1As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. 2And 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. 4We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. 5As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” 6Having 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.
8The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar were saying, “Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?” 9Some said, “It is he.” Others said, “No, but he is like him.” He kept saying, “I am the man.” 10So they said to him, “Then how were your eyes opened?” 11He 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.” 12They said to him, “Where is he?” He said, “I do not know.” 13They 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. 15So 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.” 16Some 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. 17So 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.”
18The 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 19and asked them, “Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?” 20His parents answered, “We know that this is our son and that he was born blind. 21But 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. 23Therefore his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.”)
24So 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.” 25He answered, “Whether he is a sinner I do not know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” 26They said to him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” 27He 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.” 30The man answered, “Why, this is an amazing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. 31We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does his will, God listens to him. 32Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a man born blind. 33If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” 34They answered him, “You were born in utter sin, and would you teach us?” And they cast him out.
35Jesus heard that they had cast him out, and having found him he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” 36He answered, “And who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?” 37Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and it is he who is speaking to you.” 38He said, “Lord, I believe,” and he worshiped him. 39Jesus said, “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.” 40Some of the Pharisees near him heard these things, and said to him, “Are we also blind?” 41Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your guilt remains.
John 9
1As he passed by, [Jesus] saw a man blind from birth.
Our story begins with a man born blind.
It’s hard to imagine a worse story. A mother and father wait with joy for the arrival of their little child. The pregnancy is long, and sometimes scary. Labor is hard and painful. Yet, tears of joy fill their eyes as finally, their little baby boy greets them with those sweetest cries of life.
How long did it take for those tears of joy to be touched with sorrow? How long did they wait until their son opened his eyes? How long did it take for the realization to hit them that their precious baby boy still could not see? I don’t know, but you can imagine the pain and horror.
How did they respond to the reactions of those around them? It is not for nothing that the disciples present only two options for the cause of this sorrow in the next verse. It was the concensus of the culture at large. Either the blind man is at fault, or his parents are at fault.
What did their nosy, slightly annoying neighbour say? What did their local rabbi tell them? How did their friends treat them after that? What feelings must have built up in their hearts as they encountered all of this? Their social status in the gutter. Their son, day by day as he grew, surely it became more fixed in the father’s mind that his would be a beggar at best. His mother, what was in her heart, as it began to dawn on her that her son would never marry?
What of the boy… then the man himself? An inconvenience. A stump on the side of the road. A location people could visit to feel better about themselves for the price of a few copper coins in the poor beggar’s cup.
How could his story possibly be anything but bad?
Jesus saw him. Jesus saw. God enfleshed, walking on a dusty road, in a moment in time, saw this man. Others saw him, but not, as we will see, as Jesus saw him.
2And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
“Who sinned?” What are we to make of such a question? Does it sound reasonable to you, or harsh and evil?
Do you think that people today think this way? When someone is born with a defect like this, or something goes wrong for someone, or a tower falls and crushes a man – do people today think as the disciples do?
In that day, if some suffering or misfortune befell you, someone would be to blame for doing something. Bad things didn’t just happen, they happened to bad people, and bad people were people who did specifically bad things. The bad person could be you, it could be your parents, it could be your weird uncle Albert who visits on weekends – but somewhere somehow somebody is the cause of this specific pain.
Like Job’s friends, people operate of the assumption of just deserts – people get what they deserve, and strictly what they deserve. Life is a meritocracy, and God is a most exacting Judge. The pointing finger, “It’s you!” gets projected back onto God. What is the assumption about God behind the question, “Who sinned that this man was born blind?” What is God full of?
God is full of wrath and judgement. God is bursting at the seems with anger, and it’s only His love and grace that hold it back. Let His love and grace fail for one moment, and what God is truly like is a wrathful judge, eager to punish every infraction.
There is even a worse picture of what God is like. The Father is full of wrath and anger, and it’s only the Son who is holding Him back. Jesus is gracious and loving, and He can just barely hold back the Father from going hellish by dying in the place of sinners. Underlying the question, “Who sinned,” is a horrible, alien assumption about God’s nature.
Throughout the Old Testament, it is not God’s love and mercy that is foreign to Him. His wrath is described as alien to His nature! He must be stirred up to anger. He must be provoked to wrath. In Himself, though, He is bursting with gracious, steadfast love! What is most natural to God? Love. His wrath is a response to evil.
There are some who will say, “God is holy! We are sinners! God would be perfectly just casting us all to hell this very second. He owes no one mercy or grace. It’s a miracle that He saves anyone!” Of course, there is truth in this. In Adam, all die. In Adam, we are all under God’s wrath, condemned in our unbelief, without God and without hope in the world. Children of wrath. However, such an answer does not fundamentally change the vision of God underneath the disciples’ question. In this model, God is still imagined to be brimming with wrath. This cannot stand!
John, at the start of His Gospel, says of God that
No one has ever seen God; God the only Son, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known. . . . And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
John 1:18, 14
John tells us at the start that Jesus is very different from what we imagine God to be. He wants our natural view of God to be completely unended and transformed as we encounter Jesus, God enfleshed, in his Gospel. Here, at the start of John 9, is no exception!
3Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.
In a single remark, like the flick of His hand to shoo a gnat, Jesus dismisses the best theodicy mankind has ever imagined. To be sure, in other places, Jesus focuses on the reality of sin, and the finality of God’s judgement (Luke 13). Here, however, He drives down deeper than any other theologian or philosopher ever could. He gives the answer for evil that only God could give.
He isn’t sending good vibes the blind man’s way. He’s not uncertain of His promise – “that the works of God might be displayed in him.” How many guarantee what Jesus does here, and betray the heart of God with lies! “You would have been healed, but your faith was too weak.” What torturous theology is that! That mere men would have God beholden to the whims and whines and profit of false prophets! How horrible that some kneel down to the blind man, tell him that if only he believed enough he would be healed. Dubiously virtue-signaling snakes! Slithering into the garden of God works, hissing lies about the being of God, promising what they have been given no permission to guarantee. Acting as if God did not intend to bring people through death to everlasting life.
It is the inverse of the question, “Who sinned?” “You did something to come into this condition. Now God expects you to do something to get out of it.” Theodicy of demons!
Jesus is not an arrogant man in his hubris making excuses for a false idol of a God. Jesus is God. When He speaks to suffering, He speaks as only God can.
“Why was this man born blind?” “So that God can be glorified now.”
How can Jesus say this to a man blind from birth? If a man meets with some misfortune, and the next hour the train he would have taken is derailed and everyone on it dies, people say “How fortunate that you broke your leg, and your life was spared! Maybe that is why you broke your leg.” Men assuage their fears of death with trifles of providence such as these.
How can Jesus, though, tell a man who has been blind from birth that his blindness has a purpose? Jesus isn’t just saying, “How fortunate that here’s this blind man, and how fortunate I came across him and saw him, so that now I can heal him!” No! It is not “Why is this man blind?” but, “Why is this man blind from birth?”
How can Jesus say that there is purpose here in this man’s blindness? He authored the man’s story. Out of the lump of sinful humanity, Jesus took this man, and wove every day of his life toward this moment – when He Himself would step onto the pages of the blindman’s story and write his eucatastrophe!
Unlike merely human philosophers and theologians, Jesus can be an answer to evil unlike any other. There is no secret plaque somewhere up in heaven with the answer to the problem of evil and suffering written on it. There is no treasure hunt God has set up for men and women to struggle their way towards the hidden answer to suffering. God’s answer is to evil is not a plaque, a textbook answer, or a philosophical puzzle. It is a Person! Himself, His Son! In every life, where His Son is trusted and known, this answer is wrung out over a lifetime and unto the entrance into eternity.
We take God’s hard answer and make it sound like a pat answer. He sets about a long slow answering, but we’re after a quick fix. His answer insists on being lived out over time and into the particulars. We act as if just saying the right words makes it so. God’s answer involves changing you into a different kind of person. But we act as if some truth, principle, strategy, or perspective might simply be incorporated into who we already are. God personalizes his answer on hearts with an uncanny flexibility. But we turn it into a formula: ‘If you just believe x. If you just do y. If you just remember z.’ No important truth ever contains the word ‘just’ in the punch line.”
David powlison, God’s grace in your suffering
This blind man’s story does not just go whoopty-doo-perfectly after his healing. One day he still has to die. On the same day of his healing, he is forsaken by his own parents (9:18-23), and ostracized from society for defending his healer (9:34).
Can you imagine him standing there after being cast out. Shaken by the events of the day, standing in the crowd, slightly dazed, uncertain of what to do. Eventually, the crowd who recognized him and had been there for the day’s events begin to fade away. People pass him without recognizing or understanding what had just happened. He stands alone, able to see for the first time in his life, but directionless and friendless.
Then a man comes up to him. Quite ordinary looking. The man says something like, “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” Perhaps the formerly blind man nodded, as the man continued and used a strange yet familiar title. A title he must have heard from what he listened to during his long sits by the synagogue. “Do you believe in the Son of Man?”
Jesus finds the man who was cast out. He pursues and seeks this man who everyone else thought was utterly forsaken of by God. This man, for whom his life seemed nothing more than a tragedy. This man, who lived with a condition for which millions of babies are murdered for having in our day, is found by Jesus.
Jesus, to the man’s question, “Who is He, that I may believe?” says, plainly and without any shadow of unclarity, “You have seen Him, and He is speaking to you.”
If Jesus had just healed him, gratitude – even a life-full of gratitude – would have been a sufficient response. This man doesn’t thank Jesus though. No, he sees in Jesus something more than a healer. He sees in Jesus the God who authored his story. The Author who did not just ordain His healing, but who ordained his blindness for a purpose – that He could see His God! He has met his God, the God who stands before Him enfleshed. Who allows His spit to mix with earth so that even he can see God.
He says, “Lord, I believe!” Then he falls down, and worships Him.
My wife and I wept after all three of our miscarriages. I still weep on occasions. Now, they aren’t tears of unprocessed grief. They are tears from the scars of death and misery. I think that we are all tempted to imagine that there could not possibly be any good ending to the tragedies of our lives. There comes a time when he all feel, “I can’t do this, God.” My little ones, far too young to understand anything, lost to us.
For that reason, I cry whenever I read the following conversation. It’s from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers. Frodo and Sam are on their way to Mount Doom. They face darkness and death all around them. Despair threatens to overtake them at every moment. In their darkest moment at that point in the story, Tolkien crafts this conversation…
FRODO: I can’t do this, Sam.
SAM: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?
But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.
FRODO: What are we holding on to, Sam?
We’re in a good story. We are in the story where God Himself steps into our misery. That He didn’t just leave us, or send someone else to possibly help us out of death. He came Himself, as an embryo. His chubby feet walked on the dusty streets of Bethlehem. His hands and feet were nailed to the cross, and His body was buried in the tomb. And when He rose, He rose as a man in the truest sense. And when He went to heaven, He went in all the fullness of grace and truth of Deity, having become like those He loves and is able to sympathize with in every sense.
Only the Christian has an answer to Sam’s question, “What are we holding on to?” For only the Christian has Christ, the One who Authors the story. Only we know what kind of a story we’re in. A great story. One that really matters. For we know the One who authored and entered the story.
Jesus steps onto the pages of the blindman’s story and says, “You’re in my story. I know you can’t see it right now, but I promise it’s a good one. I’ve come to make sure it is. Trust me.”
He steps onto the pages of all our stories, and says the same. “Trust me.”
How could anything good come of so much bad? How could God redeem blindness from birth? Children lost in the womb? The Fall of the human race into death, misery, and sin? “Trust me,” says Jesus.
He doesn’t just come along one day and try to do the best He can to fix things. He writes the calamity and the victory, the sin and the salvation. He permits the evil of men’s hearts to go so far and no further, so He can recover His Bride, and have the fullness of His body forever.
There is no better answer to evil and suffering and sin than this. The Person, Jesus Himself. Will you trust Him? For those who trust Him and love Him can be sure that He works all things together for their good. This was what the blind man saw that day. Jesus. Will you see Him?
