Lent 04: Jesus Heals a Blind Man
Community Group Questions
1. Early in her sermon, Mandy talked about a natural phenomena in which ants can get stuck following one another’s trails and end up walking unceasingly in continuous loops; they get stalled out as the blind following the blind and the death spiral ends only with their deaths.
What examples exist in your own life in which you have followed someone that you believed to be leading you down a clear path, only to discover you were in a kind of endless-circular march of your own? How were you able to exit the spiral? Was there a type of death that was needed as a part of that process?
Whether they were minor or major parts of you life, share about what these experiences were like - as you marched, as you realized that you were in a type of spiral, and what it was like to break out of the ongoing march, experiencing whatever deaths you may have had to encounter.
2. Mandy pointed out that, in the story from John 9, shortly after the blind man receives his sight, the religious leaders try to use him for their advantage & eventually declare him “steeped in sin from his birth.” She pointed out that the blind man becoming sighted had the potential to allow for his upward social movement; by assigning him the blame for his original blindness, the religious could reassign him back into a lower place in the social order.
Additionally, even before the miracle, Jesus’ disciples ask questions trying to understand where to assign blame for the man’s blindness. “Good religious folks,” Mandy said, “have a hard time handling” the idea of a world where anyone could suffer and experience tragedy at any time for no discernible reason.
Take a moment to thoughtfully sit with the natural discomfort of a world where you or someone you love could experience painful realities for no apparent reason and at any moment. Maybe examples of that very truth are coming to your mind. Consider the parts of yourself which might also long to assign blame or use other strategies to alleviate this discomfort.
What surfaces for you as you sit with the tension? How difficult is it to just sit with that reality? What resistance arises? How strong is the impulse to assign blame or the illusion of predictability to these types of circumstances? Where might elements of these responses show up in your every day life? Particularly in the face of public or private pain?
3. As she closed her sermon, Mandy said, “one of the most dangerous things we can do is delude ourselves into thinking we’re fully sighted.” She also quoted Oliver Sacks, saying, “One must die as a blind person to be born again as a seeing person. It’s the interim, the limbo, that is so terrible.”
Take some time to absorb and ponder each of these statements. What wisdom can you find amidst these ideas that might offer something valuable for you at this moment in your life?
How inclined are you to think of yourself as “fully sighted?” Are there areas or circumstances in which that tendency is more or less pronounced? How hard is it to come up with specific places in which you are aware of your lack of “full sight?” Do you see any patterns or commonalities in those areas? What insight might be available for you as you reflect on how well you navigate a world that encourages us to ignore the very idea of our blindness, yet, if we’re looking, has so much potential to reveal it?
