Lent 4A (Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41)

“Sleeper, awake! 
Rise from the dead, 
and Christ will shine on you.” (Ephesians 5:14)

But who is sleeping—and to what are we being awakened? What kind of death is meant here, if not the literal or physical one?

The gospel passage tells the story of the man born blind and his healing by Jesus. Throughout the narrative, Jesus is confronted by the religious authorities who press him with questions designed to trap him—to name him a sinner. Their world is built on a law that draws a strict line between the holy and the unclean. To be holy is to be set apart from all that is deemed impure.

This is not just a set of beliefs; it is what Michel Foucault would call a discourse—a system of language, practices, and power that shapes what people can think, say, and be. Within that broader order of knowledge—what Foucault calls an episteme—truth and reality are defined by those who hold authority to speak. In such a world, blindness is rendered unclean, abnormal, and sinful.

From within this discourse, the man’s blindness is read as defect and deviation. Socially, it marks him as less than whole. Functionally, it is interpreted as disability. Theologically, it becomes evidence of inherited sin—a curse passed down from his parents. The man, his family, and his condition are all caught within a structure of meaning that classifies, excludes, and condemns. No Pharisee questions this interpretation; it simply is. The law and its divisions—holy versus unclean, sinner versus saved—are taken as the unquestionable framework of existence.

But Jesus refuses to comply. He disrupts this machinery of categorization that defines identity and determines purity: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” With this, Jesus unmakes the discourse that had fixed the man’s life. He names a new possibility.

The strange act of mixing mud and applying it to the man’s eyes can be seen as a symbolic undoing—an act of unlearning and unseeing the distorted vision imposed by the world’s discourse. The washing in the pool of Siloam becomes a ritual awakening, a cleansing not only of sight but of perception itself. The man rises from within the inherited system of sin and separation, awakened to a new way of seeing—of himself, of others, of God.

In this awakening, he is reborn. Through the dust remade by Jesus’s touch, his eyes—and his being—are resurrected. He is no longer a sleeper caught in the world’s assumptions; he has risen from the dead, and Christ shines upon him. Now he stands boldly before the Pharisees, countering their questions with newfound clarity. He sees what they cannot: the constructed nature of their world, the way they fabricate holiness and sin.

He is free—awake—in the light of Christ.