"We are not blind, are we?"
Jesus kneels in the dirt. He spits on the ground, gathers the dust into his fingers, and works it into mud. It is a strange way to begin a miracle. No command. No prayer. Not even an invitation. Just hands in the earth. And then Jesus reaches out and places that mud on the eyes of a man whose eyes have never seen.
The gesture should sound familiar. In the first pages of Scripture, God forms a human being from the dust of the ground. Earth in the hands of the Creator, shaped into life. And in Lent we hear the same reminder, but with a sharper edge: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
Which means the dust in Jesus’s hand might be doing more than it first appears.
“Go wash in the pool of Siloam,” Jesus tells him. Siloam was a pool in Jerusalem fed by a spring, used by pilgrims to wash before approaching the Temple. The man goes. He washes. And he comes back able to see.
Now, you’d think that’s the whole story. A man was blind. And Jesus gave him sight. But John gives us thirty more verses after the healing, because John isn’t really telling us a story about healing. He’s telling us about what happens next. What happens when people who think they understand how the world works are confronted with something that doesn’t fit what they already believe.
It doesn’t go well.
The man’s neighbors aren’t sure it’s really him. So they bring him to the Pharisees. And the Pharisees ask him what happened, and he tells them: “He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see.”
But here’s the problem. Jesus did this on the Sabbath. So the Pharisees can’t just say, well, that’s wonderful. They have a theological framework to defend, and this healing doesn’t fit in it. God doesn’t work through Sabbath-breakers. So they ask the man again. They bring in his parents. His parents say, “He’s old enough — ask him.” So they bring the man back and they ask him again.
And every time they ask, he says the same thing. I was blind. He put mud on my eyes. I washed. Now I see.
He doesn’t have a theory about it. He doesn’t make theological claims. When they press him, he says, “Whether he is a sinner, I do not know. One thing I do know: I was blind, and now I see.”
It’s easy to turn the Pharisees into the villains of this story, but things really aren’t that simple. The Pharisees care deeply about faithfulness. They’ve devoted their lives to understanding how God’s law is meant to be lived. They’re the religious professionals, the committed followers of God. But here, their certainty gets in their way. They know exactly how God is supposed to work, and this healing isn’t part of their system. A man can see. That is the fact. And they keep circling it, because if they accept it, they have to rethink things they don’t want to rethink.
So they ask the question again, hoping for a different answer. They tell the man, “Give glory to God. We know this man is a sinner” — which isn’t a request for information. It’s a demand that he change his story. And when he won’t, they throw him out.
Those are recognizable moves. Asking the same question again because you didn’t get the answer you wanted. Attacking the messenger because you can’t deal with the message. And when all else fails, showing someone the door. We’ve probably all done it — or had it done to us.
But the story doesn’t end there. They throw him out — the man who washed before the Temple, cast out by the Temple. They throw him out, and Jesus seeks him out. Jesus hears what’s happened, and he goes looking for the man. And when Jesus finds him, the man finally begins to understand who it is who has given him sight.
That matters. It means the story John tells us has two movements, not one. First: the institution closes ranks, and a man who told the truth gets expelled. Second: Jesus goes looking for him. The one who got thrown out. The one whose only claim was a true claim: “I was blind, and now I see.”
And of course, this isn’t a story about one institution in one century. Religious communities — including ours — have always been capable of closing ranks around what they already believe and casting out the people who don’t fit. What matters is where Jesus is in the story. He’s not inside with the ones who got their theology right. He’s outside, looking for the one they threw out. That’s where Jesus always is.
In the end, the Pharisees ask Jesus one last question: “Surely we’re not blind, are we?”
I’ve always assumed that they asked sarcastically. But I wonder. Maybe it was a real question. Maybe, for just a moment, their certainty cracked.
Surely we’re not blind, are we?
Lent might be a good time for us to ask ourselves that question.
Excerpt from interior photo of the Ibaraki Kasugaoka Church in Ibaraki, Japan, which is known as the Church of the Light. Andō, Tadao, 1941-.