And just who is blind?

A Lenten sermon by Jamie Howison on John 9:1-41

In his gospel, John gives us a set of long stories about Jesus that we simply cannot ignore, and I’m grateful that every three years the lectionary takes us deep into three of those narratives. This story today runs the full length of the ninth chapter of John and has a rather remarkable structure that keeps inviting the reader forward. It is told in a series of four episodes:

1. Jesus meets a man who was born blind, anoints his eyes with mud and spit, and sends him to wash in the Pool of Siloam. And what do you know? He can see, which is a source of amazement to those who know him.

2. The man is taken to the Pharisees, who go straight into skeptical mode and then get critical because this all has happened on the Sabbath. In turn the man’s parents are questioned, but they keep their heads low for fear of being condemned, ultimately saying ‘He is of age; ask him.’

3. The Pharisees again summon the man, intent on getting to the bottom of it all… or at least to make sure that Jesus gets no credit for anything. In the end the man says to them, “If this man were not from God, he could do nothing,” to which they answer, “You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?” At which point, they then drive him away.

4. The man is then sought out by Jesus, who has been absent for the long middle sections of the story, and who ultimately says to the man, “You have seen [the Son of Man], and the one speaking with you is he,” to which the newly sighted man replies, “Lord, I believe.” This then leads to the final confrontation with the Pharisees, who say to Jesus, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” to which he answers, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see’, your sin remains.”

Now that’s a little bit of the upside-down logic that drives this story, and in fact is the engine for the whole of the Gospels. The grand irony of the healing of blindness in these these stories is that the physically blind characters are the ones who are the most honest and upfront about their need—they want to see—while the sighted characters walk with a kind of profound blindness as to what is actually going on right in front of their eyes. That is certainly true of the Pharisees in this story, but it is also true of the disciples.

As Jesus 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?’

Do you see? They are working with an assumption that would have been in the very air of that world, that if you were blind or in any way disabled, it was either on account of your sin or some sin committed by your parents.

But in her book My Body is Not a Prayer Request, Amy Kenny issues a quick and important caution, saying “Before you judge the disciples, you should know that a 2018 poll found that 67 percent of people feel ‘uncomfortable’ talking to a disabled person.” Assumptions around something like blindness are not, in other words, restricted to that ancient world, but are very much present in our own. Kenny also makes the point that her wheelchair-bound body is somehow deemed ripe for public comment as time and again complete strangers will come up to her and commend every cure from healing prayer to putting garlic in her socks.

So no, don’t judge the disciples, but instead see if you can’t grow in understanding, just as they will grow as they watch Jesus doing his work. And here growing in understanding is a fascinating prospect, because this parable doesn’t invite us into a “happily ever after” sort of resolution but rather asks that we witness what this man born blind ultimately walks through.

And here I turn our attention to Amy Kenny’s engagement with the story, as she rather playfully names the man “Zechariah,” or “Zach” for short. She writes,

Perhaps the biggest surprise in this passage is that receiving sight doesn’t magically improve everything (or anything?) for Zach. Quite the opposite, in fact. It amplifies the way he is ostracized by people who think they understand Scripture better than him.

Right? One would think that those who had seen him out near the Pool of Siloam day after day, week after week, month after month, would have been thrilled to see his sight restored, but no. John says that “The neighbours and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, ‘Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?’ Some say that yes, it is him, while others just say nah, just looks like him. They don’t quite know what to do with the restoration of his sight, and they’re certainly not about to celebrate it.

And then it is off to the Pharisees, who get all tangled up in both the problem of performing a healing on the sabbath and in what to do about a healing if they’ve already decided Jesus is a problem. Then it is off to the man’s parents who don’t want to risk getting involved, so then it is back to a second stand-off between the Pharisees and the newly sighted man which leads to his being pushed out of their circle… and no one aside from the man himself seems at all happy that he can now finally see!

And this is when the deeper healing takes place. Again from Amy Kenny:

Zach received a physical cure in the beginning of John 9 when he emerged from the pool able to see, but his true healing does not occur until much later in the chapter when he declares, “Lord, I believe,” and worships Jesus. That’s the moment he’s restored through a conversation with the living God and is finally able to reach the place of worship he’s been excluded from.

It doesn’t matter that those Pharisees won’t give him the time of day. It doesn’t even matter if he’s going to find himself shunned from the temple. He’s now in a place of deeper worship, namely in the very presence of the living God, and no one is about to take that away from him. He—the man born blind—is the one who now sees with the greatest clarity. As for who is metaphorically “blind” in the story, Jesus hardly minces words. “I came into this world for judgement so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” Not that he is blinding them, but rather the clarity of his action and of his very self demands a decision. Those who know their deep needs turn to him. Those who think they have been doing spiritually, ritually, socially, and religiously very well all along, thank you very much, effectively slam the door on their own sightedness.

Now the brilliant thing is that that slammed door is not eternally shut. Any one of them could open it back up, walk over to Jesus, and start the conversation with him all over again. That is precisely what Nicodemus the Pharisee did in Chapter 3 of this gospel, when he came to see Jesus by night and was in the end ultimately transformed by it all. That is what the good Lord most deeply desires: That all will be sighted, all will be transformed, all will find our way home to him even if only in the fullness of time.

Oh, and of course it is alongside of the man who had been blind that we, the reader or hearer of this gospel story are meant to stand, for as N.T. Wright says,

John wants us to see—wants us to see—and that is of course what the passage is all about. It isn’t just the man born blind who can now see; it is John’s readers, who are being led toward the light which is Jesus himself.

*Amy Kenny’s book, My Body is Not a Prayer Request, was published in 2022 by Brazos Press.