The Pool of Sending
15 March 2026
Fourth Sunday in Lent Year A
1 Samuel 16:1-13; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41; Psalm 23
11 am sung mass; Holy Spirit Episcopal Church, Sutherlin, Oregon
The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, homilist
God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen
In the spirit of today's epistle's counsel to "expose fruitless works of darkness," I want to start today by noting that regardless of how you may view the former leader of Iran, clearly a wicked religious fanatic, our faith and moral tradition is clear in saying that the war President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu launched three weeks ago and that still rages is not a just war by any definition. Both say that they are trying to make their countries secure, strong, and powerful again, and even want to make Iran great again. But absent an immediate and looming threat, the likelihood of making things better and not worse, and a clear and well thought out plan to achieve victory while minimizing civilian losses, this war does not meet any of the standards of a just war in international law or the moral theology of Christianity or Judaism. Curiously, as you will see, there is a subtext into today’s readings about power and vulnerability and even military threat that speak to us today,.
Today’s scripture readings seem to be all over the map: the choosing of David, the beloved 23rd Psalm, Paul talking about light and darkness, and the story of Jesus giving sight to the man born blind. But they all relate to how God deals with us in our weakness, whether this is not being the kind of person others expect in a leader, being like lambs subject to prey, trying to hide things in the dark, or blindness.
Pretty little red-headed David is chosen as a military ruler (“king”) over his brothers, all big he-men, because God doesn’t look at outward appearance (in Biblical Hebrew, “the eyes”) but on the heart. He is so small, so little, that his father Jesse doesn’t even present him to Samuel. But his heart is right, and, ironically for the story-teller, he has “pretty eyes.” The Psalm tells of a “shepherd” who can be trusted. Several words in the Hebrew psalm mark it as alluding to military deployment: a “shepherd” was a way of talking about an NCO, a marine gunnery sergeant. The word for “green pastures” in Hebrew refers to overnight stays, whether those of real shepherd staying in the fields with his sheep, or to bivouacs supervised by those gunnery sergeants. “Paths of justice” uses a technical term for entrenchments, and can be translated, “trenches that lead to victory.” Admittedly, the tradition has turned the poem of “Yahweh is my gunnery sergeant and I don’t have any reason to fear” into a gentle pastoral idyll. But it connects with David, the small and handsome red-head boy caring for sheep who, though unlikely, became the military leader who rescued Isra’el.
So what of today’s Gospel?
When you go to any of
the public churches in China, you often will see outside the wall of the Church
a similar site—beggars, some visibly and horribly disabled, lining the
walkways, shaking small begging bowls or cups, and saying in Chinese (and
sometimes English), “Please, help me, please help.” This scene is often
also encountered just outside of major Buddhist Temples or Monasteries.
Presumably the beggars gather at such places because they or their handlers
believe that people frequenting them are more likely to be moved to compassion
and give alms, or at least be shamed into giving alms because their presence at
such a place implies that they place a value on compassion, whether they feel
it or not.
The scene in today’s
Gospel takes place in just such a setting. Jesus and his disciples are
walking in an area where beggars gather, probably just outside the Jerusalem
Temple. They see a man who has been blind since birth begging, and the
disciples ask who is to blame for such a thing. They automatically view
the man as an object of pity, something I think that most disabled people find
demeaning and offensive. Worse, they are
thinking of the idea in Deuteronomy and Chronicles that if you obey God, you
will be blessed with health, wealth, and long life. So if you are missing out
on any of that, that means you committed some sin; it’s God’s punishment. “Who sinned, this guy or his parents, that he
should be born blind, condemned to a life of begging,” they ask.
Jesus replies that no one is to blame. Jesus’s God is a loving father who welcomes the recalcitrant child home, the One who sends the blessings of rain and sunshine both of the righteous and the wicked. Disability, sickness, poverty, and suffering are not punishments, they just happen. He says, instead of asking “who is to blame,” ask “how can I help?” The man’s blindness gives Jesus the chance to heal him, so the works of God can be made manifest. Like Mr. Rogers, he says when facing horror, don’t look for who to blame, but look for the helpers.
It is like a story in Luke 13 when some people use a regional slur to ask Jesus how he can explain Pilate’s massacre of some of Jesus’ Galilean compatriots while they were at worship in the Temple. There Jesus replies, “Do you think that these people were being punished for some spectacular sin? Not at all! I’m telling you, all of us probably deserve such bad stuff, and should turn from our wrongs. But just like those 18 Judeans killed when the tower at Siloam [a tower built next to the pool of Siloam, probably by unscrupulous contracters!] collapsed and crushed them. My Galilean friends they weren’t any more guilty than the rest of us.” Such bad stuff just happens. It’s random. Don’t blame them and don’t blame God.
In today’s story, Jesus says
he must do the works of God who sent him into the world. He stops, spits
into the dirt and with it with the dirt kneads into a bit of moist with which
he anoints the man’s eyes. He then sends the man to wash it off in the
pool of Siloam, where he gains his sight and becomes a witness to Jesus.
The beggar’s disability is
clearly a symbol for the disabilities we all live with, whether physical or
spiritual. Note the irony at the end of the story where the spiritual
blindness of Jesus’ opponents is contrasted to their physical sightedness and
to the healed man’s clarity of vision on both counts. In some ways, we
are all the man born blind.
Jesus is giving the
blind man new life, the “birth from on high” mentioned in John 2. Jesus uses mud to heal, an act reminiscent of
the creation story found in Genesis 3, where Yahweh as a potter sculpts the mud
into a human being before breathing on it to give it life.
Jesus sends the man to
the pool of Siloam, a Greek form of Shiloah, or “sent.” It is a
spring within the city walls that play an important part in the story of Isaiah
and Ahaz—Isaiah tells the king not to make any alliance with the Assyrians out
of fear of being besieged by local petty kings, and to trust that God would
provide adequate water for the city in the spring of Siloah. When the
king appeals to the Assyrians, ultimately to the ruin of his people, God says
to Isaiah in an oracle, “this people has refused the waters
of Shiloah that flow gently, and melt in fear before” the local tyrants. (Isa.
8:6). Again, the imagery here suggest God’s care for us in times of miliary
threat. It is to this spring that Jesus
sends the blind man.
The "Spring of
Sending" here echoes “I must do the work of my father who sent me
into the world,” but it also must refer to the fact that Jesus has sent
the blind man to the pool. A similar juxtaposition of Jesus being
sent and then sending those he interacts with is found later on in John's
Gospel, when Jesus appears to the disciples in the evening of the day of his
resurrection: “Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has
sent me, I am sending you.” And with that he breathed on them and said,
“Receive the Holy Spirit" (John 20:21-22).
This “Jesus sent to
send us" is, I think, a model and pattern for all missiology, or
theology of mission. That’s what the Latin word mission means:
“sending.” God sends Jesus, who heals is with grace. In order
to accept this grace, we ourselves are sent, both to overcome our past (wash
off the mud) and to help others (tell the others what God has done for us).
We must never think that
we come to God through our own efforts. It is God who stops and anoints our
eyes with mud, who creates us new, who gives us new life and sight.
The beggar here doesn’t ask to be healed.
Jesus just heals him. He knows what we need better than we do, and
wishes ill for none of the creatures he has made. We may be
begging for a few crusts of bread, for enough sustenance to get through the
day, but he has things in mind for us that are, in the words of the prayer,
"more than we can ask or imagine."
How we react to God’s grace
is key. Our vision may be so deficient that we do not know what we need
to do to amend our lives, or what it is God expects. So we must follow
the mission God gives us. Like the man with spit-mud on his eyes, we must
go where we are sent. It is only thus that the grace of God can take root
and grow in us.
(For my Calvinist
friends—if saying that "God wishes ill for none of his creatures" and
stressing the importance of our reaction to grace is Arminianism, so be
it. The doctrine of a universal salvific will has been a hallmark of
catholic doctrine—whether Roman, Eastern, or Anglican—since the
beginning.)
When God reaches to us
to heal us, God also makes demands on us. He sends us. He asks us
to wash the mud off. To the pool of Siloam, the flowing waters of Siloah,
we must go. And if we trust him, we do what he asks even if it doesn’t
correspond to what it was that we thought we wanted in the first place.
And what he asks us to
do is simply share with others our experience of how he healed us. No argument, no appeal to authority, no scripture
quoting. Just tell them what happened to
you.
But we are also not just
like the man born blind in the story. We are also like the religious
opponents of Jesus who react to the sign that Jesus has just worked. They
believe they know God’s demands and standards, and look at the miracle and note
that Jesus kneaded clay on a Sabbath, one of the acts of work prohibited by
their understanding of the Sabbath. So
they reason that this miracle either could not have come from God or did not
occur.
Where the blind man goes to the Pool
Sending, these other people refuse. As
Isaiah says, “they reject the gently flowing waters of Shiloah."
The opponents of Jesus are certain in
their religious beliefs, and do not want to be confused by facts. The
blind man, is unsure of many things, But once he gains his sight, he is sure of
what Jesus did. He responds to the legal arguments of the people so
certain of God’s will by saying merely, “All I know is that I was blind but now
I see.”
We, like the blind man, need help.
We, like the Pharisees, tend to think we already know what it is we
need. Jesus sends us in many ways. Sometimes, it is a voice
of conscience to be better in our prayers, sometimes, it is an urge to work for
social justice. Whatever it is, and however it comes, when we hear God’s
voice speaking to us, sending us, let us respond. Let us run to the pool
and do what we’re told by God. Then we will be in a position of sharing
what we know—not merely what we hope, or what we wish—but what we know, with
others, so that they might begin to hear the voice of God sending them as well.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
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