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In today’s gospel for the Fourth Sunday of Advent Jesus heals the man born blind.

How can we appreciate what we have seen with our own eyes? How can we understand the miracles that happen around us every day?

Many people cope with the miraculous by reducing it to what they can understand.

They say Jesus just increased the blind man’s psychological vision, or opened his eyes of faith rather than actually giving him physical sight.

The Gospel truth is that Jesus did give the man physical sight. But the really good news is that this is not the best thing that happened to the man-born-blind that day.

In fact the restoration of physical sight to this man seems to have created a commotion. The poor guy. All those questions: Who did this? Where is he now? Were you really blind before? Where are your parents? Then the people drove him away.

Now the really good bit. “Jesus heard that they had driven him away, and when he found him he said to him, ‘Do you believe in the Son of Man?”

No doubt this man had longed to have physical sight all his life. Perhaps the fact that he was blind made him something of a victim. He would have learnt to cope and survive and exist and endure and manage with his disability. But what kind of life is that?

And even after Jesus had restored his physical sight, he was now in the same boat as most of the rest of the world who can see and hear and talk and walk. He very quickly would have discovered that physical fitness is not enough to sustain and give meaning and purpose to a human life.

Deep within the healthy human is a longing for much more than sight and sound and legs and arms and houses and land and Lotto. This deep desire is planted in every human heart. This longing is the question to which Jesus is the answer. And this is the great miracle we see Jesus working.

The healed man found himself ostracised from his society, but this opened the opportunity for his deeper friendship with God: The man proclaimed “Lord I believe, and worshipped him”.

In the same way Christ enables us to look beyond our present struggles and anxieties to the real answer to all our human desires.

This is the fact that gives a person vision.

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Cafe Gatherings

Take an initiative – send me your first name with a cafe location, date and time, turn up and with whoever else turns up chat about your experience of Christ in your life. Write FFF on a serviette and place in the centre of the table so others can find you. Send your initiative to john@fff.org.nz

Monday 16 March 2026 10.00am Moko Cafe, Bush Inn Centre,  Waimairi Road Upper Riccarton Christchurch Trish 

Thursday 19 March 2026 10.00am, Stumble Inn, 200 Mangorei Road, New Plymouth Joan .