As Jesus passed by he saw a man blind from birth. He spat on the ground and made clay with the saliva, and smeared the clay on his eyes, and said to him, “Go wash in the Pool of Siloam”–which means Sent–. So he went and washed, and came back able to see. His neighbors and those who had seen him earlier as a beggar said, “Isn’t this the one who used to sit and beg?” Some said, “It is,” but others said, “No, he just looks like him.” He said, “I am.” They brought the one who was once blind to the Pharisees. Now Jesus had made clay and opened his eyes on a sabbath. So then the Pharisees also asked him how he was able to see. He said to them, “He put clay on my eyes, and I washed, and now I can see.” So some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, because he does not keep the sabbath.” But others said, “How can a sinful man do such signs?” And there was a division among them. So they said to the blind man again, “What do you have to say about him, since he opened your eyes?” He said, “He is a prophet.” They answered and said to him, “You were born totally in sin, and are you trying to teach us?” They threw him out. When Jesus heard that they had thrown him out, he found him and said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” He answered and said, “Who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?” Jesus said to him, You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.” He said, “I do believe, Lord,” and he worshiped him. (John 9.1,6-9,13-17,34-38)
Today as we continue our journey through the season of Lent, we have before us for our consideration another story found in the Gospel of John. It is one of the so-called seven signs that John offers us, preferring the word “sign” to miracle because these wondrous works point to Jesus as the Messiah. The first sign, should we wonder, was the changing of the water into wine at the wedding in Cana. The last sign was the rising of Lazarus from the tomb at Bethany. The restoring of sight to the blind man at the Pool of Siloam is considered the sixth sign.
The early Christians liked to see the story of the healing of the blind man as carrying baptismal overtones, particularly because Jesus instructed the blind man to “go wash in the Pool of Siloam.” As the story pointed out, “He went and washed and came back able to see.” It is easy to see, then, how the early Church made the association between this story and baptism.
So strong was the association that early artwork found in the catacombs of Rome shows the blind man’s entry into the Pool of Siloam as his baptism, commonsensible because baptism in the early church was by way of full immersion in a pool of water. Furthermore, anointing and spittle were soon adopted as part of the ritual of baptism based on Jesus’ anointing the man’s eyes with a mud mixture made of his spit and dirt.
These overtones make it apparent why the story has been selected as our reading for this Fourth Sunday in Lent. We need only remember it was the tradition in the early Church that baptisms take place on Holy Saturday at the night-long Easter vigil, the neophyte having spent the weeks of Lent preparing for entry into the Christian community.
Of course, there are other Johannine themes that can be found in the story, its richness providing multiple avenues of study. We hear Jesus say in verse 4, “While I am in the world, I am the light of the world,” a clear reference to the prologue to the gospel wherein John writes, “The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.
Of course, the interplay between the physical blindness of the beggar and the spiritual blindness of the Jewish leaders is also a prominent Johannine theme, found also in the synoptic texts, but more strongly emphasized here. That blindness is front and center when the Jewish leaders respond to the beggar’s question with the statement, “We are disciples of Moses. We know that God spoke to Moses, but we do not know where this one is from.”
While there is much to be gained by looking at the motif of spiritual blindness, I suggest we turn our attention to something found in that aforementioned verse when the Jews emphatically state that they do not know Jesus. The word “know” appears eleven times in this story. If frequency is prone to prove anything, it argues that John has tucked another theme into this story by his usage of the word “know.”
Again, that argument is augmented by a look back at the prologue where John writes, “He was in the world, and the world came to be through him, but the world did not know him.” Similarly, we find the word at the start of the dialogue between Jesus and Nicodemus in Chapter 3 of the gospel. Nicodemus, a leading Pharisee, says to Jesus, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one can do these signs that you are doing unless God is with him.”
Since this word “know” seems to be of great interest to John, what are we to make of it? I think a good starting point is for us to see the contrast between what the blind man knows and what the Jewish leaders know. In verse 25 the blind man emphatically says to the Jews, “One thing I do know is that I was blind and now I see.” In a few more verses, he says, “This is what is so amazing, that you do not know where he is from, yet he opened my eyes.”
Put plain and simple, the blind man knows more than the Jewish religious leaders, the suggestion being one that they take offense at, saying to the blind man, “You were born totally in sin, and are you trying to teach us?” Enraged and humiliated by the blind man, they throw him out of the Temple, their action solidifying their not knowing the truth.
Therein is our lesson for today, the question put before us found in these religious leaders who are so sure of themselves that they cannot allow any new knowledge that conflicts with their assumed correct knowledge to be tolerated. Do we, like them, foreclose anything that would call into question the validity of our knowledge?
This leads to the obvious question–are we open-minded or are we closed-minded? In other words, are we willing to entertain other points of view or are we so proprietary of our own know-how that we exclude anything and anyone that would contradict our positions? If we find ourselves continually at odds with other people who espouse different positions, where does our absolute certainty come from?
You see, this was the problem that the Jewish religious leaders had in spades. They were absolutely convinced of their own rightness, using as a support the law of Moses, dismissing anyone who differed in their understanding of the right way to live as a Jew. To borrow from another theme present here, they had blinders that greatly compromised their ability to take in new knowledge that might widen their understanding of the ways of God.
The core problem for the Jewish religious leaders was the fact that Jesus healed the blind man on the sabbath. “This man is not from God, because he does not keep the sabbath,” they said to one another. Their certainty about the will of God, based on their voluminous interpretations of what was permitted on the sabbath and what was not, foreclosed any possibility that Jesus could be a prophet sent by God. (Their proof was in the prohibition not to knead on the sabbath, and Jesus mixing spit and mud together was considered kneading.)
The net result is that the beggar in the crowd proves himself more knowledgeable–more right–than the studious and smart religious leaders who end up being wrong about Jesus. “What do you have to say about him,, since he opened your eyes,” they asked the blind man. He answered, “He is a prophet.” As we saw, his answer resulted in his expulsion from the Temple. (Scholars want to see this expulsion as the lived experience of the Johannine community at the time of the writing of the gospel, they also having to suffer the same treatment because of their knowledge of who Jesus was.)
I suspect that for many Christians today the problem is not that they are being kicked out of their assemblies, but they, like the Jewish religious leaders, are the ones doing the kicking. Sure and certain of their own knowledge, they do not allow anything that would contradict their beliefs to be entertained, surrounding themselves by like-minded believers who also do not have room for new ideas or old ideas that fly in the face of their own thoughts, resulting in a close-mindedness that has often been called “the Catholic ghetto.”
If Lent is supposed to accomplish anything, it is meant to challenge our typical way of thinking and confront our everyday actions, asking us to look deeper into our thoughts and actions to see if they truly are in conformity with the ways of God or if we have made God’s ways conform to our own. Sadly, it is easy to do. All it takes is a stringent belief that we are right and anybody who differs from us is dead wrong.
To bring this matter closer to home, we can ask ourselves a number of questions, beginning with our ability or inability to include others in our community who differ from us, believing or not believing them to be equal to us in their humanity and in their being children of God. In other words, how wide is our embrace of others? Are our arms wide open, inviting others to join us, or are they crossed at the breast, signifying our defensiveness, our protectiveness of our point of view, and a need to create a physical barrier between ourselves and others?
What other barriers do we put between ourselves and others because of our ingrained beliefs that we are right and they are wrong? Do we wall ourselves off from others by denigrating them, despising them, and diminishing their personhood as the Jewish religious leaders did the beggar, ridiculing him because he stood his ground on what wonders Jesus had done for him? Or, are we going to work on bringing down the walls that we have erected between ourselves and those who are different from us in some way, accepting that we can learn something from them?
As I’ve said before, if we want our Lenten sacrifices to have teeth, then maybe we could not only give up sweets, but also give up our strong opinions. Instead of worrying about abstaining from meat on Fridays, we might instead abstain from cold-heartedness, close-mindedness, and high-handedness. If we do, we will find ourselves to be a very changed person at the end of Lent, which, of course, is the whole purpose of these weeks.
So, we want to ponder carefully this story of the beggar who was blind and whose sight was restored, a man who in the eyes of the know-it-alls knew next to nothing, but who still knew the one important truth that Jesus was a man of God. The evangelist puts before us in him someone who wasn’t nearly the loser everyone else thought he was. Looking at him, we want to examine more closely at what we know for certain, allowing the possibility that we don’t know as much as we think we do.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 