Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, ‘Surely we are not blind, are we?’ John 9.40
Introduction
Some time ago some concern was expressed by the charity the Royal National Institute for the Blind about the way blindness was often equated in Christian worship with being unspiritual. You only have to look through the hymnbook to find examples of this. One hymn that I remember singing in the church where I grew up began:
Lord, I was blind I could not see
in thy marred visage any grace.
Or, more familiarly:
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
that saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found,
was blind but now I see.
The danger in this kind of language is that there is one factor which is very different between physical and spiritual blindness. No one chooses physical blindness and no one can be blamed for being physically blind. Spiritual blindness is, however, something that people may well have a choice about, and those who choose to be spiritually blind have no one to blame for the consequences but themselves.
Exposition
Today’s gospel reading is another of the long passages from St John’s gospel which the lectionary sets before us during this season of Lent. For me it is one of the most vivid and captivating stories in the gospels. The dialogue between Jesus and the blind man, Jesus and the authorities, and then the blind man and the authorities is just so real, and the way that in which the blind man who can now see stands up to the bullying of the authorities is so engrossing that when I hear the man say “Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from and yet he opened my eyes” I just want to punch the air and shout “yes!” It’s a wonderful story, not only because it shows that Jesus is on the side of the outcast and disregarded but it goes further than that and shows the outcast and disregarded standing up for Jesus. It must have been a story which brought great encouragement to the early Christians as they sought to stand up for Jesus.
And that, really, is the context in which we need to read this story. It was written down at the time when Christianity was becoming a separate faith from the Judaism in which it had had its origin. Christians, like the blind man in the story, had been expelled from the fellowship of the synagogue and with that expulsion had lost the legal protection that Roman law gave to the Jewish people. Jews and Jews alone, in the Roman world were exempt from sacrificing to and worshiping the Roman gods. When Christians lost their status as part of the Jewish community they became subject to the expectation that they would participate in pagan rites. When they refused to do so they were persecuted and harassed. It’s a reflection of this situation that the word ‘Jews’ becomes in John’s Gospel the label applied to those who oppose Jesus; this despite the fact that Jesus, his disciples and almost everyone else we encounter in the gospels were Jewish. To Christians it was obvious that Jesus was the long awaited Jewish messiah. They must have agonized over the question why the Jewish people themselves could not see this. For St Paul in the letter to the Romans this blindness is seen as part of graciousness in that it allowed the inclusion of non-Jews among God’s people. For John, however, it seems to have been much more a wilful act on the part of some of the Jewish teachers not to see who Jesus was. The closing words of the Gospel reading today, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, “We see”, your sin remains” imply that the particular teachers that Jesus is confronting in this passage have chosen not to see who Jesus is. They have been faced with a choice, they’ve seen a man set free from a condition which has restricted and narrowed his life, and they refuse to see in this the hand of God.
What Jesus does in this passage is not to draw a parallel between physical and spiritual blindness but in fact to contrast them. The physically blind person may actually be able to have greater spiritual perception than those who have had no such disability.
Application
There is a challenge in this for us and I believe that it is one which is especially relevant to us today. If God starts to do things which don’t fit in with our preconceived ideas will we refuse to see his hand at work? Now the danger here is that anyone can claim that what they are doing comes from God and that it is God acting in a new way. The bible is clear gives us a way to test this. The acts of God bring forth good fruit – that is, where we see human lives enhanced, where we see the oppressed liberated, where we the oppressor cast down, there we can see God at work.