From Blame to Seeing

Texts: 1 Samuel 16:1–13 and John 9:1–41 

Most of us have a reflex when something goes wrong: Who’s to blame? Who caused it? Who deserves this? It’s an understandable question—because if we can assign blame, we can explain the world. We can make it feel orderly again.

But the Gospel for this week presses a different question: Can you see? 

That shift—from blame to seeing—may be one of the most important spiritual moves we can practice. Because although blame often feels like clarity… it is often what blinds us to presence.

Samuel’s grief—and God’s new future

The Old Testament reading begins in a tender place: Samuel is grieving. Saul has failed. The future Samuel imagined has collapsed. And God meets Samuel with a kind of holy firmness: How long will you grieve? In other words, stop clinging to what was. A new future is forming. 

God sends Samuel to Bethlehem, to Jesse’s house, to anoint a new king. Jesse lines up the impressive ones—the tall one, the strong one, the one who looks like a leader. Samuel sees Eliab and thinks, “Surely this must be the one.” 

But God interrupts Samuel’s certitude with a sentence that reframes everything:

Humans look on outward appearance; God looks on the heart. 

We do this all the time. We confuse confidence with character. We confuse charisma with calling. We confuse “impressive” with “anointed.” But God says: you’re looking in the wrong direction.

And the one God chooses isn’t even in the lineup. David is out in the fields. Samuel has to ask, “Is there another?” And there is. David is brought in, anointed, and the Spirit rushes upon him. 

Sometimes the most faithful thing we can do is stop clinging to how things were… and learn to see the new future God is forming.

John 9: a healing story that becomes a seeing story

John 9 is often treated as a straightforward miracle story. But it’s more than that. It’s a drama about revelation and response—about how people react when God’s work shows up right in front of them. 

Jesus sees a man blind from birth. And the disciples immediately do what humans often do: they turn suffering into a moral puzzle. “Rabbi, who sinned? This man or his parents?” 

It’s the blame game. Because blame makes life feel predictable. It creates the illusion that if we do everything right, nothing bad will happen. But Jesus refuses that framework. He doesn’t answer the question as asked. He shifts the entire lens.

This isn’t about assigning guilt. This is about God’s work being made visible.

And here’s the turn that changes the story: the real need isn’t simply that the man can’t see. The real need is that no one is seeing what God is doing right here. 

Not spectator spirituality

Jesus then does something earthy and embodied—mud and touch and washing. And it’s provocative because it’s the Sabbath. This miracle is not “safe.” It disrupts the system.

Then Jesus sends the man to wash. The man participates. He acts. He goes. He washes. And his sight is restored. 

Spirituality is not a spectator sport—“watch Jesus do something impressive.” It’s cooperate with what God is doing. 

When certitude becomes blindness

If this were merely a healing story, it would end there. But in John, the healing is the spark—the real fire is what comes next. The community interrogates the man. The authorities get involved. And the deeper issue emerges:

Some people are open to what has happened—even if they don’t fully understand it. Others refuse it—not because the evidence isn’t there, but because it threatens their certitude. 

The authorities keep saying, “We know…”

And the man keeps saying, “One thing I know—I was blind, and now I see.” 

Eventually they expel him. The one who can finally see is pushed out by those who insist they already do. And right there, John makes his point: certitude can become spiritual blindness. 

Not because truth doesn’t matter—but because the need to be right can become a defense against what God is revealing.

John goes even deeper: in this story, “sin” is not a moral category—you broke a rule, so you suffer. Jesus rejects that. In John, sin is what happens when we resist the light, refuse the revelation, close ourselves to what God is doing in Christ. Sin is not the man’s blindness. Sin is the refusal to see. 

The tragedy isn’t that we don’t know enough. The tragedy is that we refuse to see. 

A Lenten practice: wake up, let go, choose life

So what do we do with these texts?

Wake up to the lens you’re using. When something goes wrong, do you default to blame? When life doesn’t make sense, do you try to make it tidy by assigning guilt? Wake up, too, to how often we confuse impressive with anointed. 

Let go of the blame game. 

Let go of the need for a perfectly explainable world.

Let go of the need to be right in order to feel safe.

Choose life by practicing a different question:

Not, “Who caused this?”

But: “What is God doing here?” 

And then choose participation. Choose one small “sent” action this week—one act of presence, repair, courage, compassion, or honest truth-telling. Because seeing isn’t just insight. Seeing becomes life. 

The invitation is simple: learn to see—not just with your eyes, but with your heart.