They said to him again, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” He answered them, “I told you already and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples, too?” They insulted him and said, “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses. But as for this man, we don’t know where he comes from.” The man answered and said to them, “This is what is so amazing, that you do not know where he is from, yet he opened my eyes.” (John 9.26-30)
The fourth gospel is unusual in any number of ways, which is why it is put in its own category, the other three gospels falling under the umbrella of “synoptic” gospels because they share many similarities. One of the differences in the fourth gospel, one among many it has to be emphasized, is that John does not speak of Rabbi Jesus as performing miracles, but instead speaks of the miraculous deeds he does as “signs.” The word choice, of course, is intentional, since a sign points to something else. Here, the evangelist uses the word to point to Rabbi Jesus, specifically his identity.
There are seven such signs in the fourth gospel. Again, the number is intentional, seven holding preeminence in Jewish religious belief because it is the number of days God took to complete the creation of the world. While other numbers also hold significance, such as the number forty, the number seven symbolizes perfection, wholeness, completion. So, John’s decision to have seven signs is his way of saying these signs point to the wholeness of Rabbi Jesus’ identity, each adding another layer to his identification as the long-awaited Anointed One promised by God to redeem the world.
Of course, as with any sign, it can be misunderstood or misinterpreted. And that also happens often enough in the fourth gospel when Rabbi Jesus performs a sign. We find the Jewish leaders–whom John regularly calls “the Jews”–refusing to read the miraculous deed as a sign that Rabbi Jesus is the Messiah, instead insisting that there is another explanation, often a nefarious one. They refuse to read the sign.
Our selection on this Fourth Sunday of Lent is one of those signs, the sixth one, therefore the second to last one, the raising of Lazarus the seventh and final one. It occupies the totality of what we know as Chapter 9 of the fourth gospel. Commonly called “the healing of the blind man,” the story tells of a man, blind from birth, whose vision is restored by Rabbi Jesus. At the start of the story, Rabbi Jesus, in answer to a question posed by his disciples, anticipates the curing of the man by explaining that his blindness will allow “the works of God to be made visible through him,” telling them that “we have to do the works of the one who sent me while it is day.” In other words, the healing will be a sign that Rabbi Jesus is doing the work of God, the one who sent him into the world with a task.
As the story unfolds, there is a wonderful interplay between blindness and sight, beginning with the blind man being able to see after Rabbi Jesus spits in the dirt and rubs the paste across the man’s eyes. This is the most obvious exchange. Soon enough, we will find that the blind man is the only one who can see, while those who have sight are the ones who cannot see, not really. Hence, Rabbi Jesus’ statement at the conclusion of the story when he says, “I came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see might see, and those who do see might become blind.”
The point is brought home over the course of the story when people confront the blind man four times after he is able to see, asking him each time to explain how he suddenly can see. The first occasion is his neighbors who ask him, “How were your eyes opened?” The second time comes with the Pharisees when the neighbors take the man to these religious leaders for some explanation, the Pharisees now the ones “to ask him how he was able to see.”
The third interrogation is directed towards the man’s parents, the Pharisees again the ones to ask the parents, “Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How does he now see?” We hear the fourth and final interrogation in the short snippet that was quoted at the start of our reflection. The Pharisees, refusing to listen to any of the answers previously given, ask the once-blind man the same question, as if he might finally give them a believable answer, instead of the one he has been giving, saying to him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?”
We feel the exasperation and exhaustion of the man, having been subjected to the same question multiple times, but nobody apparently listening to the answer he gives. As he says to the religious leaders after their asking him yet another time the same question, “I told you already and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again?” The irony here, of course, is that the man who was blind is the only one who sees, and the people who have had eyesight since they were born cannot see, refusing to accept the answer that the man has continued to give them, that Rabbi Jesus was the one to heal him.
After these multiple interrogations, the man finally challenges these supposedly smart guys–the Pharisees, after all, were considered the custodians of the Mosaic Law–and says to them, “This is what is so amazing, that you do not know where he is from, yet he opened my eyes.” With that simple comeback, the man makes abundantly clear who in the crowd can see and who can’t. That, of course, is John’s point, asking us where we want to be in this story.
Do we want to be the blind man who, at the end of the story, says to Rabbi Jesus, “I do believe, Lord.” Or, do we play the part of the Pharisees, who cannot see God’s wonders before our eyes, refusing to see things we don’t want to see, things that don’t fit into our narrow world-view? Or, are we like the neighbors, confused by an incident, but unable to see that it might possibly point to the ways of God?
In large measure, who we are in this story is decided by the answer we give to the central question that holds the story together, the question at the heart of the story, the question asked four different times–”How?” Face-to-face with a situation outside the normal, everyday experience, the participants in this drama repeatedly ask, “How were your eyes opened?” The answer, of course, is staring them in the face, but they can’t see it.
John, writing decades later, wants to challenge his listeners, not with the question “How can you see?” but with the question” How can you not see?” He wants to make it abundantly clear that Rabbi Jesus is the one who has come into the world to do the works of the one who sent him, but the Jews–particularly their religious leaders–can’t see it. With all the evidence around them, they choose to remain blind to the One who stands before them, all signs pointing to him as the One who came into the world so that “those who do not see might see.”
And why does John say that the Pharisees can’t see? What is the cause of their blindness? In simple terms, Rabbi Jesus doesn’t fit the profile. With their minds made up on what one sent by God should look like, they dismiss Rabbi Jesus out of hand, saying, “This man is not from God, because he doesn’t keep the Sabbath.” Astonishing as it may seem, that is what they choose to see. Not that a man who was blind can suddenly see because of Jesus, but that the healing was done on a Sabbath, when no work was permitted, two actions that the Rabbi did–making mud with spit and healing the man–in violation of the Sabbath law to rest.
All of which puts us in the uncomfortable position of having to ask ourselves what we choose to see. What have we made up our minds on? How has our narrow-mindedness blinded us to a greater reality, a more important truth, one that we simply can’t see because of the self-imposed blinders that we wear? How do our preconceptions of other people foreclose any insight into who they truly are? These are serious questions, not only for the Jews of John’s time, but for people like ourselves living in these times.
In other words, the question we may want to ask ourselves is not the question that the people posed to the blind man, “How were your eyes opened,” but the better question, “How were our eyes closed?” What in the world has made us so blind? So blind that we can’t see the signs all around us, so blind that we choose to walk in the darkness instead of wanting to walk in the light? “Night is coming,” Rabbi Jesus tells his disciples, “while I am in the world, I am the light of the world,” his words anticipating the utter blindness of the Jewish leaders when they nail him to a cross, choosing to misread every clear sign put before them of who he is.
While he welcomed sinners and ate with them because he saw them as children of God as much as anybody else, the religious leaders condemned him because they saw him as cavorting with the wrong kind of people. While he shunned overly strict rules and regulations because he saw them as manmade, not Godmade, those in charge saw him as a rule-bender and a law-breaker. While he upheld the weak and fed the hungry because he saw the wrongs done to them, the powerful and the well fed saw him as upsetting the social order and as catering to the nobodies of the world.
In each instance–and many others–people made a choice: to open their eyes or to shut their eyes, to see in a new way, or to stay blinded by their old ways, to look at things from God’s perspective, or to look at things from their own narrow perspective. And that choice, as with every choice we make, eventually defines a person, our lives simply the accumulation of a lot of choices along the way.
John, more than any of the evangelists, uses the image of light and darkness and its tributary, sight and blindness, to present a clear choice to his readers. At the start of his gospel, he writes, “The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world . . but the world did not know him” (1.9-10). Or a short while later, in the extended conversation between the Pharisee named Nicodemus and Rabbi Jesus, John tells us that Rabbi Jesus offers Nicodemus this sad reality, “This is the verdict, that the light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil” (3.19).
So, we see a continuation of the same theme in this story, a choice being presented to the people, to choose light or darkness, to choose seeing or blindness. And, sadly, as the Rabbi had already told Nicodemus, this story shows once again that “people preferred darkness to light.” It is a cautionary tale to those of us who believe we know everything and can see clearly, when, in fact, we might be blind as a bat, our vision skewed by bigotry, selfishness, and high-handedness.
The story of the blind man who was made to see by Rabbi Jesus posed many questions, as we have seen, but maybe the question we are urged to asked ourselves is the one that comes at the final episode of the story when Rabbi Jesus tells the blind man, “I came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see might see, and those who do see might become blind.”
Hearing this, some of the Pharisees then ask Rabbi Jesus this question, “Surely we are not also blind, are we?” To which Jesus answers them, “If you were blind, you would have no sin; but now you are saying, ‘We see,’ so your sin remains,” his answer making clear that when the opportunity for judgment or choice was given to them, they made the wrong choice. Convincing themselves they saw better than anyone else, they only proved they were blind to their own way.
That may be the most important question for us to answer as well, the same one the Pharisees ask Jesus, “We are not also blind, are we?”
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 