Progressive reflections on the lectionary #105

John 9:1-41

In John’s story of the healing of a man born blind, his subsequent interrogation and eventual expulsion by the religious authorities raises some interesting possibilities. The plain reading, of course, is that Jesus was a miracle worker - a magic-doer. In some ways, though, that’s the least interesting, and certainly least credible option of them all. I will say that John uses this story to communicate a number of key enduring truths. Among them: that real ‘blindness’ is not about eyes at all; and that those who testify to the truth will find themselves expelled from their communities by religious and political authorities. Ok, not the most cheery of truths, perhaps, but he does it with humour too. There are laughs to be had, fear not.

Photo by Osarugue Igbinoba on Unsplash

The opening stanzas of the gospel of John take us back to the poem of creation, found in Genesis chapter one. They set the scene, too, for the ongoing fascination John will exhibit, throughout his gospel, with issues of darkness, light and sight. Throughout his gospel, issues of misunderstanding abound, characters who can see, or can’t see - and of course that is very evident in the story of the healing of the man born blind, found in chapter nine.

9:5 “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world." (Jesus)

I’ve mentioned previously that John is a humorous writer, aspects of his wry style are evident here too - not the semi slapstick of Nicodemus trying to figure out how to be born again, but the drier, more ironic tone that John uses to expose authority figures.

Here it is the healed man, another unnamed character (I’ll come back to his, bear with), who acts as the comic centre of the story. Through the passage he gains a certain boldness, just as the pharisees lose credibility. When the authorities demand, in verse 26, that he explain the healing again, he replies with a sarcastic tone: “Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?” There are number of lines like this in the text, it would have made a good classical farce.

Other areas of humour enrich the scene. Take the confused neighbours for example, they are flustered because they can’t decide whether the man is really the man. Perhaps because they’ve ignored him all his life. “It is him!” “No, it only looks like him…” The inability to see, John is keen to communicate, is not really about visual impairment.

There’s a whole lot of humour here - those with time and energy could make a really good fist of bringing that to the fore.

While the humour and clever structure is great, though, I’m instinctively drawn to the socio-political ramifications of what John is up to in his work. Because like all good dramas this text has layers of meaning. It’s effectively a parable set out in a narrative form.

It is sometimes said that there are seven signs in John’s gospel - seven key miraculous events that reveal something about Jesus. Perhaps we can go through the full list sometime, but for this exercise it’s sufficient to say that this is the sixth of the seven signs.

Broadly a sign in John’s gospel is four things. It’s a symbolic act, a revelation of God’s character, a challenge to oppressive systems, and a moment that forces a choice.

Here the sign is not simply that a blind man sees; the sign is that a whole system is exposed. You could say that the blindness that is being healed, here, is actually our blindness. We get to see things differently by virtue of what is revealed in the story.

Ok, sidebar. So I mentioned that this is an unnamed character - in John an unnamed character (there are a few) is an opportunity for the reader to see something of themselves in the story.

The unnamed characters in John can represent a sort of mirror for the reader - they can also function as a marker of either a type, or a symbol, or perhaps a representative figure. They are each, in a sense an ‘everyperson’. I appreciate this is on the verge of sounding like one of those awful ‘thoughts for the day (adopts a pious tone): “…and in a way, isn’t that just like all of us?”

Sometimes, though, cliches can be true. The Samaritan woman, the man born blind, the royal official, and later the paralysed man: none of them are named, each somehow represents the the reader’s own story. /sidebar

In the story, the physical healing happens quickly, and oddly. The physical sight comes back quickly, but other sight comes back more slowly. It is only as the story progresses, that the man begins to see more clearly. First he recognises Jesus as a prophet, then as one sent from God, and ultimately as the one worthy of worship.

Just as he is recovering his sight, though, the interrogatory religious authorities move in the opposite direction. They, who started off with clear sight, see less and less. John is saying, perhaps, that the miracle is not the point; the revelation is. The weak are strong, the blind can see, the oxymorons are oxyclever.

There is, of course, a political dimension of the story, and it’s quite clearly woven into the narrative - the man is a political problem. His healing, indeed his existence presents a challenge to the way that things should be. He was healed on the sabbath, for a start - an undermining of politico-religious authority.

John’s Jesus is a loose cannon in these terms, he’s a threat to the fragile political system, he’s a threat to established power. The problem with the man is that he testifies to this, so he must be dealt with, so in verse 34 the man is ‘driven out’ of his community.

This kind of experience, expulsion from community, was a familiar experience in the early Christian community. In particular scholars agree that John, as a whole, reflects the story telling of a community that has recently experienced expulsion from the synagogue (expulsion from the synagogue for the crime of following Jesus is explicitly referenced three times in John: 9:22; 12:42; 16:2). That accounts, I think, for the difficulty of the anti-Judaic rhetoric that we find in John, something that has caused difficulty for scholars over a long period.

So at the end of the passage here in In John chapter nine we find Jesus seeking out the man after he has been expelled and beginning the formation of a new kind of community - a model for the early Christian communities. This is not built on the sort of social controls of their time, but on acceptance and trust. In that way the story becomes a parable of new belonging. A reassurance for all those who find themselves expelled from the communities they grew up in because they can now see more clearly. They are not abandoned.

John uses the motif of ‘sight’ in a similar way to the way he uses ‘light’ - to explore how truth becomes disruptive, to expose the way that legal, political and religious systems resist, and to show how liberation often begins with a single person who refuses to deny what they now see.

After all - the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.

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Progressive Reflections On the Lectionary are intended to be useful to people who preach, or are interested in why on earth anyone still reads the Bible.