article30

§24 The Man Born Blind (John 9:1–12)

The temple discourse is over, but Jesus’ ministry in Jerusalem continues with no discernible break in the narrative. Having escaped death by stoning, Jesus “slipped away from the temple grounds” (8:59), and, as he went along (apparently just outside the sacred precincts), he noticed a man blind from birth (v. 1). Despite the smooth transition, it is clear that a new chapter, indeed a new division in the structure of the Gospel, is under way. Jesus’ disciples, out of the picture since the end of chapter 6, are with him again (v. 2), and once more Jesus will assume the role of miracle-worker. The healing of the man born blind gives rise to a series of investigations by the religious authorities (vv. 13–34) and finally to the blind man’s confession of faith (vv. 35–41) and a new discourse in which Jesus confronts the authorities for the last time with the word of God (chap. 10).

A question from the disciples begins the sequence. The feature of the blind man’s predicament that attracted their attention was that he had been blind from birth. This fact may have been generally known, or it may have been obvious to onlookers from the man’s appearance. In any case, it was this aspect of the man’s situation that was thought to require an explanation. Assuming that congenital blindness was a punishment of some kind, was it punishment for the man’s own sins or for the sins of his parents (v. 2)? The traditional Jewish notion, “Surely I have been a sinner from birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me” (Ps. 51:5), surfaces here in the disciples’ initial question and again in the Pharisees’ verdict on the man at the end of their series of interrogations (v. 34). Even though Jesus rejects the alternatives posed by the question and shifts the focus from the cause (i.e., origin) of the man’s affliction to its purpose (v. 3), the fact that the man was not only blind but blind from birth remains a highlight of the narrative. This is what sets the story apart from all the synoptic accounts of the giving of sight to the blind (Mark 8:22–26; 10:46–52 and parallels; Matt. 9:27–31). If a man is blind from birth, then the restoring of his sight is nothing less than a new birth. The incident becomes a case study in the experience of which Jesus had told Nicodemus: “No one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.” “No one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit” (3:3, 5).

The blindness of this man, Jesus says, is not the result of someone’s sin but the occasion for God’s work in his life to be displayed. Like the person mentioned in 3:21 who “comes into the light,” the man born blind will demonstrate in his experience that he is God’s child. In coming (literally) from darkness to light, he is born again. His story is the case history of a Christian convert. At the beginning he is a beggar and an outcast in the old community of Judaism, and at the end he is a worshiper of Jesus (v. 38). Issues raised theologically in chapter 3 but not resolved with reference to Nicodemus are acted out in the story of the blind man. Though divine election (which shaped the thought of 3:18–21) is not made explicit in the account of the blind man’s healing and conversion, it comes to the fore in the theological reflections of chapter 10: The man born blind is one of Jesus’ “sheep” because he hears the Shepherd’s voice and follows him out of the old community into the new. His response proves that God is already at work in his life (cf. 3:21).

This working of God comes to realization in the work of Jesus. Before he acts, Jesus speaks of the urgency that impels him (vv. 4–5). Earlier he had described this urgency “to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work” as the food that sustained his life (4:34). Here the imagery is that of night and day. Jesus compares his ministry to light in a dark world (cf. 1:9; 3:19; 8:12), a light that like the hours of daylight has its limits and must in time give way to darkness again. Like a laborer determined to finish his job before nightfall, Jesus summons his disciples to join him in taking full advantage of the remaining daylight hours (cf. 11:9–10). It should be remembered that the references to day and night constitute a brief parable about the ministry of Jesus. They do not look beyond it. Elsewhere the Gospel writer can look back on Jesus’ ministry with the comment that still “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (1:5, margin). From the writer’s viewpoint, the time since Jesus’ departure from the world is a time for doing “greater things” than Jesus did (14:12), not a time of darkness in which “no one can work.” The focus in chapter 9 is on Jesus’ impending Passion. The point of verses 4–5 is not that the work of God stops when Jesus’ life on earth ends but that Jesus has a certain task assigned to him and a limited time in which to complete it. What he is about to do, therefore, is done under a divine necessity. By including the disciples in that necessity (we must do the work, v. 4), Jesus is not so much asking their help with this particular miracle as inviting them to confront with him the approaching reality of the cross. It is an extension of an earlier summons to share in his work (cf. 4:34–38), and a summons he will issue several times again before his Passion (cf. 11:7, 15; 12:26; 14:31).

The miracle itself is told simply and briefly (vv. 6–7), setting the pattern for two even briefer repetitions of it by the blind man after his cure (vv. 11, 15). The account recalls the twin stories in Mark’s Gospel of the healing of a deaf-mute (Mark 7:31–37) and of a blind man at Bethsaida in Galilee (Mark 8:22–26). In these stories, Jesus does not hesitate to use whatever secondary means are available to bring about healing. In one case he puts two fingers in a man’s ears, then spits on his fingers and touches the man’s tongue (Mark 7:33); he spits in another man’s eyes, puts his hands on him, and afterward touches his eyes again (Mark 8:22, 25). Here he spits on the ground to make a ball of mud that he smears on the man’s eyes; then he sends him to the pool of Siloam to wash the mud away. Such procedures were not uncommon among ancient healers, for saliva (especially when one had been fasting) was believed to have healing properties. Precisely the healing of one’s eyes with saliva on the Sabbath was forbidden in the Talmud by some rabbis (Shabbath 108a), though the problem over the Sabbath in this case (cf. vv. 14, 16) seems to have arisen because Jesus kneaded the mud into a ball in performing the miracle (the Mishnah, Shabbath 7.2, lists “kneading” among 39 activities prohibited on the Sabbath; cf. 24.3).

The narrator’s symbolic interpretation of Siloam as Sent (v. 7) opens the possibility that the whole procedure described in verses 6–7, vivid and factual though it is, serves a symbolic purpose in the narrative. Irenaeus, writing near the end of the second century, proposed that the “work of God” displayed in these actions of Jesus was nothing less than “the fashioning of man” in the beginning, by which “the Lord took clay from the earth and formed man”: what the Word “had omitted to form in the womb”—that is, the man’s eyes—he “supplied in public, that the works of God might be manifested in him.” Irenaeus uses this to show that the redeemer and Father of Christians is also the world’s creator. The washing in Siloam is the “laver of regeneration,” the new birth represented by Christian baptism (Against Heresies 5.15.2–3; ANF 1.543).

Without insisting on such a direct relationship to Genesis 2:7, one can appreciate this interpretation because of its strong emphasis on new creation or new birth in the story of the blind man. The note that the water by which the man receives his sight is Sent (as Jesus is “sent” from God) suggests that the water represents the Holy Spirit. The man born blind is now reborn “of water and the Spirit” (cf. 3:5). The rest of the chapter unfolds all the experiences of a Jewish convert to Christianity: He is born again and baptized; he is questioned by the religious authorities (vv. 13–34); he is finally expelled from the synagogue (v. 34); he confesses his faith in Jesus and worships him as Lord (v. 38).

These things are not, of course, told in the order in which they would happen to Christian converts. A person would be expected to confess Jesus as Messiah or Lord before receiving baptism, and the interrogations and eventual expulsion from the synagogue would come later. The order of the narrative is determined by the fact that it recounts an actual historical incident. It is not an imaginary story or an allegory. The narrator uses a real incident from the lifetime of Jesus to portray or symbolize several aspects of the experience of Christians from the time of Jesus’ resurrection to his own day. The sequence of events is historical, but the point that emerges is theological. It is that God’s true children will find their way from the old community to the new even though the transition may not be an easy one. If 8:30–59 described a false and hypocritical kind of Jewish Christianity, chapter 9 describes the real thing.

The transition begins in verses 8–12. The protracted investigation by the Pharisees in verses 13–34 is preceded by a glimpse of his neighbors and those who had seen him earlier as a beggar. After arguing among themselves about the man’s identity (vv. 8–9), they confront him directly (vv. 10–12). Was he the same person as the blind beggar they had known before, or wasn’t he? Their disagreement recalls certain disputes or “schisms” in the crowd elsewhere in this Gospel over the claims and identity of Jesus himself (e.g., 7:12, 40–43; cf. 9:16; 10:19–21). The man’s response (v. 9) is also strangely reminiscent of Jesus. I am the man, he says, using the same formula of self-identification that Jesus had used (Gr.: egō eimi; lit., “I am”; cf. 6:20; 8:24, 28, 58). These similarities suggest that even though Jesus himself has disappeared from the scene, it is Jesus’ power and Jesus’ identity that are at stake in the evaluation of this man’s experience. In a sense he is Jesus’ surrogate in the narrative of verses 8–34 even though he is not yet Jesus’ follower. He testifies to what Jesus has done for him (v. 11), and he will doggedly “stick to his story” through a whole series of interrogations. Ironically, he does not know Jesus’ whereabouts (v. 12) and (we learn later) fails to recognize him when he sees him.