I Was Blind, Now I See
John 9:1-41
“As he walked 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?” How odd that question sounds to our ears! For one thing, it’s not at all clear how the man could have sinned as a child in his mother’s womb, but let’s leave that aside. The bigger issue is that I don’t think it would ever occur to most people to attribute any sort of innate physical disability to someone’s moral failure.
My best friend Dave was born with impaired vision that is not correctable. He explained it to me once. It has something to do with his retinas. Even with glasses he doesn’t see anything close to 20/20. Dave has never seen clearly a day in his life, which may explain why I used to beat him at tennis all the time. He’s never had a driver’s license because he could never pass the vision exam. The only time he ever took the wheel of an automobile was late one night when I let him drive my car around the empty parking lot of the Connecticut Post Mall.
When we were in elementary school, on the first day of class each year he would have to tell the teacher that he needed to sit in the front row so that he could see the blackboard, and that sometimes he’d have to walk right up to the blackboard in the middle of a lecture. And each year on that first day he’d show up with some sort of new optical gadget that his eye doctor had given him. One year he had a mini telescope, the next year these special glasses that had telescopic lenses.
Despite Dave’s having had impaired vision since birth, it never occurred to me or to any of Dave’s other friends that his poor eyesight could be the result of his or his parents’ sin. It was a matter of medical science not morality. And yet the notion that God punishes bad behavior, and on the flip side, rewards good behavior, is hardly a relic from the prescientific days of the Bible. It’s still very much with us today. We hear it in the familiar axiom “God helps those who help themselves” (which is not in the Bible, by the way). Some churches explicitly teach that God blesses the faithful with health and wealth. Other churches offer a more legalistic understanding of that theology in which faith is about following the rules that God has laid out. Faith is about do’s and don’ts, and you’d better do or not do as God says because you don’t want to be found wanting by the great scorekeeper in the sky.
I understand the appeal of these rather transactional understandings of God. For one, rules provide order and structure. With rules, things make sense. You know what you’re supposed to do and what you are to avoid doing.
Second, rules also provide a sense of control. With rules, so the thinking goes, how you fare in this life (and the next) is entirely up to you. Follow the rules and you will succeed; break them and you will suffer the consequences. It’s entirely up to you. You are in control.
Today’s reading from the Gospel of John shines a spotlight on this theology and—spoiler alert—it’s not a favorable light. What it reveals is a transactional understanding of God based in rewards and punishments rather than the transforming power of the God who enables us to properly see.
The Pharisees exemplify the former. They are experts in the Law. They know the rules better than anyone. They can cite every commandment chapter and verse. As members of the religious establishment, they are highly educated, well respected leaders of society.
Then there is the man blind from birth who begs for a living. He lives on the margins, entirely dependent on the goodwill of others. In the eyes of many, his condition is not a result of misfortune but rather divine punishment. Showing just how pervasive this way of thinking was, note that the ones who ask Jesus, “Who sinned, this man or his parents?” are not the letter-of-the law Pharisees but Jesus’ own disciples. They look upon suffering, and their first thought is, Who’s to blame? What did he or his parents do for him to deserve this?
“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” Jesus answers. “He was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” Perhaps knowing that such an unexpected and enigmatic answer might confound his disciples, Jesus opts to show them what he means. He spits on the ground, mixes the dirt with his saliva, and spreads the mud on the man’s eyes. Yes, I know. It doesn’t sound sanitary, but doing the Lord’s work sometimes means getting your hands dirty. Jesus then instructs the man to wash in a nearby pool.
There are two peculiar things about this incident. First, we don’t see the miracle. It occurs off-camera, so to speak. John doesn’t describe the man opening his eyes to sunlight for the first time in his life. Imagine what it would be like to go from living in total darkness to suddenly seeing in technicolor!
The YouTube algorithm sometimes puts in my feed videos of people who are severely hearing impaired receiving cochlear implants that enable them to hear clearly for the first time. The reactions almost always feature the person becoming overwhelmed with emotion. I imagine the blind man having a similar reaction, but if he does, John doesn’t tell us. All John says is that the man walks away blind and comes back able to see.
The miracle is not the climax of the story…. The rest of the chapter is about everyone’s reaction to the miracle.
The second peculiar thing is that the miracle is not the climax of the story. If this were a drama, the miracle occurs in Act 1, Scene 1. The miracle happens in verse 7, but there are about six hundred more verses in the chapter! The rest of the chapter is about everyone’s reaction to the miracle. The Pharisees, the man’s neighbors, and even his own parents wrestle with what it means, or if it really happened.
First up are the blind man’s neighbors. When the man returns from having washed the mud from his eyes, seeing his neighbors for the first time, it is they who don’t recognize him. “Isn’t this the man who used to sit and beg?” “No, it can’t be. It’s just someone who looks like him.” In a subtle bit of humor that’s easy to miss, the man has to keep insisting that it’s really him. “I’m the guy! It’s me!” Yet still that’s not good enough. His neighbors demand to know how it is that he can see. He’s supposed to be blind. How could this blind beggar whom they walked past and stepped over every day be transformed into the man now looking them directly in the eye?
The crowd then bring the formerly blind man to the Pharisees. Surely the religious experts will be able to make sense of the situation. The funny thing is the Pharisees don’t seem at all interested in the fact that the blind man can now see. What gets them worked up is that this miracle took place on the sabbath. How can this Jesus, a man who is supposedly sent from God, violate the commandment not to work on the sabbath? Clearly, he is not from God. He is a sinner!
The crowd then go and fetch the blind man’s parents and ask them whether he is indeed their son, and if so, how is it that he now sees? Was he always blind? Are you sure? The parents want no part of this inquisition and respond, “He’s old enough. Ask him yourself.”
By now you might have noticed something strange about the way everyone—the Pharisees, the blind man’s neighbors, and even his own parents—reacts to his suddenly being able to see…no one celebrates. No one receives it as good news. His neighbors don’t believe their own eyes. The Pharisees take issue with the timing of it. His parents keep themselves at arm’s length from it out of fear. The irony is hiding in plain sight—a blind man sees but everyone who sees is blind to the good news of what Jesus has done.
The irony is hiding in plain sight—a blind man sees but everyone who sees is blind to the good news of what Jesus has done.
This is the irony of the gospel on display: the man’s blindness gives him insight into his need for God’s grace, something the Pharisees, with their transactional understanding of God, cannot see. Jesus is not interested in a transaction—in issuing rewards for good behavior and punishments for bad—he’s interested in transformation. “One thing I do know,” says the protagonist of this story, “that though I was blind, now I see.”
A transformation has taken place. The blind man is not the same person he was before meeting Jesus. His eyes have been opened, not only to the beauty of the world but also to the wonders of God’s grace, a grace made known to him in the healing touch of Jesus Christ.
It is not a small thing to be touched by the grace of Jesus Christ, although it is easy to take for granted or to lose sight of. That’s why I preach about it every week, over and over again. I try to direct your attention, and my own, to something that can be seen only with the eyes of faith. And that is that the grace of Jesus Christ is at work here and now, in this very moment, transforming you, me, this church, this community, and beyond. That transformation will continue when you leave this building and go about your business in the week ahead. Even when the news cycle is one horror story after another, even when our lives continue to be marked by brokenness, God is at work opening blind eyes, transforming how we see the world by the light of an otherworldly grace.