Guest Speaker: Dieter L.
John 9
This is my favorite chapter in the Bible and I hope you will see why, by the end of this true story. And I will use J.B. Phillips transliteration as he tells the story.
The story starts out with: Later, as Jesus walked along…….later than what? Well He had just come from the temple where he had claimed to be the “I AM” …John 8:58… I tell you the truth, before Abraham was born, I am. And because of that claim he had narrowly escaped assassination for “blasphemy”. Some modern theologians say that Jesus never really claimed to be God, but here is one instance when he certainly did. And he is going to prove it moments later…. He saw a man who had been blind from birth… blind folks evoke our pity, and this patient is simply incurable by even the best of today’s medical technologies. If you’re born without vision, the vital connections between the retina and the optical cortex in the back of the brain aren’t established, and the dis-connect can be anywhere between the front of the eyeball and that part of the brain where the picture is interpreted. So, even if the eye defect can be cured later in life, the person doesn’t see, period. It is so very important to fix the eye problem near birth, in those cases where the fault lies in the eyeball itself. That was the case I encountered one day when I had begun to do eye surgeries at our mission hospital in Cameroon in the seventies of the last century.(because there was only one ophthalmologist in the country of 7 million people, I got a few months of training at the Alex and started to treat the curable blind after our first furlough.) One day the midwives came into my consulting room and brought a newborn with cataracts- both pupils were white, the rest of the eye was sound. So I had to try and remove the obstruction, meaning remove the lens material from both eyes.