I. The friends brought their suffering friend to ask for him the Lord's healing hand. He did not refuse their prayer. He gave them what they asked. But He sighed as He gave it sighed, no doubt, with a sense of heaviness and pain, even while He cheered their spirits by granting the boon they asked for. They felt no doubt in asking. They thought they knew quite well that it would be a great blessing to their friend to be restored. The Lord knew more than they did, and He sighed while He granted their prayer. Can we not apply this thought to ourselves? We often wish for things and pray for things for ourselves and our friends, nothing doubting that this or that which we ask will be a great boon and blessing to us or to them. Sometimes the request is denied, and we are apt to be disappointed and perhaps repining. Sometimes the prayer is granted. May we not think that sometimes the merciful Lord sighs as He grants it, knowing what we little know, that perhaps it will turn out not for our good but for our hurt that we should have what we have asked? foreseeing that it will bring us perhaps into temptations and dangers, which otherwise we might escape.
II. But the particular prayer offered in the case before us seems to suggest still more particular reflections. The sufferer in this case was deaf and well-nigh speechless. The Lord gave him back both his hearing and his voice, and sighed to give them. Was a man sure to be better and please God better and die more happily because his restored power of hearing brought all this multitude of new things to his thoughts and knowledge? And, again, his loosened tongue, was it so sure that the gift of voice so long withheld would bring him nothing but good? Was it certain that the loosened tongue would always be employed in uttering good and wholesome words, and that a sacred watch would be set over the door of his lips, now at last made vocal with articulate sounds? No doubt it was in the anticipation of a future which man could not foresee that the Lord sighed even in the midst of His act of mercy, and gave the boon desired, but with fear and heaviness and distress of mind. The narrative may well set us on thinking how it may be with ourselves whether, thinking of our own way of living and acting, our possession of all these precious senses and powers has really been and is a blessing to us, so that the Lord may be thought to have given them to us in love and mercy, or whether we should rather think that He sighed in giving them.
G. Moberly, Plain Sermons at Brightstone,p. 134.