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John 9 and the blind Pharisees
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?” Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see. The neighbors 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 were saying, “It is he.” Others were saying, “No, but it is someone like him.” He kept saying, “I am he.” But they kept asking him, “Then how were your eyes opened?” He answered, “The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’ Then I went and washed and received my sight.” They said to him, “Where is he?” He said, “I do not know.”
They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. Now it was a Sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. Then the Pharisees also began to ask him how he had received his sight. He said to them, “He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see.” Some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, for he does not observe the Sabbath.” Others said, “How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?” And they were divided. So they said again to the blind man, “What do you say about him? It was your eyes he opened.” He said, “He is a prophet.”
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 and asked them, “Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?” His parents answered, “We know that this is our son and that he was born blind, but we do not know how it is that now he sees, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is of age. He will speak for himself.” His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews, for the Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue. Therefore his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.”
So for the second time they called the man who had been blind, and they said to him, “Give glory to God! We know that this man is a sinner.” He answered, “I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” They said to him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” 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?” Then they reviled him, saying, “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.” The man answered, “Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” They answered him, “You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?” And they drove him out.
Jesus heard that they had driven him out, and when he found him he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” He answered, “And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him.” Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.” He said, “Lord, I believe.” And he worshiped him. Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see may see and those who do see may become blind.” Some of the Pharisees who were with him heard this and said to him, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.
John 9:1-41
The Oscars are tonight, and even though the ratings are down and people don’t go to the movies as much anymore, it remains such a key cultural touchstone. Why? If you think about what the Oscars fundamentally are, yes, they’re about movies, but even more, it’s our annual cultural check-in asking, “What were the best stories this year?” Because every movie is trying to tell a story, we judge a movie either by how good the story is, how well the story is told, or both, because the craft of how you show stories directly shapes not only the audience hears the story, but even shapes the story itself. Where you edit a story, the details you highlight or omit, and a bunch of techniques which fall under the #1 rule of storytelling, “Show, don’t tell” (and though the rule is “show, don’t tell,” for some reason we don’t call it storyshowing). Showing a story instead of just telling it is what makes it a story and not a lecture. Unfortunately, preaching can be a lot of telling.
Why do I say this? Because all throughout Lent, we’ve been reading John, a master story-shower. John’s read at least some of the other gospels, and a couple of times he tells the stories again. But John uses the craft of storytelling a little differently than the other gospels. Instead of the entire journey of Jesus’ ministry, he gave us a series of very detailed moving pictures of Jesus, more like a movie that is an anthology of scenes rather than a long continuous epic. In each of these vignettes, he wants us to see a different side of God’s glory.
Why do we even need stories? Why can’t we just receive a list of facts? Why are the gospels told as stories, and why does Jesus himself use stories in the form of parables? I believe one reason is that if we didn’t hear the truth in the form of a story, our pride wouldn’t let us hear it otherwise. If someone simply tells you what is true, especially if it goes against the story you’ve already told yourself, you aren’t going to actually even hear it as true; you will hear it as a lie, even if it’s fully true. Stories are sticky that way. Many times, you can only let go of an old story when you finally hear a better, truer, fuller story. And here at the start of this story in John of Jesus and the blind man, baked into the story is hearing the other competing stories that disciples and Pharisees and maybe even the man have been telling themselves. But Jesus has a new story.
The disciples’ old story is familiar to anyone who has gone through a hard time and then had someone, who means well, give you terrible theology; some terrible explanation for your problems or the problems of the world that are so dire, God must be involved. It’s a story embedded into much of human history, something like: “if bad things happen to you, you somehow deserve it.” They weren’t asking “why do bad things happen to good people,” they were asking, “Okay, so since he’s disabled, how is he bad? Was it his fault or his parents’?”
From our vantage point, we might easily see the absurdity here, and I wonder if John is even pointing to it, because the implication of their question is that they are so convinced the man did something to deserve being born blind, maybe he did something in the womb. But as absurd as it is, I actually want to give them some credit. Can we understand where they were coming from? These were devout believers in God who wanted to make sense of God’s justice, God’s goodness, and God’s glory in light of a tragic situation. They didn’t want to undermine God’s justice; I mean, have you considered God’s servant Job, who once questioned God’s justice? Yet as the Book of Job shows, when you can’t make sense of injustice, the mind often turns to blaming the person who is harmed (as Job’s friends erroneously do). Anyone who has worked with abuse survivors is familiar with the phenomenon of blaming the victim, which can happen in every single kind of subculture. So it’s not that hard to believe that the disciples would look at a man born blind and say, “Well, he deserved it,” because people have not really changed that much.
This scene is one of several times when Christ rejects this explanation. He utterly rejects the idea that those who are harmed deserve it. The poor, the downtrodden, those failed by society, you name it, he utterly rejects the idea that they were uniquely bad. In fact, blessed are they. Still sinners in need of grace; still in need of salvation. But for all their struggles, blessed are they who life has unjustly humbled, for not only will God’s justice one day reign, but blessed are they who today know they need God. That is at the heart of this new story of Jesus.
Jesus does miraculously heal this man’s physical eyesight with mud, which is the very dust of the earth from which God made humanity, mixed with water, that is, his water, saliva. But this blind man and his story are really not even about physical blindness as much as spiritual blindness. The man knew he was utterly blind without Jesus. Then even after he was healed, he still knew he needed God. And because he had this innate humility from the tragedy of his birth, innately humbled by life, when he encounters the glory of Jesus, he is utterly transformed by his glory. As Jesus tells his disciples, the man is not how he is because of anything wrong he did, but in fact, he has a special role of revealing that glory to the world. Blessed is he.
Then, on the other hand, you have the Pharisees. We get to hear the story they tell themselves, and it’s something like: “God has laid out the exact time and place and ways in which he works to us, and so now, in fact, we share the perfect vision of God. And we act accordingly.” Does this sound like us Christians sometimes? It’s the other side of the coin from the disciples’ story, the flip side of “people in pain deserve their pain.” The story of the Pharisees is, “people who are blessed did something to deserve their blessing—they earned God’s favor.” This story is so subtle, so common, and so full of the deadliest poison: spiritual pride. The reason pride is a deadly poison is shown, not told, by the master storytellers Jesus and John. But I will be a bad storyteller and just tell you: if the blind man’s humility is what makes him available to be transformed by glorious grace, the Pharisees’ pride makes them totally unavailable to be transformed by grace.
The Pharisees are not ready for that story. And so instead of being available for grace, they interrogate: “How’d this happen? Who is this guy? Why did he do it on the Sabbath? Where are his parents? I mean surely he’s making this up.” The man says, “I don’t know exactly who he was, a prophet, or exactly where he was from, all I know is I was blind, and now I see. And God had to be in the mix somehow.” To which the Pharisees say, “You were born entirely in sin—obviously or you wouldn’t be blind—and you want to teach us? Don’t you know anything about God or justice or theology? Hilarious.” And they drive him out.
Where do the proud drive people? Certainly not towards their own worldview; he didn’t leave that conversation like, man, I can’t wait until Pharisee try-outs open up and I can get on the list. No. Praise be to God that all the proud can do is drive someone straight to Jesus in one form or another. So Jesus finds him again. “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” “Who is he?” “You have seen him. You are speaking to him.” “Lord, I believe.”
We all know the paradox of humility: you can only have it if you think you don’t have it. It’s the joke we all know, the guy bragging, “I’m the most humble person in the world.” The most insufferable I’ve ever been had nothing to do whether I was right or wrong, but whether I was self-righteous, taking myself too seriously and feeling a need to be perfect. When you feel like you need to be perfect, and you try really hard to be perfect, you often self-justify. You often become the reference point of your own salvation. You might think God is your reference point, as the Pharisees do, but really, it’s yourself.
If you you could see yourself as God sees you, you would see you still have sin you just can’t shake. But! The realization that you can’t fully see clearly, and that you can’t fully see yourself as God sees you? That’s realizing you’re blind, even with some sight that Jesus has given you, even after encountering his glory, still realizing you still have limited vision, and we always will…that is the kind of blindness Jesus can work with. If you say, “I see myself and the world totally clearly,” well, then you’re blinder than ever. But if we show up again and again to God in humility, he will transform us, not with more pride, but with his glorious humility.
In our own humility, we can sometimes take the log out of our eye as Christ tells us to do. But glorious humility before God is realizing that there are always going to be logs up in there that only God could remove, and that we truly depend on God. That is a hard pill for so many of us to swallow: dependence on God. We have a hard time with this precisely because of our pride. Being independent and not needing anyone is so endemic in our culture and to our sense of self, the belief in us deserving what we have, which breeds a sense of righteousness. This is the pride in the old stories of the disciples and the Pharisees: “If they are that way, it’s because of them, and if I like the way that I am, it’s because of me.”
But leaning into utter dependency on God, as this once-blind man does, is what opens up his vision. The formerly-blind man’s reliance on God never becomes a posture of “I’ve got it figured out” or “I now have all the answers” or “I am totally correct” (actually, John shows us that his explanations aren’t totally correct). But he knows what we all need to know: that we need to encounter the glory Jesus. Everybody in this story had a chance to encounter glorious grace. But only the humble one was transformed by it. So when you go out from here and see the person who is struggling, hurting, and needs help, a call to help them is not just an opportunity for God’s glory to be shown in their life; it’s an opportunity for you.
So I don’t know who’s going to win tonight. I just know the best sports movies are always underdog stories, and we have an underdog God. This is one of so many underdog stories in the gospels, but it’s not about pitying someone who has a disability. Rather, it’s about giving thanks to God for how God works in the unlikely places. Praise be to God that even if you have no vision, there’s an opportunity for you to see more clearly.
If pride is like putting mud over our own eyes and thinking it makes us see, humility is knowing that Christ’s mud is something else entirely, a mix of earth, water, and the Spirit. And when we open ourselves fully to him by realizing just how blind and dependent on him we really are and always were, there is no telling how he can transform you. For no matter how broken you are, you are someone who Jesus sees fit to show his glory to the whole world. Amen.
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