Don: In the story of the blind man, the disciples saw the blind man as an opportunity to discuss theology, by asking “Who sinned?” It’s a common trait of humanity to seek judgment. Jesus, however saw in the situation an opportunity to be re-creative, to heal the blind man and bring him into the light. Jesus took the initiative here; and unlike similar stories, in this case the blind man did not ask to be healed. He did not ask to be shown the light.
Also, in contrast to similar cases of healing (Matthew 9, Matthew 20), the healing in this case was not a matter of a word or touch: It required the mixing of a paste made from dust and saliva and then the washing off of the paste before the man’s eye’s would be opened. It is suggestive of a re-creation, since Man was formed from dust. It also suggests burial (into dust) and resurrection (from dust).
By the time the man returned from washing off the paste at the pool of Siloam, Jesus was gone. He had to go wash the paste off his eyes not as a matter of faith but as a matter of simple necessity: He must surely have felt uncomfortable with a mess of gooey paste all over his eyes and would have felt a natural urge to wash it off. He was not promised that he would be able to see after he washed it off: He simply found that he could.
While Jesus gave the blind man sight, the Pharisees gave him an interrogation. At that time, any debate about whether or not someone had been divinely healed had to take place in the temple so that the Pharisees could judge whether the person healed was fit to remain in the religious community or should be shunned. (It happened also in the story of the lepers.) Unsatisfied with the man’s initial responses to their questions, the Pharisees had a second go at him, saying “Give glory to God. We know that this man is a sinner.”
“Give glory to God” as used here is not suggesting Jesus should be glorified for healing the man. It is a sort of oath-swearing, requiring persons questioned to answer (as it were) with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
The man, of course, had no idea how or why he was healed and could not answer the Pharisees’ questions. All he could repeat—with evident exasperation—was that he was blind but after meeting Jesus he could see. (Perhaps this is like a person transition from faith stage 1 to stage 2: They know that something has transformed them from no-faith to faith, but they don’t know how or why.) The man knew Jesus was responsible—he believed in him; in a sense, he became a disciple. In his exasperation he asked the Pharisees if the reason for their questions was that they too wished to become disciples of Jesus.
The Pharisees were looking for holes in the man’s story that would fit their preconceived notions—their “dataset”, their knowledge base, Judaic law—of how healing should occur, what the Messiah should be like, and what was the truth about God. How could a law-breaking sinner such as Jesus be God’s tool? It was contrary to their belief system, which they did not question. When Jesus said (verse 41): “If you were blind, you would have no sin, but since you say ‘We see’ your sin remains” he meant that all they could see was their law, their belief system—even though Jesus had just shown them overwhelming evidence that he was the tool of God. Paradoxically (or so it seems) it takes a humble “I don’t know” to know the truth. Hebrew scripture proclaimed that healing the blind was the work of the Messiah (Isaiah 29:18, 35:5, 42:7) and the Pharisees must have known this. It may have been no accident that Jesus performed more miracles with respect to blindness than for any other condition. Yet despite this evidence, such was the Pharisees’ intransigent view of the truth about God that they still could not accept Jesus as the Messiah in spite of the evidence.
With humility and without the baggage of a belief system, the formerly blind man had no trouble accepting the evidence of his unblinded eyes and therefore accepting Jesus as God. “I don’t know if Jesus is a sinner or not; all I can say is, I was blind and now I see”, he told the Pharisees. The Pharisees, for their part, were blinded by their preconceived notions of the truth about God and their arrogant assumption that they had a lock on that truth. To claim to know God and to speak for him is potentially a violation of the 2nd Commandment, which prohibits the making of images of God. We tend to think that this commandment is about pictorial representations, but it seems to be also about intellectual constructs. To claim that we know God and can speak for him is tantamount to saying “We see”, and that—said Jesus in verse 41—means that we don’t see at all.
What can we know? What can we see? In sharing our views about God through evangelism or proselytism, are we committing the sin of arrogant assumption of being able to see? Is there a way to share our view of God without committing this sin?
David: If blindness is ignorance and is good, then to be cured of it is to be made knowledgeable and bad! It seems a contradiction.
Pat: Does it make us bad or does it make us accountable? When we can truly see, we have more responsibility for what we see. When we do see the truth about God and the law and Jesus and salvation and so on, then I think we are accountable for acting upon that knowledge in some positive way.
Robin: The blind man never pretended he could see when he was blind. The Pharisees did just the opposite. Is this a question of humility/arrogance, or of innocence/sin? Confessing blindness makes cure possible, whereas pretending to see precludes being cured.
Kiran: Grace upsets those with a tendency to theologism. Even the disciples wanted to know why the man was blind; and the Pharisees wanted to know how the man could be healed since their theology would not countenance healing by a sinner nor a Messiah who broke the law. Jesus, and grace, are stumbling blocks to a nit-picking theology that obscures the bigger picture of a God whose grace is for everyone, everywhere. To see that bigger picture is to be cured of the blindness of theology.
Pat: How do we decide what data is valid? Who decides?
David: The search for data, for knowledge, seems to be at the crux of things. With the gift of sight the formerly blind man could see things that he could not see before. But he did not seek to understand what he could now see. His sight did not confer, and he did not seem to want, understanding. There is joy enough in sightedness alone. This seems to be anti-science, and was the situation that obtained in the Garden before the Fall. It seems Jesus is saying though this story, enjoy the view but don’t try to map it, organize it, or understand it in any way.
Pat: Does yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling legalizing gay marriage represent acceptance of new data? Does it represent a new level of understanding? I am saddened to see the division it has caused in churches.
Robin: Not being God, and lacking his understanding, we ought not to allow our emotions to overwhelm us on the issue; rather, we should rest our trust in faith that God’s will will be done. Jesus told us that God loves sinners, but the Pharisaical attitude is to judge them. So with issues such as homosexuality we simply need to accept that God loves everyone, regardless; and so, therefore, should we.
Charles: The blind man represent a human race that was born blind as a result of the sin of Adam. John’s gospel describes God as Light and Love, and Jesus said he was the Light. If we accept that we are all born blind, that sin separates us from God, and that faith is the way to enlightenment and reconciliation with God. Light is revealing, but first it has to be turned on. We have to seek the switch. A blind person seeks a physician and medicine; a spiritually blind person seeks Jesus and the holy spirit through faith. The Pharisees thought they were in the light. They did not know they were blind, so they had no incentive to seek enlightenment. As a result, they are even more grievously blinded. The blind man knew he was in the dark, so could appreciate enlightenment when it confronted him. When Jesus said he came into the world for judgment, I think he did not mean judgment at the End Time but rather judgment in the sense of revealing the blindness in people who thought they could see and the true enlightenment of people who humbly believe they are blind. To a Christian, it is critically important that enlightenment, the reconciliation with God, can only occur through Jesus.
Michael: The blind man’s passivity is astonishing. He did not seek to be healed and he just did what he was told. His parents had essentially thrown him out on the street to beg, so he had learned to take life as it came. He was a stage 1 individual, just going with the flow. He remained passive even after becoming enlightened, still accepting whatever life threw at him—such as his expulsion from the temple. Yet Jesus chose him to show the work of God.
Kiran: Looking at it from the Pharisees’ point of view: Presumably, they became Pharisees because they wanted to become close to God. Their intention was pure. But they were going the wrong way about it in choosing a path that imposed a belief system on them. It seems to me Jesus was reaching out to them too, in this story, as well as reaching out to the blind man and to the disciples who posed the original question. The blind man accepted Jesus’ hand; the disciples accepted his explanation; but the Pharisees’—by virtue of their theology—could do neither. But over time, all will come to accept him.
A former gay-basher said in a PBS interview that Christian heterosexuals had done far more than gays to destroy the sanctity of marriage through the great prevalence of divorce. The gays are just a scapegoat.
Pat: The blind man was gutsy in talking with the Pharisees the way he did. He would have known their power and the risk he was taking, yet he spoke his mind anyway.
Don: Indeed, and he was thrown out of the temple for doing so. This was tantamount to becoming eternally lost, under that belief system. So his gutsiness cost him.
David: I still see the story as a rebuke of reason. By “reason” I mean the imposition of order on society and on the spiritual community in particular. Law is the only means by which any community can be ordered and regulated. Law gives members of the community an understandable (in human terms) framework on which to establish and build their lives. Jesus seems to be saying “No! That’s not the way! The way is anarchy!” He seems to be arguing for chaos. He seems to be saying that we need to be always in transition between stages of faith—that we must not dwell in any one stage. We must live in spiritual chaos but then simply accept it. Don’t question it. Don’t try to impose order on it. And don’t worry about it! Maybe the blind man was not so much gutsy: He simply could not have cared less what the Pharisees said or did.
Don: I see it more as a rebuke of arrogance. It’s a matter of how one deals with the data, how one applies it to oneself and most importantly how one uses it in one’s relationships with others. I see it as a call to humility and a recognition that while I have a view of God—I “see”—I am not so certain of it that I dismiss all other views. I see it more a call for humility than a call for ignorance.
Kiran: We need the humility to recognize that the more we are enlightened, the more there is yet to be enlightened. Accepting grace, accepting that one needs it, is the source of humility, it seems to me. And it is a lifetime’s work.
Charles: Chaos exists in the absence of light. We illuminate things in science in order to understand them. Spiritual darkness is also chaotic and will remain so until it is enlightened by Jesus (the Light).
Don: The Light that Jesus refers to reveals not just the world outside one’s self but also the world inside one’s self. It induces self-awareness as much as awareness of the world around one. Our present discussion is set in the context of Jesus as “the Light of the world.” Light is a very general concept. It is not well defined. But in Revelation 4 and 10, the light in the new earth and new heaven is a rainbow around the head and the throne of God. It is not just an amorphous whiteness. Is this significant?
Michael: How does one accept or reject the Light? How do you know it when you see it? Why does it seem to affect people differently?
Alice: You don’t have to seek it. Just be open, and it will be given.
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