You may remember that events in John’s Gospel usually have several levels of meaning, particularly the “signs” or miracles. There is the obvious surface meaning as at Cana, when Jesus turned water into wine to save the groom from the embarrassment of failing to provide enough wine for the marriage feast.

At another level, the turning of water to wine represented the superiority of the new wine of the Gospel over the old way of the law. Our passage this week is about Jesus healing a man born blind, but there is more to it than that.

There are stories in all four gospels in which Jesus restores the sight of a blind man. The other three are Mt. 9:27-31, Mark 10:46-52 and Luke 18:35-42. But the one in John 9 is the only one in which the person to be healed was afflicted at birth.

So that raises a controversial issue: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind” (9:1). In the Judaism of Jesus’ day, there was a general assumption that suffering was always the result of sin. The only question was, whose sin?

Some turned to Exodus 20:05 when Moses reported, “for I the Lord am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate me.”

Some Jews believed in prenatal sin – the possibility of sinning while still in the womb. When asked at what point in the embryo’s development was it capable of sin, the answer of Rabbi Judah was: “From the formation of the embryo.”

Another explanation was the belief in the preexistence of the soul, that before the creation of the world, all the souls of those who would ever live were already in a certain chamber waiting to enter into a body. They believed some bodies were evil and contaminated the souls (see Wisdom 8:19).

Who sinned?

When asked “Who sinned?” and caused the man’s blindness, Jesus said “No” to all of the explanations and said, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, that he was born blind, but that the works of God might be made manifest in him” (9:3).

On the one hand, he may mean that a person might come into this world marked to be blind so God may heal him as a sign. But neither here, nor in any other healing narratives in John, is this concept explained.

I rather believe that John is merely saying the infirmities of people are an opportunity to demonstrate the healing power of God. That is certainly true. Pain, hardship, sorrow and disappointment give us many opportunities to demonstrate God’s grace.

The healing was also an opportunity for Jesus to present himself: “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world” (9:5). Here we see Jesus going deeper than the superficial, to an even deeper level. Physical blindness is one thing, but spiritual blindness is much more damaging.

The Pharisees thought they could “see,” but although their eyes could see, their souls could not. Even worse than physical blindness then, is spiritual blindness. For example, although the Pharisees had all the proof that they needed, they could simply not see that Jesus was the healer of the man’s blindness.

The Pharisees could not see past the letter of the law. “This man is not from God,” they said, “for he does not keep the Sabbath.” Legally, they were right. The law forbids people from working on the Sabbath and Jesus clearly broke the laws. He put clay on the blind man’s eyes. Making clay was considered work.

Also included in these prohibitions were wearing sandals with nails on the Sabbath, cutting one’s fingernails and pulling out a hair from one’s beard. Jesus healed this man on the Sabbath and healing was also prohibited on the Sabbath. In all, there were 39 categories of work that were not allowed on the Sabbath.

Also blind?

The Pharisees saw only their rules, while Jesus saw the man and had compassion. At the end of the chapter, Jesus says, “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may be made blind.”

Some of the Pharisees nearby heard this and asked, “Are we also blind?”

Jesus replied, “If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your guilt remains” (9:39-41). Jesus is not condemning honest doubt, but self-satisfied prejudice.

This morning in my prayer time, I read these appropriate words by Barbara Brown Taylor: “Jesus stood at the center of the stage like a mirror in which all those around him saw themselves clearly for who they were. One way we Christians have avoided seeing our own reflections in the mirror is to pretend that this is a story about Romans and Jews.

“As long as they remain the villains, then we are off the hook – or so we think. Unfortunately, this is not a story that happened long ago in a land far away.”

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of Farm World. Readers with questions or comments for Rev. Althouse may write to him in care of this publication.