miracle 6

The book of the year in 2004 was ‘Eats, shoots and leaves’ by Lynne Truss. It was the zero tolerance approach to punctuation and was about – punctuation! It was all about where we put those pesky commas and semi colons, the speech marks and the apostrophes – because, as it happens, they are rather important! The story goes like this. A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots into the air. “Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes its way towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over its shoulder. “I’m a panda,” he says, at the door. “Look it up.” The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation. “Panda. Large-black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves”. So, punctuation really does matter, even if only occasionally it is a matter of life and death.

 

When John’s gospel was written in Greek there was a problem for us Brits in that there was no punctuation. So when it was translated into English we had to put the commas in and where they are placed, as we have seen from the above, can change the whole meaning of what is being said.

In John Ch 9 v1 Jesus is confronted with a man born blind and is asked a question – whose fault is it?

As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" In the NIV translation he answers, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned," said Jesus, "but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life. As long as it is day, we must do the work of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. I am glad it says that it wasn’t his parents fault or his own fault but it does imply that God had something to do with it. I’m not sure that God is like that.

 

How about looking at it this way.

"Neither this man nor his parents sinned," said Jesus. "But this happened. So that the work of God might be displayed in his life, as long as it is day, we must do the work of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. Jesus says that this happened. Stuff happens all the time. Now it is us, the body of Christ who must work while there is still time to do so, with Christ, to see healing come and the kingdom advance. You see, it really can be a matter of life and death!