Ask Him

The neighbors couldn’t settle what had happened to the beggar, so they took him to the Pharisees (John 9:13). A man who’d been blind from birth could see. You’d think the only question left was who to thank.

John 9:14 — It was a Sabbath

Then John adds one line that turns the whole chapter. The day Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes was a Sabbath (John 9:14).

We’ve been here before. Back at the pool by the Sheep Gate, Jesus healed a man who’d been lying there thirty-eight years, and John told us that day was a Sabbath too (John 5:9). The leaders went after Jesus for it, and they kept going after Him (John 5:16). He’d already answered them in the temple. If they’d circumcise a boy on the Sabbath, why were they angry that He’d made a whole man well on it (John 7:23)?

Don’t think He picked Sabbaths by accident. Jesus never did anything by accident. He didn’t stumble into a calendar fight. He walked straight into it, more than once, because He’s the Lord of the Sabbath and He wanted that known (Mark 2:27-28). He’d already told them it’s lawful to do good on the Sabbath (Matthew 12:12). Opening a blind man’s eyes is about as good as it gets.

So what was the problem? By their rules, kneading mud was work, and healing a man who wasn’t dying could wait until sundown. God’s law did set the day apart for rest and worship (Exodus 20:8-11). But God never told Israel a man couldn’t be given eyes on His day. That was a fence men had built around the law, and they’d started guarding the fence harder than the law it was meant to protect (Mark 7:8). Jesus never broke the law of God. He broke their fences, and He did it on purpose.

John 9:15 — Tell us again

So the Pharisees asked him the same question the neighbors had asked. How did he get his sight? He gave them an even shorter answer than before. Jesus put mud on his eyes, he washed, and now he could see (John 9:15).

Notice he’s dropped details, not added them. He doesn’t embellish. He doesn’t make the story bigger to impress the committee. He just tells it again. A witness who’s telling the truth doesn’t need a new version every time somebody asks.

John 9:16 — Split down the middle

Then the room divided. Some of the Pharisees said this Man couldn’t be from God, because He didn’t keep the Sabbath. Others asked how a sinner could do signs like this. And they were split (John 9:16).

That split keeps showing up around Jesus. It happened in the temple at the feast, and it’ll happen again after He calls Himself the Good Shepherd (John 7:43, 10:19). He doesn’t leave a room the way He found it. Men are either drawn or pushed away, and nobody stays neutral for long.

Look at the first group’s argument, because it isn’t stupid on its face. God had told Israel that if a prophet worked a sign and then led them after other gods, they weren’t to listen to him, no matter how real the sign was (Deuteronomy 13:1-5). So the test was real. A sign isn’t enough on its own. What a man teaches matters. The trouble was their premise. They’d decided He broke God’s law when He’d only broken their rules. Start with a false premise and you can reason your way, step by careful step, to calling the Son of God a sinner.

The second group was closer. Nicodemus had said nearly the same thing the night he came to Jesus. Nobody could do these signs unless God was with him (John 3:2). That’s true as far as it goes. But it didn’t go far enough to make them stand up and say so. We’ll see why in a minute.

John 9:17 — He’s a prophet

So they turned back to the blind man. He was the one whose eyes had been opened. What did he say about this Man? He told them He was a prophet (John 9:17).

That’s further than he’d gone before. With the neighbors, Jesus was just a man people called Jesus (John 9:11). Now He’s a prophet. The Samaritan woman took the same step at the well. First a Jewish stranger, then a prophet, then maybe the Christ (John 4:19, 29). This man’s sight is growing, and it’ll keep growing until he calls Jesus Lord and worships Him (John 9:38).

He didn’t have it all yet. Prophet isn’t the whole truth about Jesus. But he said what he knew, and he said it in front of the men everybody else was scared of. And that was more than the scholars in the room were willing to say.

John 9:18-19 — Call the parents

Then John tells us the leaders didn’t believe he’d actually been blind and gained his sight, not until they called in his parents (John 9:18).

Think about that. They’d just questioned the man himself. The neighbors who’d watched him beg for years had brought him in. And the leaders’ first move was to doubt the miracle happened at all. That’s what unbelief does. It doesn’t need more evidence. Abraham told the rich man that if his brothers wouldn’t listen to Moses and the prophets, they wouldn’t be convinced even if someone rose from the dead (Luke 16:31). Evidence doesn’t melt a hard heart. Only God does that.

So they put the parents on the stand. Was this their son? Did they say he was born blind? Then how did he see now (John 9:19)?

And here’s a beggar who’d never read a scroll, seeing more clearly than the men who’d memorized them. Jesus thanked His Father for hiding these things from the wise and showing them to little children, because that’s what pleased Him (Matthew 11:25). God doesn’t pick the men we’d pick. He chooses the weak and the overlooked so nobody gets to boast in front of Him (1 Corinthians 1:26-27). He chose this man, and He opened his eyes twice, once on the outside and once on the inside.

John 9:20-23 — Ask him

The parents answered carefully. They knew he was their son, and they knew he’d been born blind. But how he could see now, they didn’t know. Who opened his eyes, they didn’t know either. He was a grown man. They should ask him. He could speak for himself (John 9:20-21).

Then John tells us why they talked like that. They were afraid of the Jewish leaders, because the leaders had already agreed that anybody who confessed Jesus as the Christ would be put out of the synagogue. That’s why they said he was old enough and to ask him (John 9:22-23).

So they did know. Or at least they knew enough to be afraid. You don’t dodge a question that carefully unless you know where the honest answer leads. Their son had been given his eyes after a lifetime of darkness, and the best they could do was step back and point at him.

Being put out of the synagogue wasn’t a small thing. It meant losing your place in the worship of Israel, your friends, your standing, maybe your living. Jesus warned His men it would happen to them. Men would hate them, cut them off, and throw out their name as evil because of Him (Luke 6:22). He told them the time would come when men would kill them and think they were serving God (John 16:2). It costs something to confess Christ, and it always has.

But look at what fear did to these parents. It made them hand their own son over to the men who frightened them. Isaiah asked God’s people why they were afraid of men who die, men who wither like grass, and forgot the Lord who made them (Isaiah 51:12). Later in John, some of the rulers would believe in Jesus and keep quiet for this same reason, because they loved men’s praise more than God’s (John 12:42-43). Paul said it plainly. If he were still trying to please men, he wouldn’t be Christ’s servant (Galatians 1:10).

Jesus said whoever confesses Him before men, He’ll confess before His Father in Heaven, and whoever denies Him before men, He’ll deny (Matthew 10:32-33). And He said a man who loves his father or mother more than Him isn’t worthy of Him (Matthew 10:37). Usually we read that as a man choosing Christ over his parents. Here it’s the other way around. The parents chose the synagogue over their son and his Healer.

Still, God wasn’t scrambling. He’d ordained the blindness, and He’d ordained this hearing too. Even the parents’ fear did His work. It left the testimony right where He wanted it, on the lips of the man whose eyes Jesus had opened. God doesn’t need brave men to get His glory. He uses cowards and courageous men alike, and He’s never once been backed into a corner.

They weren’t done with him. John says they called him back a second time, and this time he’d have more to say.