miracles: his scepticism that seeing such things is required for believing. Quite the opposite unfolds in the story: although close to incontrovertible proof of a miracle is established, it has no effect on the critical observers.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 9.1-41 )

Word: Proclamation

Of course, the people who feature in this story were not modern scientific thinkers. But neither were they fools. The Pharisees in the story are rightly sceptical of the report of a blind man’s sight being rectified. Yet neither can they deny that something miraculous has happened.

Yet, while they cannot deny the extraordinary report, this alleged miraculous work of God – as a “work” – has occurred on the Sabbath, mandated to be work-free. We must forget here that we have heard from Jesus in another gospel tradition – that “the Sabbath was made for human beings, not human beings for the Sabbath”. John’s Jesus appeals to no happy humanism to justify working on the Sabbath. Jesus gives no justification for his healing on the Sabbath. And so, while the apparent miracle points towards Jesus, its performance on the Sabbath points away from him. This is the tension the Pharisees feel.

The question, then, is not, Did Jesus do this? This is already established. The question is, Does Jesus’ having done this prove him righteous or unrighteous? We must feel the jolt here, given how we usually hear accounts of miracles. The modern mind asks questions like “Did it really happen?”, as if an affirmative answer to this would be self-explanatory. But the proposal of this story is quite the opposite: knowing that it happened doesn’t tell us anything about what it means. The miracle by itself is, in this sense, “irrelevant”. This is an instance of what becomes more explicit later in the Gospel, in the well-known story of “doubting Thomas”, where Jesus declares against Thomas’ insistence on seeing: “blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed”. Seeing doesn’t tell us what we need to know (or, in a different sense, what we should really be seeing).

Put differently, the miracle which matters is not what we could call the “magic trick”. The miracle is the seeing which the trick makes possible. The miracle is only the lens, through which we might or might not choose to look. The miracle is not the magic, but that some people come to see, even if most do not.

At the end of the story, we hear Jesus say,

³⁹‘I came into this world for judgement so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.’ 

This undercuts just about anything we have learned about what miracles are “for”. Are they not supposed to attract our attention? Impress us? Make us believe in Jesus or whoever performs them? Do we not wish that we could perform miracles, so that others would see and come to faith? Yet, Jesus says, “I came into this world…[that] those who do see may become blind”. Eyes which cannot – or refuse – to see, are as much part of what Jesus reveals as the possibility that the closed eyes might be opened.

⁴⁰Some of the Pharisees near him heard [him] and said to him, ‘surely we are not blind, are we?’ ⁴¹Jesus said to them, ‘If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see’, your sin remains.

The magic trick now falls into the background; it is only the occasion for a deeper reflection, almost a ruse to make a different point. This lesson sits within shifting meanings of sight and sin. The man’s blindness represents no sin but rather his readiness for belief. His blindness is what he does not yet know, which is the identity of the one who heals him. The appropriately blind here – to say a strange thing – are those who wait to have their eyes opened, which means here, those who wait to know who Jesus is. Over against these, the sinful are those who do not know that they are blind, and so who refuse to allow that they need healing, and so who cannot recognise Jesus.

The story, then, makes rather a pessimistic point: it is as difficult to see the presence of God in the work of Jesus as it is for a man born blind to begin to see. Though the Pharisees eyes and ears – and perhaps ours too – are physically open to see and hear everything that can be physically seen and heard, they don’t see or hear beyond the physical. And so the story is only in a passing way about a rectification of the eyes of a man whose eyes did not work. We should notice here not eyes which now register light but eyes which register the presence of God in Jesus, which the eyes of the Pharisees cannot see in the miracle they cannot deny.

The story began with Jesus saying that the man had been born blind “so that God’s works might be revealed in him”. Superficially, this is a deeply troubling declaration, as if God kills in order to raise to life again. But, in view of what we’ve said about what then unfolds, God doesn’t render him blind in order then to heal him. Death is not a method for God. Rather, the man becomes an occasion for making an unsettling point: we would not know what God looked like, even if he were standing right in front of us. This is the pathos of the Pharisees’ objections. And so Jesus says to them – and, again, perhaps to us – If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see’, your sin remains. Most strangely, then, if the healed man represents the believer, faith becomes a waiting-to-see, an acknowledgement that we do not yet see.

But if there is a pessimism here about our ability to see, it is met with the promise that eyes can be opened: that those born and living with what we might hesitatingly call ‘spiritual’ blindness can be healed even of that most dehumanising of conditions: seeing with only our own eyes and not as God sees. The not-seeing of faith is the beginning to see as God sees.

The strange thing this story proposes is that the blind man was, in his blindness, closer to God than those whose eyes worked properly. Faith is a kind of innocence which knows and yet does not. Faith is a humility which is open to being taught. Faith is a realisation of the gift of freedom which comes from not having to know all things, not having to see all things, not having all things reduced to certainty about what could and couldn’t be so.

The miracle is not the trick which breaks the rules and which, against the rules, which we must try to believe. The miracle is that there are no rules. And so the miracle is that we don’t need miracles. This is the meaning of creation, of grace.

With a God like this, we are – as we are – miracle enough. The trick is actually believing this.

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Lent 3
8/3/2026

Exodus 17:1-7
Psalm 95
Romans 5:1-11
John 4:5-42

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

The story of the woman at the well is timeless. It tells of a world of racial enemies and the myths that feed their prejudices against each other – pure tribalism. It tells of the political tensions between the genders. It tells of religious bigotry. It is really very modern. Our news broadcasts and newspaper editors feed us these things as a daily diet. We are all too familiar with what happens when one ethnic group moves in on the territory of another group. We know about indigenous people’s resentment of invasion, and the colonists’ resentment of their resentment. We know of stolen land and stolen children. We are told about the struggle of refugees and the resistance they find in the lands that they escape to. We know of the struggle of women to win equal status in society’s structures. We know of the stigmatism that is dumped on people that do not conform in their societies. We know about the church taking a lashing from secular humanism. We know of the devastating conflict that can flow from fundamentalism in any religion – the religious justification of hate.

At another level it is timeless too. It tells of the weariness of travel (Jesus was tired out by his journey) and the grind of daily chores (give me this water so I won’t need to come here to the well every day).

It is all strangely familiar and timeless, but it is also far enough away for us to have some questions about the details. What lay behind the antagonisms and prejudices of that time and place?

In the story of the woman at the well we are talking about open hostility between racial cousins. They avoided each other like the plague. The Jewish historian, Josephus, reveals that people of the Northern Kingdom who had not been carried off into exile permitted Alexander the Great to build them a temple on Mount Gerizim. When the southerners returned from exile, they rebuilt the Jerusalem temple and jealously regarded it as the only legitimate shrine for the worship of God. Josephus says that the Gerizim temple was destroyed in 128 BCE. According to the conversation between the woman and Jesus, the heart of their 150-year-old dispute lay in their love for their respective places of worship – a sentiment we can relate to.

It is typical of John’s story-telling that there is more than one level of meaning. Often, he will insert a character who misunderstands what is going on. The account of Nicodemus visiting Jesus is an example of this. He couldn’t understand Jesus’ concept of being born again. The woman at the well is presented with two levels of meaning. She struggles to understand what Jesus is talking about. Jesus explains the mysteries for her and for us.

Let’s unpack the story. The central symbolic motif is water. Jesus was thirsty and asked for water. The woman with the bucket raised all the human anomalies we have been remembering — how is it you, a Jewish man, ask water of me, a woman and a Samaritan – aren’t you afraid of catching Samaritan girl germs.

Jesus’ reply moved the discussion onto the new plain – if you knew who I am you would ask for water from me without any fear of catching Jewish boy germs, because what you would catch would well up in you into eternal life. The woman hasn’t moved into this new plain of talk and just thinks Jesus was getting a bit above himself – do you think you are greater than Jacob who gave us this well?

Returning to Jesus’ plain of debate the answer was that the problem with Jacob’s well is that one drink doesn’t quench all your thirst. It took a bit more toing and froing before both Jesus and the woman were relating on the same plain of conversation – but they get there because the woman started to connect what Jesus was saying with the things of God — might this man be the promised one, the Messiah?

A woman of Sychar in Samaria went to the well to find water. She met Jesus and got found out. ‘Go and get your husband,’ said Jesus. ‘But I don’t have a husband.’ she replied. ‘You have had 5 husbands, and he whom you now have is not your husband.’ replied Jesus. ‘How did you know’, she said. ‘Are you a prophet?

A woman went to find water and was found out by Jesus. She went to tell the people of her city. A prophet had found her. He had told her everything about herself. Could he be Messiah? Faith in Jesus had been kindled, and she had gone to tell others who came to see and came to faith themselves. As they said – they believed because of her testimony. Jesus stayed two days and many came to believe on the testimony of their own encounter with Jesus. The story ends with the Samaritans knowing that Jesus is the saviour of the world.

I would like to focus on two things that John’s story is saying. The first is about how the Samaritans came to faith in Jesus. A particular point is made about how faith began by virtue of the woman telling the town about Jesus, but then they came to encounter Jesus for themselves.

I think we all know the best known of all children’s hymns, Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. The editorial committee of AHB changed one word in this hymn. At number 166 reads Jesus loves me, this I know, and the Bible tells me so. I am sure this was done in recognition that faith in Jesus does not only come from third person testimony. God’s love is revealed in Christ through the mystery of personal encounter by the power of the Spirit of God.

The second strong message of John’s story is that Jesus is the point of reconciliation. At the feet of Jesus, old enemies and antagonists converge. They are still Jew and Samaritan, still male and female, but on the plain on which the discussion about living water was held, the old never-to-be reconciled found a common place, a unity.

There is a danger in just leaving that idea sit there. It is not enough to say that we find our unity in Christ. Being reconciled to God is a nonevent if there is no commitment to being reconciled to one another. I have divided the conversation Jesus had with the woman into two plains of meaning. The two plains must be connected. Spirit and flesh are part of the same realm. Those who are reconciled to Christ are committed to reconciliation among all for whom Christ died.