Please turn with me in your Bibles to John chapter 9 and we will begin at the first verse. John writes, ‘As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘It was not that this man sinned or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed 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.’
And having said these things, he spit on the ground and made mud with the saliva. Then he anointed the man’s eyes with the mud and said to him, ‘Go wash in the pool of Salom,’ which means sent. So he went and washed and came back seeing. The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar were saying, ‘Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?’ Some said, ‘It is he.’ Others said, ‘No, but he is like him.’ But he kept saying, ‘I am the man.’
So they said to him, ‘Then how were your eyes opened?’ He answered, ‘The man called Jesus made mud and anointed my eyes and said to me, ‘Go to Salom and wash,’ and I went and washed and received my sight.’ They said to him, ‘Where is he?’ And he said, ‘I do not know.’
They brought to the Pharisees this man who had formerly been blind. Now it was a Sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. So 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.’ Some of the Pharisees said, ‘This man is not from God,’ referring to Jesus, ‘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.
So they said again to the blind man, ‘What do you say about him since he has opened your eyes?’ And he said, ‘He is a prophet.’ Now 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 how he sees now we do not know, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him. He is of age. He will speak for himself.’
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. Therefore, his parents said, ‘He is of age. Ask him.’
So 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.’ He answered, ‘Whether he is a sinner, I do not know. 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?’ And 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, ‘Why, this is an amazing thing. You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does his will, God listens to him. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.’
They answered him, ‘You were born in utter sin, and would you teach us?’ And they cast him out.
And Jesus heard that they had cast him out. And having found him, he said, ‘Do you believe in the Son of Man?’ He answered, ‘And who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?’ Jesus said to him, ‘You have seen him, and it is he who is speaking to you.’ He said, ‘Lord, I believe.’ And he worshiped him.
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray. Heavenly Father, you’ve given us your word as a guide, as a means of correction and training in righteousness. You have given us your word filled with examples of those who have gone before us in faith and in the faith. Help us to hear you speak and to see the works of your hands in their lives so that we may better and more easily recognize your work in our own. We pray this in the name of Jesus. Amen.
So after recognizing the Lord’s providential hand upon the life of this man born blind, we next consider the man himself and his response to the miraculous work of Christ upon and within his life. Although his name is never provided, John does give us a number of details that help to create a fuller picture about who this anonymous man was and what his life was probably like.
The first detail is found in verse two. When the disciples asked Jesus, ‘Rabbi, who sinned? This man or his parents that he was born blind?’ Now, their question should cause us all to wonder, how did they know? How did the disciples know that the man was born blind? I mean, apparently, I guess the man and his story were well known enough that even Jesus’s Galilean followers knew about it. Maybe he possessed a degree of notoriety because of the origin of his situation, being born blind.
The second detail was his occupation, which is recorded as being a beggar. But although the law of Moses forbade the mistreatment and exploitation of the poor and commanded that the Israelites should provide for the sojourners, widows, and orphans that were living within their midst, the law did not actually prescribe any special care or consideration for people in such dire circumstances that they depended on begging for their provision. Instead, a person that fell into beggary was considered to be under the judgment of God. It was taken to be a sign of their wickedness.
The psalmist wrote, ‘I have been young and now am old. Yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken or his children begging for bread,’ thereby associating begging with a sense of wickedness and as being the consequence of sin. During the first century, the Jewish attitude towards beggars was summed up in an apocryphal book called The Wisdom of Ben Sirak, which writes, ‘My son, lead not a beggar’s life, for better it is to die than to beg. The life of him that dependeth on another man’s table is not to be counted for a life, for he polluted himself with other men’s meat. But a wise man well nurtured will be whereof. Begging is sweet in the mouth of the shameless. But in his belly there shall burn a fire.’
You see, the common Jewish attitude during the life of Jesus was that it was better to die than be a beggar. That being dependent on others was not a worthwhile life because the dependent would become spiritually polluted or corrupted by the sins of their benefactor. People who were found begging were considered to be personally profitable or enjoyable were without shame because they chose it as a lifestyle. While they might enjoy a present benefit, they would surely come to regret it and suffer for it in the future.
But those attitudes are not what our Christian attitude towards begging or beggars ought to be. We should consider and remember that beggars are our neighbors, and so we should love them. We should be merciful and kind towards them. We should be charitable towards them and help them as far as we are able. We should be following the example of Jesus here and of Peter and John in Acts three.
Christians should work to help people in need to prevent them from reaching such desperate need that they have to resort to begging. Meanwhile, the gospels testify that the practice of begging was widespread and prevalent within and around every major city in first-century Judea, really because there was no social network of support and because the Roman taxation had so impoverished the nation. So this blind beggar was not begging by choice but out of utter desperation.
He was living out on the furthest fringe of society. He would have been ostracized by everyone. And as a blind man, he likely would not have even been allowed into the fellowship of the synagogue. But he may have been allowed, at least, to come as close as the court of the Gentiles. Socially, he was probably considered somewhere around a leper. He could expect no kindness from anyone. Everyone would be presuming and assuming that he was wicked and an unclean sinner because of his affliction.
He would have been publicly visible but only as an object of either pity or revulsion, while the man himself, the person, would remain virtually unseen. Such a tragedy. The third detail is the man’s age. Although it’s not specifically stated, there are two points that help us to be confident and understand that the man is really a younger adult. The first being the fact that both of his parents were alive and present, and the second was their testimony telling the Pharisees to ask him; he is of age and he will speak for himself.
So he was a younger teenager, probably a man between the ages of 13 and 15 because otherwise, there would not have been any need to mention his legal status or age unless he seemed so young. And that fourth detail also relates to his age because the responses to his healing, where people didn’t recognize him as the same person or disbelieved in the story of his blindness, together implies that he was not considered a credible witness, like most women and children were not.
All of these details produce a picture of an unfortunate person struggling to survive—a young man, barely an adult, who had grown up without even having the hope of hope. But when Jesus saw this blind man and spoke to him, that man experienced a kindness that he had forever been denied. And when the man heard Jesus’s command to go wash in the pool of Salom, he obeyed and went, filled with this hope that he had never before dreamed of or imagined.
But how did he respond to this miraculous miracle, this wondrous miracle that Jesus did? And how did the people around him react? The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar were saying, ‘Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?’ Some said, ‘It is he.’ Others said, ‘No, but he is like him.’ He just kept on saying, ‘I am the man. It was me.’
See, people doubted the miracle. They questioned whether or not he had even been blind at all. They thought perhaps he was an impostor or a fraud. And when they asked him how the miracle happened, they did not like his answer. When he told them plainly, ‘The man called Jesus made mud and anointed my eyes and said, ‘Go to Salom and wash,” Jesus put mud on his eyes, told him to go wash. There’s nothing fancy about this. It wasn’t showy.
Then they asked him, ‘Where did Jesus go afterwards?’ But he didn’t know. I mean, it is pretty unreasonable to assume or expect that a blind man would know where somebody else has gone to. But it also seems reasonable to expect that a miracle worker would want to stick around and see his handiwork.
So clearly, the people did not know what to think about this formerly blind man. So they went ahead and took him to the experts. They brought him before the Pharisees, the people with expert knowledge and understanding about scripture and the law of Moses, to be judged by them. When the Pharisees interrogated this young man, he gave them the same answer. He put mud on my eyes; I washed, and I saved.
But the Pharisees were more interested in the healer, in Jesus, than in the man healed. They were more concerned about what Jesus did than about this young man who had experienced such a wonderful miracle, especially after they learned that it happened on a Sabbath. Deliberating amongst themselves and ignoring this young man before them, the Pharisees debated the subject of Jesus once again. Where some of the Pharisees said, ‘This man Jesus 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?’
See, the Pharisees were not of one mind concerning Jesus. Some of them were beginning to believe him and to believe in him, but few of them were willing to openly admit it. And now we begin to see why. Because the Pharisees asked the man, ‘What do you say about him, since he opened your eyes?’ They asked this young man, someone who possessed far less theological knowledge than them, for his opinion about Jesus.
And since his lack of knowledge was supplemented by this wonderful experience, he was able to confidently answer them, ‘He is a prophet,’ answering the Pharisees. This man made a credible profession of faith about Jesus. He demonstrated a degree of understanding that they did not yet have.
While his answer was based upon the experience of faith, in part rather than just his Bible knowledge, the foundation that he would have had from the scriptures surely formed the lens that interpreted his experience. This man did not know Jesus ginosco, but he did experience Jesus. And earnest faith, a pasto, was already growing within him. Because when Jesus told this blind man to go wash, he trusted Christ’s word and obeyed his command even though he had no rational reason to do so except for faith. This is evidence.
The Holy Spirit was already working within the blind man, giving him the faith necessary to believe and obey Jesus against all worldly wisdom. Jesus just simply walked into this man’s life and found that the soil of his heart was already prepared and ready for him by God. So both his healing and his regeneration are examples of this miraculous and providential work that Christ was sent into the world to do by God our Father.
But these Jewish leaders and the elite did not believe the man or his story. They didn’t believe that he was even born blind. So they summoned his parents to confirm it and asked him, ‘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 how he sees now, we do not know. Nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him.’
See, the testimony of his parents should have removed the Pharisees doubts about the young man, but their answer was problematic for their son. John provides us a parenthetical here explaining that his parents said these things because they feared the Jews. For the Jews had already agreed that anyone who should confess Jesus to be the Christ, he was to be put out of the synagogue.
It was becoming socially dangerous to express a positive opinion about Jesus. Confessing Jesus as anything more than just a rabbi—saying that he was a prophet or the Christ—was something that they thought deserved immediate excommunication. Because a person who’s put out of the synagogue did not merely become a social pariah; they were total outcasts, culturally executed as far as everyone was concerned.
Being put out of the synagogue was the worst thing that could happen to a Jew because being Jewish was their core identity. It was ethnicity and faith. Being put out of the synagogue removed them from fellowship with the Lord and with God’s people, and they lost access to their spiritual hope. As an excommunicated Jew, as far as the Gentiles were concerned, they were still a Jew. So they were utterly alone, cut off from their family, their friends, and their faith.
So it is understandable why a person might not want to risk that. No one wants to risk losing everything and abandoning all that they have and know for some unproven, unfounded hope. Even if some of the Jews thought that Jesus might be who he said he was, they didn’t think the odds were in their favor. And sadly, that seems to have been the opinion of this young man’s parents.
They were more concerned with their own social standing, their place within society, than with positively responding to what Jesus had done for their son. Instead of standing with their son, they cut him loose and socially abandoned him because they did not want to be associated with him or his profession of faith in Jesus.
See, people were already disassociating from friends and family when they came to faith in Jesus Christ 2,000 years ago. So it should not be any wonder that more often than not this still happens to Christians today. However, then as now, it is important for us to recognize, understand, and remember that when we come to Christ, when we begin to better obey him, when we are being conformed to his image, away from the image of the world through the renewing of our minds, those people who belong to the world in this present age are the ones who step away from us.
As we become more Christlike and sanctified, the holiness that is growing within us repels the worldly wicked; they abandon us. We do not abandon them. Although they may abandon or forsake their existing relationship with us because we don’t really belong together, we do not have the luxury to abandon them. They continue to remain a field for us to evangelize for Christ.
Yet even then, we should not close the door on them. Any of y’all remember those old hotel rooms where you have doors that run between the two rooms—one on one side and one on the other? Their door, the door to their room may be closed, but we should still leave our door open so that when Christ calls them to himself, they can open that door and find us still here, ready and waiting to welcome them back.
So after confirming the truth of his blindness with his parents, the Pharisees turned their attention back to this young man. They commanded him, ‘Give glory to God,’ because we know that this man is a sinner. See, they rightly encouraged him to give the Lord glory for the wonderful miracle, but then they wrongfully and unjustly passed judgment against Jesus, someone who was not even there, naming him a sinner.
Yet this man stood confidently on his own, alone without anyone’s support. He asserted what he believed and knew to be the truth about Jesus Christ. He answered the Pharisees, ‘Whether Jesus is a sinner, I do not know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.’
But they continued to badger him, pressing him and pushing him, demanding to know what he did to you? How did he open your eyes? So the man started to get confused. I mean, how was he to know how? I mean, if he knew how Jesus gave him sight, then don’t you think he’d be showing or helping other people to see?
Or maybe since he had already told them his story several times, maybe he thought that they were actually starting to believe him and wanted to tell it again so they could write it down. So he turned around and questioned them, passing back, asking about their intention, saying, ‘I’ve told you already, but you didn’t listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?’
But he was not actually being sarcastic. I think he was being earnest with his question. And this is just more evidence of his regeneration, of having received the gift of faith.
But their response to him, their response to this young man says far more about them than it does about us. They reviled him, but we’ll consider their response more next week. This young man demonstrated a degree of understanding that greatly exceeded the wisdom of the wise when he answered their scorn, declaring, ‘Why, this is an amazing thing. You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes.’
We all know that God does not listen to sinners, but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does his will, God listens to him. He rebuked the Pharisees’ disbelief. He pointed out how they were missing, ignoring, or suppressing the obvious truth that only the most godly person—only someone sent by the Lord and empowered by him—could do what Jesus was doing.
Then he pointed out the greatest evidence affirming the miracle’s origin. He goes to scripture, saying, ‘Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.’
See, that fact should have caused these religious leaders to stop, think, and remember because the young man was correct. You can check for yourself and search your Bible, and you will find not another example of a man that was born blind receiving sight. Similar examples are of sight being restored, not sight being originally given.
So this miracle was not actually a wondrous healing; it was a miracle of creation. Jesus did something new and it was even different from all the other miracles he did as well. And since the man was speaking to a group of Pharisees—men who believed in the resurrection, who believed the word of God given to the prophets, and who were hoping for a Messiah—their minds should have turned to the prophet Isaiah because Isaiah wrote several relevant prophecies concerning the day of Israel’s deliverance when the Christ would come.
In chapter 29, he wrote, ‘In that day the deaf shall hear the words of a book, and out of their gloom and darkness, the eyes of the blind shall see.’ In chapter 35, ‘Say to those who have an anxious heart, Be strong and fear not. Behold, your God will come with vengeance, with the recompense of God. He will come and save you. And then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute sing for joy.’
We’ll also be wise to recall from Matthew’s gospel Jesus’s response to the envoys sent from John the Baptist, asking him whether he truly is the Christ. Jesus answered them, ‘Go and tell John what you see and hear. The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk. Lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not offended by me.’
So what the Pharisees should have recognized and understood is that all the miracles Jesus was doing were evidence that he is the Christ. The miracles were fulfilling divine prophecy. But the Pharisees, who should have known best, could not see it. But this uneducated young man who grew up blind saw the truth that they could not see. Instead, they proved themselves to be that other group of people that Isaiah was sent to, the ones who God said, ‘Go and say to this people, keep on hearing, but do not understand. Keep on seeing, but do not perceive. Make the heart of this people dull and their ears heavy, and blind their eyes, lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.’
Because although they could see with their eyes, the Pharisees were spiritually blind. So they judged and condemned this young man, saying, ‘You were born in utter sin, and you would teach us?’ They excommunicated him. They cast him out of the synagogue, exiling him from the community of Jewish fellowship. He was further away now than he was when he was blind. Even his parents had disowned him. He was utterly alone.
But then Jesus heard that the young man had been cast out. Jesus sought him out and asked him, ‘Do you believe in the Son of Man?’ The young man answered Jesus, ‘And who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?’
See, although everyone in the day and age knew about and heard about a coming Messiah, whether or not they actually believed in him, this man probably didn’t understand very much about him. The narrative suggests that he did not immediately recognize Jesus as the man who healed him because he’d never seen him before. Jesus said to him, ‘You have seen him, and it is he who is speaking to you.’
Suddenly, understanding flooded the young man’s mind. What he first knew by faith was now confirmed by sight. His spirit recognized his savior and healer. And though blind, he had believed and trusted Jesus. After he received the gift of sight, he believed it even more strongly because his belief and hope were proven true.
His faith gave him the confidence to stand firm in front of those who stubbornly refused to believe his testimony or to believe in the man who had healed him. Now, when he was confronted again by the living Christ, he was asked, ‘Do you believe?’ and he said, ‘Lord, I believe.’ And he worshiped him.
This formerly blind man confessed his faith and then responded to Christ and what he had done for him by worshiping him. And even though the conviction of his faith had already cost him everything, he worshiped and praised God in joy and with gratitude because it also gave him everything.
Now, this formerly blind man’s story is a very good analogy for what a Christian’s spiritual experience is ordinarily like. Like him, we’re all born spiritually blind. We are so bound by our sin and held captive in darkness that we do not even know what light looks like. We’re completely helpless. We’re utterly unable to help ourselves because we do not even understand what it is that we need.
Like him, we were not looking for Jesus. We did not know that he could help us. We did not know where to find him. We did not know that we could even ask him for help. But like him, Jesus walked into our lives uninvited. His Holy Spirit worked upon us without asking for our permission first.
Then, like him, we were each faced with a choice. Ignore his command or obey him immediately and without question. Do we respond to him with a heart filled with hope, trusting him against all worldly reason? Do we respond with faith? Yes, I think we all here have responded with that faith because who can disobey the voice of our king, especially when he gives us the ability and desire to do what he commands?
Then, once we were healed like he was, once we were changed and made unrecognizable to those around us, what did we do? And how did we each react? Our right response as Christians should be to tell others about what Jesus has done for us. We should not be shy about proclaiming the wonder of his miraculous power.
And like him, we cannot answer either how or why Jesus chose to make us whole. But we can remain steadfast and sure, confident in what he has done for us, done to us because it is our testimony. It happened to us. It’s one of the few things in life that we can really be sure about.
And then, when those around us revile us for our faith in Jesus as the Pharisees did to him, how should we respond to them? Like him, we remain steadfast, confident, and sure. Like him, we should answer their charges and accusations with the truth that Jesus has changed us and that it has nothing to do with who we are or what we’ve done, and that it is really in spite of who we are and all that we have done.
And like him, we should tell them about Jesus and offer to help them become disciples of Christ, to lead them to follow him. Like him, even when we are persecuted and cast out for our faith in Christ, even when our friends and family abandon us because we are standing with and for the truth of God, we may remain steadfast in hope and joy because we know that Christ will come for us. We know.
And so we can stand confident in the expectation that everyone who believes and confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord before the world will be acknowledged by him, by Jesus, before our Father in heaven. And we will be forgiven of our sins and justified by the blood of Jesus Christ.
But we also know that everyone who denies Christ to the world, everyone who denies that they belong to him, everyone who denies that the Lord is God, everyone who denies that Jesus is will be denied by Christ before his Father in heaven and will be judged and condemned by their own sinfulness.
So, do you believe in the Son of Man? Do you believe in, is your whole faith and confidence placed in Jesus Christ, the Son of God and God the Son? Amen.