March 15, 2026, Year A, Fourth Sunday in Lent

John 9:1-41, Psalm 23, 1 Samuel 16:1-13

Grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with you, on this Fourth Sunday in Lent.

Over these past three Sundays, the lectionary has been taking us somewhere. The Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness, where he answered the tempter's every assault with the word of God alone (Matthew 4:1-11). Then Nicodemus came by night with his impressive credentials and heard that no one sees the kingdom without being born from above (John 3:1-16). Last week, a Samaritan woman at a midday well left her water jar behind and ran to tell her village she had met the one who gives living water welling up to eternal life (John 4:5-42). Each Sunday the question has sharpened: "Do you believe in the Son of Man?" (John 9:35, ESV).

Today that question reaches its most dramatic form in our gospel reading. A man is born blind. He is healed. The religious authorities investigate. And by the end of the chapter, the man born blind is the only one who can spiritually see—while the people with perfect physical eyesight stumble around in the dark, absolutely convinced they can see just fine.

Our gospel reading, John 9:1-41, is found on page ______ of your pew Bibles. But we must begin, not in Jerusalem with the man and the mud, but in Bethlehem with an old prophet with a horn of anointing oil.

Our reading from 1 Samuel 16 opens with God telling Samuel to stop mourning over Saul and go to Bethlehem, to the family of a man named Jesse, because God has chosen a new king. The LORD says: "Fill your horn with oil, and go. I will send you to Jesse the Bethlehemite, for I have provided for myself a king among his sons" (1 Samuel 16:1, ESV). Samuel goes, and Jesse parades his sons. The eldest, Eliab, steps forward, and Samuel takes one look at him and thinks: surely this is the LORD's anointed. The text gives us the clear implication that Eliab is impressive—tall, probably, strong, the kind of man who looks like a king is supposed to look.

Then, God stops Samuel in his tracks: "Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the LORD sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart." (1 Samuel 16:7, ESV)

Seven sons pass before Samuel. Seven times, the answer is no. Samuel, a bit bewildered, asks Jesse: "Are all your sons here?" (1 Samuel 16:11, ESV). And Jesse answers with something that sounds almost apologetic: well, there is the youngest, but he is out keeping the sheep. Not worth gathering for what must have looked like a significant occasion—a prophet of God at the door. The youngest, the least considered, the one nobody thought to send for. And God says: that is the one. Samuel says: "Send and get him, for we will not sit down till he comes here" (1 Samuel 16:11, ESV).

David comes in—the text describes him as "ruddy and had beautiful eyes and was handsome" (1 Samuel 16:12, ESV)—and the Spirit of the LORD rushes upon him from that day forward (1 Samuel 16:13). The anointing happens not in a palace but in a family home in Bethlehem, before an audience of bewildered brothers, to a shepherd boy who smells of sheep.

The connection to Psalm 23 is not accidental. This shepherd boy is the same man who wrote: "The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want" (Psalm 23:1, ESV). He knew the language from the inside. He had walked dark valleys with his flocks. He had led them to still water and green pasture. And when the prophet Samuel came to Bethlehem, David was out doing exactly that—being a shepherd—while his older brothers stood in line waiting to be chosen. God chose the shepherd to be the shepherd-king of Israel.

Keep that image in mind as we cross centuries and arrive at a gate in Jerusalem.

Now to our gospel reading. The disciples' question in John 9 is entirely predictable and entirely wrong. Look at verse 2: "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" (John 9:2, ESV). It is a neat theological system—suffering is punishment, disability is evidence of fault, the man's condition tells you something definitive about his moral status or his family's. The disciples are not cruel; they are just applying the conventional, but faulty, framework of the day.

Jesus dismantles it in one sentence. In verse 3 he says: "It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him" (John 9:3, ESV). Then, Jesus spits on the ground, makes mud, anoints the man's eyes, and tells him in verse 7: "Go, wash in the pool of Siloam" (John 9:7, ESV). The man goes. He washes. He comes back seeing.

What follows is a drama in which the man born blind gradually comes to see who Jesus truly is, while the Pharisees descend into a darkness of their own making.

The neighbors don't recognize the man. Some actually debate whether this is the same man. The man himself keeps insisting: "I am the man" (John 9:9, ESV). They drag him to the Pharisees. The Pharisees interrogate him once, then interrogate his parents, then call him back for a second round. His parents, terrified of being expelled from the synagogue, offer the minimum in verse 23: "He is of age; ask him" (John 9:23, ESV).

And so the Pharisees have at him again. In verse 24 they say: "Give glory to God. We know that this man is a sinner" (John 9:24, ESV). The man born blind—uneducated, a beggar, no theological credentials, no rabbinical training—gives them a quietly devastating response in verse 25: "Whether he is a sinner I do not know. One thing I do know: I was blind, and now I see." (John 9:25, ESV). They press him further. He presses back. In verse 33 he says: "If this man were not from God, he could do nothing" (John 9:33, ESV). Then they throw him out in verse 34.

Then Jesus finds him. Verse 35 deserves to be read slowly. "Jesus heard that they had cast him out, and having found him he said, 'Do you believe in the Son of Man?'" (John 9:35, ESV). The man who has just been expelled from the synagogue for telling the truth about his own healing is found by Jesus. Not the other way around. Jesus seeks him out. And when the man asks who this Son of Man is, Jesus says in verse 37: "You have seen him, and it is he who is speaking to you" (John 9:37, ESV). And right there in verse 38, the man who was born blind falls down and worships.

Then comes the devastating closing word. In verse 39, Jesus says: "For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind" (John 9:39, ESV). The Pharisees catch the implication immediately in verse 40: "Are we also blind?" (John 9:40, ESV). And Jesus answers in verse 41: "If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, 'We see,' your guilt remains" (John 9:41, ESV). The one who confessed his blindness now sees. The ones who claimed to see are the truly blind.

Now we need to hold these two stories alongside the psalm David wrote from the fields where God first found him.

The psalm opens with an announcement: "The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want" (Psalm 23:1, ESV). The LORD—YHWH, the covenant God of Israel—is the one doing the shepherding. And what does a shepherd do? A shepherd sees the sheep. A shepherd knows which ones are limping, which ones have wandered, which are strong enough to push to the front and which are the weak ones who fall behind. A shepherd does not look at a flock and see an undifferentiated mass. A shepherd sees each one.

"He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul" (Psalm 23:2-3, ESV). The shepherd does not wait for the sheep to find the pasture on its own. He leads. He provides before the need becomes desperate.

And the valley, "even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death" (Psalm 23:4, ESV)—the valley is not avoided. There is no promise here that the path does not go through dark places. The promise is: "I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me" (Psalm 23:4, ESV).

Then, "You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies" (Psalm 23:5, ESV). This table is set not after the enemies have been defeated, not once the danger is safely past, but right in the middle of it. The shepherd-king does not wait for conditions to become favorable before he provides for his own.

The Pharisees in John 9 think they can see. In verse 16 they invoke the Sabbath rules: "This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath" (John 9:16, ESV). They know what a sinner looks like. They look at a man born blind begging at the gate and see a case study in divine judgment. They look at Jesus and see a Sabbath-breaker, a troublemaker, a threat to the order they have worked so hard to maintain. But they cannot see the shepherd.

The blind man's story is Psalm 23 lived out. He walks through his own valley of the shadow—expelled, alone, cast out by the very community that should have sheltered him. And the shepherd comes to find him. That is Jesus, crossing the city to find the man nobody else went looking for.

The man born blind—the beggar at the gate, the one nobody thought much of, the one they tried to intimidate and then threw out—he sees the shepherd. Not at first with the eyes of faith. First with the eyes in his head, which is miracle enough. But by the end of the chapter, when Jesus finds him in verse 35 and asks, "Do you believe in the Son of Man?" (John 9:35, ESV)—this man falls down in verse 38 and worships. He has been born from above and now sees.

The pattern running through our readings is not subtle. God does not see the way we see. Remember, "Man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart" (1 Samuel 16:7, ESV). We look at credentials and categories, at who stands in the front row and who is stuck out in the fields with the animals, at who has the religious pedigree and who is begging at the gate. And then God does not simply notice the overlooked from a distance. He goes to find them. He sends Samuel to Bethlehem (1 Samuel 16:1). He makes mud and puts it on blind eyes (John 9:6). He hears that a man has been thrown out for telling the truth and goes looking for him (John 9:35). "The LORD is my shepherd" (Psalm 23:1, ESV)—which is to say, the LORD is the one who seeks me out.

The honest answer, for most of us most of the time, is that we are somewhere in between. We have done real work in prayer and self-examination this Lent. We have also found exactly what the Ash Wednesday Gospel told us we would find: that our spiritual lives are far more tangled up with appearances, performance, and reputation than we like to admit. Pharisees we are.

But here is the word the lectionary puts in our ears on this Fourth Sunday: the shepherd is not waiting for us to sort all of that out before he comes looking. He goes to find the man who has just been thrown out of the synagogue (John 9:35). He sends a prophet to the family nobody thought to gather (1 Samuel 16:11). He shows up in the fields where the overlooked one is doing ordinary work (Psalm 23:1).

There is a line in Psalm 23 that gets less attention than the green pastures and the valley of the shadow. It is this: "He restores my soul" (Psalm 23:3, ESV). In the Hebrew it carries the sense of turning back, of being brought back around. A sheep that has wandered. A soul that has drifted. The shepherd does not simply manage the flock from a distance; he goes after the one that has gone astray and brings it back.

This is what Lent has been preparing us to receive. Not the judgment of the Pharisees—who scan the crowd looking for sinners to categorize, as they do in John 9. The attention of the shepherd—who scans the same crowd looking for the one who needs to be found.

We may be in this room today carrying something that has convinced us that we are the wrong kind of person for the shepherd to bother with. A failure too significant, a habit too entrenched, a history too complicated. We may even have done the Pharisees' work on ourselves—looked at our record, applied the categories, reached the verdict. Fortunately, the shepherd does not see as we see. Remember, "The LORD looks on the heart" (1 Samuel 16:7, ESV).

When Jesus heard that they had cast the man out, and then having found him, he asked in verse 35: "Do you believe in the Son of Man?" (John 9:35, ESV). That is the question this Fourth Sunday puts to each of us. Not: have you earned it? Not: have you cleaned yourself up? Not: do you have the correct theological credentials? Simply: "Do you believe in the Son of Man?" (John 9:35, ESV).

There is a gentleness in Psalm 23 that I do not want us to miss as we move toward Holy Week. The psalm does not flinch from the dark valley, from enemies on every side. Verse 4 names it plainly: "the valley of the shadow of death" (Psalm 23:4, ESV). It is not a psalm for people whose lives are going smoothly. It is a psalm for people who know what the dark looks like—and it speaks into that darkness with a steadiness that can only come from someone who has actually been there.

David had been there. The shepherd boy who spent years being hunted by the king he served, living in caves and desert strongholds. He knew the valley. He also knew what God promises: "Goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life" (Psalm 23:6, ESV). He had tasted the table prepared in the presence of enemies. He had found the still waters after the storm, the living waters.

Today, we are three Sundays from Easter. The lectionary knows what it is doing by placing this particular Sunday here, in the heart of the penitential season. We need to hear Psalm 23 not when life is pleasant and the future is bright, but exactly here—in the season of ashes and honest reckoning, in the middle of the Lenten wilderness—so that we do not mistake the valley for the final destination.

The darkness is not the end of the story. The man thrown out of the synagogue is found by Jesus (John 9:35). The overlooked shepherd-boy is anointed king (1 Samuel 16:13). The beggar at the gate becomes a worshipper (John 9:38). And the closing promise of the psalm stands: "I shall dwell in the house of the LORD forever" (Psalm 23:6, ESV).

In a few minutes we will come to this Table. Bread and wine. The body broken and the blood poured out. Here too is a table prepared in the presence of enemies—the accumulated fears and failures of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and the Pharisaical tendencies that each of us carries into this room. Jesus does not wait until we have resolved all of that—he asks only that we come having confessed it and repented. Verse 5 of Psalm 23 tells us: "You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies" (Psalm 23:5, ESV). The feast is prepared now, for us, in the middle of the wilderness, three Sundays before Easter.

Come to the Table as the man born blind came to Jesus: not with a polished testimony, not with our spiritual lives perfectly in order, but simply willing to answer the question honestly: "Do you believe in the Son of Man?" (John 9:35, ESV). Answered rightly, we can say with David, "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD forever" (Psalm 23:6, ESV).

Let's pray…