A Sermon for Those Who Are Isolated
The Fourth Sunday in Lent
March 15, 2026
The Rev. Josh Evans
St. John’s Lutheran Church
Albany, NY
Video and podcast unavailable this week.
“Hold on…let me overthink this”
might as well be my daily motto.
It’s also an apt description for the story in John 9.
What begins as a simple healing story
turns into a lengthy debate.
Instead of just accepting and celebrating the healing
and the good thing that has just happened,
everyone from the next-door neighbor to the religious authorities
has to analyze it to death –
which is exhausting enough by itself,
but their overanalysis also comes at the expense
of only further isolating an already marginalized person.
This man, whose name we don’t even know,
described only by his disability,
even after he’s been healed,
is cut off from society,
alienated from his family,
and shunned by his faith community –
only for being blind.
The disciples’ opening question sheds some light
on what must have been a lifetime of social isolation for this man,
equating his blindness with something that he,
or at least his parents,
must have done “wrong.”
It’s a lot easier to explain suffering
when we can point to some kind of reason for it.
Who sinned? What did they do? How can we not do that and not wind up like…him?
On the one hand, it gives the suffering a name and distances it from us –
but it also isolates our fellow human beings in the process.
Everyone in this story seems interested
only in overthinking every detail of the man’s blindness,
and how it is that he now can see.
They’re so focused on stagnant details of the past,
instead of the life-giving future made manifest in this moment –
of God’s promise of abundant life for all
and relationship with God and one another.
Their attention is misplaced,
and it only exacerbates the isolation
of the man standing right in front of them.
What must it feel like to be isolated like that?
For the man born blind, his isolation was the equivalent
of social marginalization –
being cut off from his people, his family, his religious community.
For this man, isolation is degrading and dehumanizing.
Which is what makes the miracle all the more profound –
not so much for the healing itself (however gross and unsanitary the means),
but for the way Jesus enters into this man’s isolation.
Where everyone else couldn’t actually see the man born blind,
Jesus sees him.
The disciples can’t see him.
They ask their question about him
as though blindness somehow means he can’t hear either,
or worse, as though he’s not even there.
The neighbors can’t see him.
They don’t even fully recognize him.
The religious authorities can’t see him.
They’re more focused on the circumstances around the healing
than the actual man who was actually suffering and who was actually healed.
Imagine this man’s internal dialogue:
How many times do I have to answer the same question?
How do they not get it?
Are they even listening to me?
Do they even know I’m here?
Then, in the midst of such deep isolation,
something remarkable happens.
The man has been driven out – alone (again).
The crowds have presumably left.
There, in deepest isolation, Jesus finds this man.
In one tender moment, only a few short verses,
we get the first real conversation –
not just a one-sided interrogation –
in the whole story.
Jesus sees this man,
and for the first time in maybe his whole life,
he is not alone.
This is what John’s gospel is all about:
not to overthink and analyze every detail
(and there are a lot of details to choose from),
but to abide, to dwell, to be in relationship with Jesus
and with a God who sees us
and never leaves us alone.
“Accept the miracle,”
the poet Mary Oliver writes
in one of my favorite poems.
“Accept the miracle.
Accept, too, each spoken word
spoken with love.”
