[JESUS & COMPASSION] 8. Two Stories of Life

Seeing Jesus with Paul Miller

In this episode, we continue looking at how Jesus and the disciples interact with the man born blind in John 9.

"Jesus looks at this blind man and he looks long enough that the disciples ask him, ’Rabbi, who sinned this man or his parents? Jesus says, ‘Neither.’ In other words, you’re in the wrong paradigm or story. But let me just defend the disciple’s story for a minute. Their story is that sin leads to suffering. And they have warrant at one level for saying that because in John 5, when Jesus heals the kind of the cranky guy in the in the pool of Bethesda, Jesus says to the lame man, ‘go and sin no more.’ In other words yes, there is a very dominant pathway that sin leads to suffering. The wages of sin is death."

"There is nothing like the Gospels in the way they portray ordinary people."

"Jesus left space so the disciples would see the blind man, and then he left space for the blind man and in that space the blind man emerges as a person and we get this rich dynamic of what this guy is like. There’s a whole new way of being human here of relate that we can forget what it’s like. Almost every time Jesus has a conversation, he’s crossing through cultural barriers."