There are many healing stories in the gospels, but John takes this one and raises it to an altogether higher plane of meaning. In John's hands, the fact of the healing remains a sign, calling attention to Jesus as to his teaching. But it acquires many other layers of meaning.

These are teased out in the events which follow the healing. The healing itself is disposed of quickly, in verses 1 to 7 of John Chapter 9. The rest of the chapter, through to verse 41, is basically a courtroom drama structured, as all good courtroom dramas are, to lay out the full meaning of the story

John's purpose in placing this story in chapter 9 is to explain the claim of Jesus, made just before in John 8, that "I am the light of the world".

To be blind is of course to be deprived of physical light, but there is another sense of the word "light" — enlightenment, or understanding. In this story the blind man is healed on two levels. By the cure of his blindness, physical light is restored to him. But he also becomes enlightened; he believes, and worships.

And his response is contrasted with the "official" response — that of the Pharisees.

It's easy for us to demonise the Pharisees, but it's a mistake:

• We tend to see them as representative of "the establishment", but they were not. They were one of several sects in Judaism at the time. The establishment was represented by the priests, the Temple authorities and the Sadducees. The Pharisees were a fairly new, radical and reforming group in Judaism, and they were very far from being universally popular.
• We see them as hypocritical, but they were not — at least, not particularly. They were entirely sincere in their search of an understanding of God's purpose for the Jews, and his call to them, and in their efforts to understand and internalise the law, rather than simply mechanically following it.
• We see them as elitist and oppressive. But they were, basically, a very democratic movement. They insisted on the right and duty of every (male) Jew to study the Law and the Prophets, to pray, to reflect and to arrive at an understanding of God's purpose for himself and for the Jewish people. It was precisely this insistence on the individual that got them into trouble with the Temple authorities, who naturally preferred to encourage deference to the priesthood in all things.

It was very much in the Pharisee tradition, therefore, to atempt to engage with the implications of this cure. What could it teach them about God's purpose?

They start by questioning the cured man, to establish exactly what happened. And, as soon as they hear what happened, they immediately recognise a challenge to their existing understanding. On the one hand, God does not want Jews to do any kind of work on the Sabbath. On the other hand, only a man favoured by God could work a sign like this. We are told that "there was a division among them", meaning that they engaged with this apparent conflict, and they did not find it easy to resolve.

The problem would go away, of course, if the story turned out to be untrue. So they look for more information. They question the man a second time, looking for more detail; then they question his parents.

As John tells it, the parents were cowed, because they feared being expelled from the synagogue if they affirmed the cure by Jesus. This is almost certainly a detail added by John to point up the significance of story for his own community; expulsion from (Pharisee-dominated) synagogues was a problem for Christian Jews at around the time this gospel was written, but it was not an issue in the time of Jesus himself.

Be that as it may, the man's parents confirm the basic facts of story, so far as they know them. So his story checks out; the problem can't simply be dismissed.

The cured man is called back and questioned a third time. This time, though, he's not just asked for information about what happened; he is abjured to tell the truth ("Give glory to God!") and his version of events is challenged ('We are satisfied that this man [Jesus] is a sinner.")

Cross-examination…

This, of course, is what lawyers call "cross-examination"; questions are asked not in a neutral, open way, but in a way which suggests that some answers are more acceptable than others.

This isn't necessarily a hostile act; it's a technique used to test the credibility of the witness. If he sticks to his story in the face of scepticism, or in the face of suggestions that a different story is more plausible, more advantageous, or a better fit with the known facts, then his story is more likely to be true (or, at least, he is more likely to be honest in telling it).

But it appears that the cured man does see this as a challenge, and he responds by throwing down a counter-challenge. Why are you so hung up about this, he asks; "Do you want to become his disciples yourselves?" In other words, he has recognised that his cure poses a challenge to the Pharisees view of the world; if they accept what he says, they must change their understanding and acknowledge the authority of Christ.

The response from the Pharisees is depressing; first, an appeal to their own authority ("We are disciples of Moses!") and then, an ad hominem rejection of what the cured man has to say ("Are you trying to teach us, and you a sinner through and through ever since you were born?")

It's at this point, I think, that the Pharisees go wrong. Up to now they have enquired openly into these events, and they have wrestled honestly with their implications. But now they reject the enlightenment that these events offer them — and for the wrong reasons; a preoccupation with their own status, and a disdain for the cured man.

Why did they assume that the cured man was "a sinner through and through"? We're told that right at the very beginning of the story, in verse 2: "who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"

It wasn't the Pharisees who asked this, but Jesus' own disciples, but we discover at this point that the Pharisees shared the assumption implicit in this question.

The belief that physical infirmities or other misfortunes are a retributive judgment for sin was widespread in the time of Jesus. It had been rejected before in the Jewish tradition — the Book of Job contains a strong refutation of it — but it's a tenacious idea. Indeed, it hasn't completely disappeared even today. How long do you have to discuss HIV/AIDS for before somebody will make a spurious connection between infection and sexual immorality?

At the end of this story, Jesus is hard on the Pharisees. He condemns them for their refusal to "see" – i.e., to understand – what the sign of the cure shows them. And what has stopped them from seeing it is concern for their own status, and a prejudiced assumption of sin and unworthiness on the part of the cured man.

A basic misunderstanding about God…

That prejudice, in turn, reflects a basic misunderstanding about God. The Pharisees seriously consider an argument that Jesus must be from God, because he works cures. This implies that God is loving and healing. In the end, though, they make their choice for a punitive God, who strikes people blind for their sins or, worse still, the sins of their parents. And, of course, if you believe in such a God, naturally you fear for yourself, and you seek to reassure yourself about your status and worth in God's eyes. Hence the concern with status; "We are disciples of Moses!"

So, in the end, it is the Pharisees who are blind. They cannot see that God is a loving God, not a punitive God. Because of that, they have contempt for the man born blind, who must be a sinner, and they are obsessed with justifying themselves. And this in turn blinds them to the meaning of the cure worked by Jesus.

The cured man, by contrast, has an intuitive understanding that God is not vengeful, but loving. He sees the hand of God not in his blindness, but in his cure. And, with that insight, he can see Jesus for who he is; "The man said, 'Lord, I believe,' and worshipped him".

Photo Credit:
The background image of Braille text for today's reflection is sourced from stock.xchng – photographer: Wojciech Augustynowicz,Warszawa, Poland.

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Peregrinus can be contacted at: Peregrinus <peregrinus@catholica.com.au>

©2008 Peregrinus

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