Born Blind

Jesus had just walked out of the temple with stones in the air behind Him (John 8:59). John’s next words are simply that as He went along, He saw a man who’d been blind since birth (John 9:1). John doesn’t tell us whether it was the same day. He tells us what Jesus saw.

John 9:1 — He saw him

Notice who sees whom. The man couldn’t see Jesus. He didn’t call out to Him like Bartimaeus did (Mark 10:46-47). He didn’t ask for anything. As far as we’re told, he didn’t even know Jesus was there. Jesus saw him.

That’s how grace always starts. Before Nathanael came, Jesus had already seen him under the fig tree (John 1:48). Before Zacchaeus climbed down, Jesus had already stopped under his tree and called him by name (Luke 19:5). Any love we have for Him started with His love for us (1 John 4:19). No blind man ever went looking for the Light. The Light comes to him.

John 9:2 — Whose fault?

The disciples saw him too, but they saw a theology question. They asked Jesus whose sin had caused it, the man’s own or his parents’, since he’d been born that way (John 9:2).

It’s an old question, and it isn’t a stupid one. Sin did bring suffering into the world. Death came in through one man, and the whole creation has been groaning ever since (Romans 5:12, 8:20-22). And sometimes God does chasten a particular sin with sickness. Jesus warned the man He healed at the pool to stop sinning, or something worse might come on him (John 5:14). Paul told the Corinthians some of them were sick and some had died because of how they treated the Lord’s Supper (1 Corinthians 11:30).

But the disciples turned that into a rule. If a man suffers, somebody must’ve done something. That was the mistake Job’s friends made. They were sure the innocent never perish, and they spent chapters accusing a man God Himself called blameless (Job 4:7-8, 1:8). The disciples had a second question tucked in there, too. Can a man be punished for his father’s sin? God had said He visits iniquity on the children of those who hate Him, but He’d also said each man dies for his own sin, not his father’s (Exodus 20:5) (Ezekiel 18:20).

Men still do this. A baby is born with a defect, and somebody starts hunting for the sin behind it. A man gets cancer, and his friends wonder what he did. Jesus shuts that whole line of thinking down.

John 9:3 — Neither

He told them it wasn’t because of this man’s sin, and it wasn’t because of his parents’. It was so God’s works could be put on display in him (John 9:3).

Jesus wasn’t saying the man and his parents were sinless. Everybody’s a sinner (Romans 3:23). He was saying this blindness wasn’t payback. It had a purpose, and the purpose was God’s.

Sit with that. This man had spent every day of his life in the dark. He’d never seen his mother’s face. He’d sat by the road begging while other men walked to work. And God wasn’t caught off guard by any of it. The blindness wasn’t a problem God had been waiting for a chance to fix. It wasn’t plan B. God had ordained it before the man drew his first breath, so that on this day, on this road, the Son of God would open his eyes.

God says it plainly to Moses. He’s the One who makes a man mute or deaf, seeing or blind (Exodus 4:11). Every one of this man’s days was written in God’s book before one of them came to be (Psalm 139:16). There’s nothing He made without a purpose for it (Proverbs 16:4). He runs everything by His own plan, and everything that exists comes from Him and is headed back to His glory (Ephesians 1:11) (Romans 11:36).

And God didn’t need anybody’s permission or help to do it. He didn’t need the man to have enough faith, or the disciples to have the right theology, or the parents to have prayed harder. He’d decreed the blindness, and He’d decreed the healing, and both came to pass exactly when He said.

Jesus would say almost the same thing about Lazarus. That sickness wasn’t going to end in death. It was for the glory of God, so the Son would be glorified through it (John 11:4). And God would tell Paul He was leaving the thorn right where it was, because His strength shows best where Paul was weakest (2 Corinthians 12:7-9). Sometimes God gets glory by removing the trouble. Sometimes He gets glory by leaving it. Either way, it’s His hand, and it’s never wasted.

If you’re carrying something you were born with, or something that landed on you without any sin you can point to, don’t let anybody tell you it’s an accident. God’s purpose is in it. You may not see the end of it in this life. This man waited decades for his.

John 9:4-5 — While it’s day

Then Jesus told them that they had to work the works of the One who sent Him while it was day. Night was coming, and then the working would stop. As long as He was in the world, He was the light of the world (John 9:4-5).

Notice He didn’t say the work was His alone. The Son includes His men in His Father’s work. That isn’t because the Father needs help. It’s because He’s pleased to use them. He prepared good works ahead of time for His people to walk in (Ephesians 2:10). The works are already appointed. The only question is whether a man will be found doing them.

And the day is short. For Jesus, the night was the cross and His going back to the Father. His time to walk the roads of Judea and open blind eyes had an end on it. For you, the night is the end of your life, when the time to work is over (Ecclesiastes 9:10). Moses asked God to teach His people to count their days so they’d grow wise (Psalm 90:12). God doesn’t need your work. He’s given you a few hours of daylight to do it anyway.

Jesus had already told the crowds in the temple He was the light of the world (John 8:12). Now He was about to prove it on a man who’d never seen light at all.

John 9:6-7 — Mud and the pool called Sent

Then He spit on the ground, made mud with the spit, and smeared it on the man’s eyes. He told him to go wash in the pool of Siloam. John stops to translate the name for us: it means Sent. So the man went, washed, and came back seeing (John 9:6-7).

Why mud? Jesus didn’t need it. He healed Bartimaeus with a word (Mark 10:52). He healed the official’s son from miles away (John 4:50). But He chose to use means here, and the means tell us something. When God first made man, He formed him from the dust of the ground (Genesis 2:7). Irenaeus, writing around the year 180, saw the same hand at work here: the Creator who’d shaped Adam out of the dirt took dirt again and finished what this man’s eyes were lacking (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5.15.2). John doesn’t spell that out, so don’t build a doctrine on it. But it fits. The One standing on the road with mud on His fingers is the One who made eyes in the first place (Psalm 94:9).

Then He sent the man to wash. That’s a lot like what happened with Naaman. Elisha didn’t even come out to meet him. He just told him to go wash in the Jordan seven times. Naaman almost went home angry, but when he finally obeyed, he came up clean (2 Kings 5:10-14). There was nothing in the Jordan, and there was nothing in Siloam. The power was in the word of the One who sent them.

And look at the name John wants us to notice. Sent. All through this Gospel, Jesus has been the One the Father sent (John 3:17, 17:3). The blind man went to a pool named Sent, at the word of the Sent One, and came back with eyes. Isaiah had once warned that Israel rejected the gently flowing waters of Shiloah, the same water system, and trusted kings instead of the Lord (Isaiah 8:6). Here was the true Sent One, and most of Jerusalem was rejecting Him too.

The prophets said the day was coming when the eyes of the blind would be opened, when God’s Servant would open blind eyes and bring prisoners out of the dark (Isaiah 35:5, 42:7) (Psalm 146:8). When John the Baptist sent to ask if Jesus was the One, Jesus pointed to exactly this (Matthew 11:5). This was the Messiah’s work, and only God can do it.

John 9:8-12 — Is this the man?

Now the neighbors couldn’t agree. The people who’d seen him begging for years asked if this was the man who used to sit and beg. Some said it was. Others said no, it just looked like him. He kept telling them he was the one (John 9:8-9).

Those words can sound like Jesus’ claim from the day before, when He said He was before Abraham (John 8:58). They aren’t. On this man’s lips they just mean he’s the beggar they already knew. No divine claim here. Just a healed man refusing to deny who he is.

That’s what a real work of God does to a man. The people who knew him best could hardly recognize him. Christ makes a man new from the inside out (2 Corinthians 5:17). If the men who’ve known you for years can’t see any difference, ask yourself whether anything has really happened.

So they asked him how his eyes were opened. He just told them what happened. The Man they call Jesus made mud, put it on his eyes, and told him to go to Siloam and wash. He went, he washed, and now he could see (John 9:10-11).

He didn’t preach a sermon. He didn’t explain the theology. He told them what Jesus did and what happened to him. That’s all a witness is. And when they asked where Jesus was, he said he didn’t know (John 9:12).

He didn’t know much yet. He knew Jesus’ name, and he knew his eyes worked. That’s it. He’d never even seen Jesus’ face, because he was still blind when Jesus sent him away. But he wasn’t going to deny what had happened to him. John will show us his sight growing, step by step, until he’s on his knees in front of the One who opened his eyes (John 9:17, 33, 38). Light came to him before he understood it. That’s how it is with every man God saves. The God who made light on the first day is the One who turns the lights on in a man’s heart, so he sees God’s glory in Christ (2 Corinthians 4:6). Christ sends His word to open men’s eyes and turn them from darkness to light (Acts 26:18). A man doesn’t open his own eyes. He just finds one day that he can see.

Next, the neighbors bring him to the Pharisees, and things get harder for him.