Reading for the Fourth Sunday in Lent (Year A)

Our devotional reading for the Fourth Sunday in Lent comes from a sermon in Concordia Pulpit Resources.

Scripture Readings

Isaiah 42:14–21
Psalm 142
Ephesians 5:8–14
John 9:1–41

Devotional Reading

Jesus healed a man who had been born blind, and he did it on the Sabbath. This alarmed the Pharisees, who sprang into action and launched an investigation. They interrogated the man who had been healed. Their big question was “How?” How did he get his sight back?

“How?” is usually the focus when people have doubts about God. We don’t ask “Who?” We want to know “How?” . . . 

God does not meet man in a how but in a who: in the person who is God and man, Jesus Christ. He is Jacob’s Ladder, the one who joins the open heaven with undeserving sinners on earth. “You will see heaven opened,” Jesus had declared, “and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man” (Jn 1:51). . . .

In the text, Jesus used spit (from his mouth, the organ of speech) and mud and water when he healed the blind man. To this day, the Word and Sacraments do not speak so much to our questions about “how” as they show what the great “who,” our Creator and Redeemer, can do with the “how” materials of this world. He uses ordinary water, combined with his Word, to give you new birth by his Spirit. Similarly, by his Words of Institution, common bread and wine convey to you the body and blood that the now-risen Christ once gave and shed for you.

Don’t lose your grasp on him, the grasp of faith. Be like the blind man in the text. He had only a vague idea as to the how of his healing, but a very firm sense about who had healed him. At the end of the text, Jesus came to him to make sure the man knew who the “who” really is. Jesus comes to us through his reconciling Word and Sacraments so we know and believe in him too.

We don’t know all the “hows,” but by God’s grace we know the who.

Devotional reading is adapted from Concordia Pulpit Resources, Vol. 24, Part 2, Series A, page 56–58 © 2014 Concordia Publishing House. All rights reserved.

Hymn

Hymn is “O Perfect Life of Love II,” from Good Friday Suite. Video © 2020 Concordia Publishing House. All rights reserved.

Find additional readings and activities to guide your Lenten devotions.