John 9, like the rest of John’s Gospel, is in one sense basically about  seeing.  The themes of sight, light and darkness run from the book’s prologue to its conclusion.  “In the beginning,” John states, was the Word – “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory… full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).  Later, in the 20th chapter, Jesus says to “doubting” Thomas: “Have you believed because you have seen me?  Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” (John 20:29).  John makes masterful use of these themes to layer irony upon irony in order to show to his audience the truth of Jesus’ claims.  For example, in John 3, Nicodemus come to Jesus at night – in the dark – to question him about his identity.  Standing face to face in the dark, Jesus responds by saying that “the light has come into the world” (3:19).  

When we come to chapter 9, then, and encounter “a man blind from birth,” we should not be surprised that this man comes to see Jesus (literally) as “the light of the world” (see 9:5) even as the Pharisees and other religious leaders remain in the dark.  In this powerful encounter with Christ, a man stigmatized by society for his disability – who was rejected by religious leaders as a “sinner” (see 9:34) – comes to see the truth and, in so doing, becomes himself a light bearing witness to the One who made him whole.  It is likely that the religious leaders never paid much attention to this man, disabled and poor, until his broken body became the site of God’s salvific and revelatory action in the world.  After this miraculous healing, the religious leaders basically put him on trial, disbelieving that “their” God would ever be concerned with someone so lowly (and sinful), especially on the Sabbath.  

Jesus’ concrete actions in response to the man’s situation call into question not only the self-righteous judgment of the religious leaders, but also the comfortable distance maintained by the disciples.  When they encounter this man in the city, they see it as an opportunity for theological reflection.  “Who sinned,” they want to know, “this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (9:2).  While their question regarding the relationship between sin and suffering is a good one (especially in that historical context), Jesus changes the nature of the conversation altogether.  The disciples want to speculate; Jesus decides to act – to welcome the man as a person and a child of God, to offer those unique gifts that he has been given to heal the man’s suffering, that the glory of God might be revealed.

John’s Gospel hinges on the reversal of sight and blindness, light and darkness, “ability” and “disability.”  It is precisely for this reason that Jesus says to the man, after he has seen Israel’s Messiah with his own eyes, that “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind” (9:39).

BY CHRIS LIU BEERS, PROGRAM ASSOCIATE

NC COUNCIL OF CHURCHES