(Series: Jesus’ ‘signs’ in the gospel of John)

27 August 2023

Wethersfield Evangelical Free Church, Wethersfield, Connecticut, USA

We’re in a series of messages about the signs of Jesus as these come to us in the fourth gospel, the gospel of John. Today we look at the sixth of the seven signs of Jesus in that book. The account of this sign is found in John, chapter 9. It’s a long story, so let’s please do our best to focus on it as I read its forty-one verses.

They go like this…

John 9:1   As (Jesus) passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. ² And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” ³Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him. ⁴ We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. ⁵ As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” ⁶ Having said these things, he spit on the ground and made mud with the saliva. Then he anointed the man’s eyes with the mud ⁷and said to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). So he went and washed and came back seeing.

John 9:8   The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar were saying, “Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?” ⁹ Some said, “It is he.” Others said, “No, but he is like him.” He kept saying, “I am the man.” ¹⁰ So they said to him, “Then how were your eyes opened?” ¹¹ He answered, “The man called Jesus made mud and anointed my eyes and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’So I went and washed and received my sight.” ¹² They said to him, “Where is he?” He said, “I do not know.”

John 9:13   They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. ¹⁴Now it was a Sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. ¹⁵ So the Pharisees again asked him how he had received his sight. And he said to them, “He put mud on my eyes, and I washed, and I see.” ¹⁶ Some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath.” But others said, “How can a man who is a sinner do such signs?” And there was a division among them. ¹⁷ So they said again to the blind man, “What do you say about him, since he has opened your eyes?” He said, “He is a prophet.”

John 9:18   The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight, until they called the parents of the man who had received his sight ¹⁹ and asked them, “Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?” ²⁰ His parents answered, “We know that this is our son and that he was born blind. ²¹ But how he now sees we do not know, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is of age. He will speak for himself.” ²² (His parents said these things because they feared the Jews, for the Jews had already agreed that if anyone should confess Jesus to be Christ, he was to be put out of the synagogue.) ²³ Therefore his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.”

John 9:24   So for the second time they called the man who had been blind and said to him, “Give glory to God. We know that this man is a sinner.” ²⁵ He answered, “Whether he is a sinner I do not know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” ²⁶ They said to him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” ²⁷ He answered them, “I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?” ²⁸And they reviled him, saying, “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. ²⁹We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.” ³⁰ The man answered, “Why, this is an amazing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. ³¹ We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does his will, God listens to him. ³² Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a man born blind. ³³ If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” ³⁴ They answered him, “You were born in utter sin, and would you teach us?” And they cast him out.

John 9:35   Jesus heard that they had cast him out, and having found him he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” ³⁶ He answered, “And who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?” ³⁷ Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and it is he who is speaking to you.” ³⁸ He said, “Lord, I believe,” and he worshiped him. ³⁹ Jesus said, “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.” ⁴⁰ Some of the Pharisees near him heard these things, and said to him, “Are we also blind?” ⁴¹ Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your guilt remains.

Let me just say right up front that I really like this blind dude. He is the most practical man in the world. I’ve chosen to title this message The man who only knew one thing, because I think he holds tenaciously to just one thing, even as events and argument swirl around him. Perhaps they would have devoured a less practical or a more complex person.

In fact, I find everything about this passage unexpected and deeply human, starting with its first words. 

Apparently, Jesus didn’t go looking for this guy. He was ‘passing by’, the story tells us, and he saw a man born blind. Maybe if his disciples hadn’t had their strange interest in how the guy ended up blind from birth, we wouldn’t have this passage at all. But they were interested. And so, we do.

In part, I think I like the guy because people keep asking him questions for which he doesn’t have the answer. That happens to me all the time, and I sometimes get irritated by it just like he does.

But we differ, this man I’m charged with explaining this morning and I, in one very important detail. I’ve never been blind, at least not in his way. Until Jesus passed by, he’dnever had his sight.

I do remember waking up one morning as a kid and calling out, ‘Mom, I can’t open my eyes.’ I had what we called Pink Eye back then. Mom came running up the steps, got my eyes cleaned up, and in a few minutes I was back to my seeing self. But for those fifteen minutes or so, I realized there is an entirely different way to live. One in which you can’t see. One in which you have no light.

But as I’ve already suggested, here’s the thing I find most gripping about this guy in this story in this gospel of John: He only knows one thing.

Everybody else in the story seems to be obsessed with acquiring certainty about all sorts of things:

First, there’s that odd question the disciples ask when they see the blind guy, seemingly after having been informed that his blindness is not the result of illness or accident, but rather goes all the way back to his birth. I mean, the question presumes that they know this:

Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?

(Verse 2)

It doesn’t strike me as the most empathetic or sophisticated first question when you encounter a blind beggar along the road, but there it is. These are Jesus’ disciples. They come at us in all their unvarnished glory and they’re a whole lot like us. Or maybe we’re a lot like them.

More understandable to me is the debate among the neighbors in verse 8: 

The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar were saying, “Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?”

There’s some urgency to their question, by my lights. They really want to know whether the unthinkable has just happened—a blind man now sees—or whether this is fraud or just some really awkward misunderstanding. 

Then in verses 13-17, the Pharisees interrogate the guy with an apparent obsession for establishing the exact circumstances of his healing and whether the man who did this thing is ‘from God’ or ‘not from God’. Oddly, they seem more obsessed with the opinion of the man who’d had his sight restored than anything else. I mean, they’re the theological experts. Yet they press him, ‘What do you say about him, since he has opened your eyes.’

But this isn’t the end of their process. After all the Pharisees smell a rat, since it isn’t every day that a blind person suddenly sees. They call in the man’s parents and they grill them. The pressure they apply is intense, in a context where they had already made clear that any affiliating with Jesus would lead to being banned from the community’s principal gathering place, its synagogue. Anyone who hung with Jesus would be dis-membered from the community; the text three times calls it being ‘put out’ and ‘cast out’. It was a big deal and a thing to be feared.

In the shadow of this threat, all the parents can manage is the disingenuous suggestion that the Pharisees go back to their son and ask him for more clarity. 

‘He is of age…’, they offer up in verse 23, ‘…ask him.

Then the wheels come off from verse 24 on. The Pharisees insist that ‘we know this man is a sinner’. The exchange there is full of threats from the Pharisees and snarkiness from the formerly blind guy under the heat of the Pharisees’ need to know more.

And after the gloves have come off, the Pharisees do in fact expel him, maybe just from their council but almost certainly from the synagogue itself. Now he’s a total outsider to the community. Getting his sight back wasn’t a completely good thing, it would seem. It had consequences at the hands of people whose religiosity had them preferring blind guys over people healed on the Sabbath.

Everybody wants to know exactly what has happened here. Everybody seems to have an opinion. A lot seems to tilt on getting everybody’s answers lined up with the Pharisees ‘official’ version of events, even though verse 16 has allowed us to glimpse a lack of unanimity even among them: 

And there was a division among them.

Jesus is strangely absent from much of this. If the blind guy is the most practical man in the world, if he comes across as holding to just the one thing that he knows, Jesus’ behavior is really puzzling.

First, look at how he heals the dude. We’re familiar with how Jesus is drawn to human misery and suffering, how he esteems and elevates the outlier. So when his attention is drawn to a blind beggar, it doesn’t surprise us that he’s gonna’ engage and do something. Maybe we’d expect him to take the guy’s head in his hands and say, ‘Open your eyes!’. There’d be glory in that, and the signs in this book are all about revealing Jesus’ glory. Itt would be a great entrée to what Jesus does actually say about himself in his first encounter with the blind man: verse 5, ‘I am the light of the world.’

But that of course is not how things happen.

Instead, the action slows way down. 

Having said these things, (Jesus) spit on the ground and made mud with the saliva. Then he anointed the man’s eyes with the mud ⁷ and said to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). So he went and washed and came back seeing.

Verses 6-7

And then, having done that thing that is described as something that has never been seen in all the world, Jesus goes somewhere else.

He doesn’t hang around for the arguments about the guy’s identity. He is not part of the theological debate about whether healing is to be permitted on the Sabbath. He is not present to defend himself when some of the Pharisees conclude that he just might be ‘from God’ and others declare that he most certainly is not. He does not counsel the man’s parents on how to survive their interrogation by the Jewish officials. He doesn’t console them after that trauma.

He is simply gone.

Maybe Jesus is off preaching the good news of his Father’s kingdom in another town. Maybe he’s liberating another village’s lunatic from a demon. Maybe he’s grinning as a man who has never walked rises up and dances in the street a village or two down the road. We don’t know.

But he’s not here.

And this man is left alone to deal with seeing neighbors and trees and sky and parents for the first time. Seeing light. He is seeing light. He is seeing his own body. But the ‘light of the world’ is not beside him, not holding his hand, not coaching him through his first days with eyes that function.

What does he do?

He holds to the one thing he knows. Let’s watch him…

First, we find him insisting that things are more simple than they are complicated. There’s that kerfuffle about whether he’s really the same guy who used to sit there and say, ‘A little help for a blind man…’ … ‘A little help for a blind man…’:

The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar were saying, “Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?” ⁹ Some said, “It is he.” Others said, “No, but he is like him.” He kept saying, “I am the man.”

Verses 8-9

He had to repeat it every time he was faced with the conspiracy version or the confusion version of events. Just two words in the Greek of John’s gospel, just four in the version I’ve read from this morning, just two again in what would be a perfectly good translation into our English: He kept saying, ‘It’s me.’

I have to wonder whether John intends us to see the humor in this, especially in the words that follow:

So they said to him, “Then how were your eyes opened?” ¹¹ He answered, “The man called Jesus made mud and anointed my eyes and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’ So I went and washed and received my sight.” ¹² They said to him, “Where is he?” He said, “I do not know.”

Verses 10-12

The language suggests that people asked him this over and over again, probably incredulous as they did. And that each time, he simply told them what Jesus had said, what he did, and what happened next.

My favorite part of this passage, for whatever it’s worth, is in those four words near the beginning of verse 11:

The man called Jesus…

The man has no theory, he has no Jesus theology, he just knows what happened and he narrates it in all its direct simplicity.

Then ‘Where is he’, and his stupendously simple response: ‘I don’t know.’

I love this guy. He’s the most practical man in the world. He only knows one thing, and it doesn’t include Jesus’ whereabouts or a complex theory about what it means to be Israel’s Christ, the nation’s messiah, or whether it was OK that he got his sight back on his people’s venerated holy day.

It’s this simplicity that generates a certain interpretation that clings to this passage that goes like this: ‘This guy is … well … simple’. That’s why the Pharisees call in a grown man’s parents, that’s why he can say ‘I don’t know’ on repeated occasions. 

I think this framing of our man is probably mistaken. I mean, his eventual tense exchange with the Pharisees is very gutsy and pretty articulate. But you can see where it comes from. He doesn’t seem to know very much. Everybody else does, thinks they do, or wants to.

When the Pharisees focus their resentment on the man, he finally does offer up a response to Jesus’ identity, in verse 17:

So they said again to the blind man, “What do you say about him, since he has opened your eyes?” He said, “He is a prophet.”

Now to my eyes, this is an evasive answer. Prophets don’t restore sight to the blind. It’s the least remarkable thing the man can say to survive the very unbalanced power dynamics of the moment. Remember, these are the Pharisees. And he is an illiterate, blind beggar, who has never seen a scroll in a day when Braille and then all the modern tools that bring unsighted people into the mainstream of our communities were still thousand years into the future.

This wasn’t fair.

So they summon his parents. That doesn’t really get them anywhere, so they call in the man himself a second time. Now the Pharisees are loaded for bear.

So for the second time they called the man who had been blind and said to him, “Give glory to God … (ominous words for the accused) … We know that this man is a sinner.” ²⁵ He answered, “Whether he is a sinner I do not know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” 

There it is.

The one testimony they can’t twist. The one reality they can’t take away. The one thing he knows.

I was blind. Now I see.

They want more, they want a theory, they want to know Jesus’ technique, they want to find the crime, they are not accustomed to such a simple truth and will not have it on their watch. So things get a little feisty:

They said to him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” ²⁷ He answered them, “I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?” ²⁸ And they reviled him, saying, “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. ²⁹ We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.” ³⁰ The man answered, “Why, this is an amazing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. ³¹ We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does his will, God listens to him. ³² Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a man born blind. ³³ If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” ³⁴ They answered him, “You were born in utter sin, and would you teach us?” And they cast him out.

Verses 26-34

When they have come up empty, all they have left to spit out is the accusation that loomed behind the original question of the disciples, ‘Who sinned, this guy or his parents?’ They find their certainty and announce to this man that he was born in utter sin.

When all else fails, inform the victim that it’s his fault. That’s all they’ve got.

Word of the man’s banishment from the community finds its way to Jesus. He comes back onto our page. This time he doesn’t happen upon a man born blind, he seeks out a manwhose sight he has restored, though it has cost the man his place in the town where he was born and raised.

The man still only knows one thing, but Jesus is about to shape that knowledge into understanding. Into redemption. Into a life and a future for a man who has gained his sight but lost everything else because of Jesus’ touch.

Jesus is now gathering one of his lambs into his embrace.

Jesus heard that they had cast him out, and having found him he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” ³⁶ He answered, “And who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?” ³⁷ Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and ^sit is he who is speaking to you.” ³⁸ He said, “Lord, I believe,” and he worshiped him.

Verses 35-38

Have you noticed something strange about this man in this long passage that presents him to us, before he fades back into the shadows?

We never learn his name.

I believe there’s a reason for that. 

You see, this healing is one of Jesus’ signs. I believe John has taken care that we not end up reading this as a really cool thing that Jesus did to a certain guy once upon a time …. way back when.

By calling this one of Jesus’ signs, John is saying that this story … this anecdote … this testimony communicates how Jesus is and what Jesus does consistently. And so it says something about how Jesus’ followers experience him. Over and over again.

It allows us to join with this unnamed brother of ours … to stand beside him … and to say among the doubters and the accusers and the obsessive seekers of certainty … One thing I know. I was blind and now I see.

No one can take this from you. No one can refute your claim. No one can say convincingly, ‘you are deceived.’

This is not mindlessness. This is not anti-intellectualism. This is not escapism. Those things are all imposters that look a little like this, but they’re something entirely different.

This is the testimony of those who do not claim to see on our own. This is the foundation of the life for those who have been surprised by Jesus, the light of the world.

If this becomes our testimony, the one thing we know, it does have implications. If we see, then we see something. So what do we see in Jesus’ light?

• We see that we were blind. That what we were living is not our intended condition. 
  
• We see Jesus and we see by means of Jesus’ own light. We do not live and breathe via our own spiritual sophistication or insight.

• We see that Jesus is capable of introducing us into a new, sighted reality, where things make sense … hold together … where things reflect our Father’s purpose. This is where theology and a Christian philosophy begin.

• Because Jesus is the light of the world, we begin to see our world—illuminated by his light—as he does. Its goodness and its brokenness. Its promise and its tragedy. Its dancing and its groaning. Its eventual, glorious renewal.

• We see that the power to give us back our sight is not ordinary. It comes from above. It’s an interruption of what we thought was normal when we were blind. We see that there is more to glimpse, discover, see. We become alive and alert to God’s purposes in his world. We see something of what he is up to. We rejoice in it, we join in with it. We invite others to abandon the darkness and come stand in the light of the world.

One thing we know. We were blind. Now we see.

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