Episode
When Fear Keeps Us Silent
- Published
- Mar 9, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 741
- Processing state
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- https://teerhardy.substack.com/p/when-fear-keeps-us-silent
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Summary
If this sermon moved you to consider the urgency of God‘s grace, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Anyone who has ever been called to testify in a courtroom knows the moment. Your name is called. You stand and walk forward. You raise your right hand and swear to tell the truth. And when you sit down in the witness box, something changes. You are no longer an observer. You are a witness. Your testimony carries weight. What you say can clarify the truth or cloud it. Every eye in the room is on you. That is the atmosphere of the Gospel of John, chapter 9. During Lent, we are working through this chapter, which tells the story of the man born blind whom Jesus heals. It is one of the most fascinating stories in the Gospel because once the miracle happens, the story does not end. Instead, it turns into something like a trial. The miracle is not the final act. The neighbors question the man. The religious authorities question him again. And now, the man’s parents are summoned. The last two weeks of this chapter sound read like a courtroom drama where everyone is trying to figure out what to do with the inconvenient fact standing right in front of them. A man who used to be blind can now see. The religious leaders want an argument. What they have instead is evidence. Yesterday, the man was blind. Today he sees. That is not a theological theory. That is a problem. And that is what makes the story so uncomfortable. The religious authorities are not debating an abstract doctrine about Jesus. They are staring at the results of his work. The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer once argued that the sermon does not come from universal truths or emotional experiences. The sermon comes from the incarnation of Jesus Christ himself. As Bonhoeffer puts it, “The sermon derives from t…