The man born blind: the light of the world opens eyes

The Fourth Gospel names no author. It says that the disciple whom Jesus loved bore witness and wrote these things (21:24), and from the second century this disciple has been identified with John the son of Zebedee. D. A. Carson and many others defend this view. Richard Bauckham argues for John the Elder, a different eyewitness, and others for a Johannine community that edited the book. The usual date is about AD 85 to 95, with a minority arguing for an earlier one. John says he wrote so that readers might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and have life in his name (20:31). Chapter 9 serves that purpose by following one man from ignorance to worship.

The Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) contain no story like this one. They record healings of the blind (Mark 8:22-26; 10:46-52; Matthew 9:27-31), and one of them also uses spittle (Mark 8:23), but the healing of a man blind from birth, the long interrogation and the ending with the Pharisees' blindness are found only in John. John's Gospel is often counted as built around seven signs, and this is usually counted as the sixth. Scholars debate how the four Gospels relate: most hold that Mark came first, that Matthew and Luke used it with a shared sayings source, and that John is largely independent, though some think he knew one or more of the others.

The chapter follows the teaching at the Feast of Tabernacles (chapters 7 and 8). Verses 1 and 14 imply a Sabbath, and the next dated event is the winter Feast of Dedication (10:22), so the chapter falls between them. Many readers take chapters 9 and 10 together with the earlier debates, and the link is not merely chronological: Jesus has just said that he is the light of the world (8:12) and now repeats it before giving sight (9:5).

The man is healed at the Pool of Siloam, a reservoir at the southern end of the City of David that was fed by Hezekiah's tunnel from the Gihon spring (2 Kings 20:20; 2 Chronicles 32:30). Water drawn from this pool was poured at the altar during Tabernacles, according to the later Mishnah. A large pool from the Second Temple period was uncovered in 2004 and is widely identified as the pool John names.

John 9 is among the best constructed narratives in the Gospels. It runs in short scenes, each with a different set of speakers: Jesus and the disciples; the man and his neighbors; the man and the Pharisees; the parents; the man again; and finally Jesus and the man. The shape is of an inquiry that is reversed. The Pharisees believe they are examining the man, and in fact he is examining them. At the start he is blind and they can see; by the end he sees and they are blind.

Two principles help.

• First, the narrator speaks little and lets irony do the work. The man who cannot see knows more than the learned. The Pharisees claim to know that Jesus is a sinner (9:24) and yet admit they do not know where he is from (9:29). The healed man observes that they do not know where he is from and yet he opened his eyes (9:30).
• Second, John works with the ordinary meaning of seeing and its spiritual meaning at once. 'Light' and 'sight' belong with the title Jesus claimed in 8:12.

One historical question must be named. Verse 22 says the Jews had agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus as the Christ would be put out of the synagogue. J. Louis Martyn argued that this reflects a later situation, when Jewish Christians were expelled from synagogues after about AD 80. Others, including D. A. Carson, reply that exclusion from the community is attested earlier and could have been threatened in Jesus' lifetime. The passage works under either view, since John tells the story as something that happened to this man.

Verses 1–5

Passing by, Jesus sees a man blind from birth. The disciples ask, 'Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?' The question assumes that suffering must be traced to someone's sin, a view the book of Job argues against and that Jesus elsewhere sets aside (Luke 13:1-5). Jesus answers, 'Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the works of God would be displayed in him.' He does not say that no one in the world is a sinner. He denies that this man's condition has that kind of explanation, and he points to what God is about to do. 'While it is daytime, we must do the works of Him who sent Me. Night is coming, when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.' The urgency is that there is a limited time to work.

Verses 6–7

Jesus spits on the ground, makes mud and applies it to the man's eyes. Spittle is used in other healings (Mark 7:33; 8:23). The mud may recall the creation of man from the dust of the ground (Genesis 2:7), a possible echo, though John does not say so. Making mud was also a kind of work, and kneading is among the forms of labor later Jewish law forbade on the Sabbath. Jesus tells the man to wash in the Pool of Siloam, and John adds, 'which means Sent'. The Hebrew name Shiloah (Isaiah 8:6) comes from a verb meaning to send, and John's Jesus has just spoken of 'Him who sent Me'. The man goes, washes and comes back seeing.

Verses 8–12

The neighbors are divided over whether he is the same man. He says, 'I am the one.' He tells them simply what happened, calling Jesus 'the man they call Jesus'. He does not know where Jesus is.

Verses 13–17

They bring him to the Pharisees, and John tells us at this point that it was a Sabbath. The Pharisees are divided. Some say that Jesus is not from God because he does not keep the Sabbath. Others ask how a sinful man can perform such signs. They ask the man what he thinks, and he says, 'He is a prophet.' His understanding has grown from 'the man they call Jesus' to a prophet.

Verses 18–23

The leaders doubt that he was ever blind and summon his parents. The parents confirm that he is their son and that he was born blind, but decline to say more, because they fear being put out of the synagogue. The man is of age and can answer for himself.

Verses 24–34

A second time they call the man and tell him to give glory to God, which was a formula for telling the truth under oath (compare Joshua 7:19), and say that they know this man is a sinner. His reply is the best-known line of the chapter: 'Whether He is a sinner I do not know. There is one thing I do know: I was blind, but now I see!' When they ask again, he asks if they want to become his disciples. They insult him and say they are disciples of Moses and do not know where Jesus is from. The man answers with irony: that is remarkable indeed. God does not listen to sinners but to the one who worships him and does his will, and never has anyone heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God he could do nothing. Their answer is, 'You were born in utter sin, and you are instructing us?' and they throw him out.

Verses 35–38

Jesus finds him and asks, 'Do you believe in the Son of Man?' The man asks who he is, and Jesus says that he has seen him and that he is the one speaking with him. 'Lord, I believe,' he says, and he worshiped Jesus. The man has moved from 'the man they call Jesus' to a prophet, to one from God, to Lord, and to worship.

Verses 39–41

Jesus declares that he has come for judgment, so that the blind may see and those who see may become blind. Some of the Pharisees ask, 'Are we blind too?' He answers that if they were blind they would not be guilty of sin, but since they claim to see, their guilt remains.

The chapter addresses the problem of suffering, and its answer is partial and exact. Jesus does not give a general explanation of why people are born blind. He denies that this man's blindness is to be traced to a particular sin, and he says that it is the occasion for the works of God. This fits the book of Job, where friends who insist that suffering is always deserved are rebuked, and it does not deny that some suffering is the result of sin, as John 5:14 shows.

It also deals with the doctrine of revelation. The man sees because Jesus gives sight, and the Pharisees do not see because they say they see. Isaiah's commission to a people who would see and not perceive (Isaiah 6:9-10), which John quotes in 12:39-40, provides the pattern. The chapter's last verse echoes Jesus' teaching elsewhere that to those who claim to see, the claim becomes the problem (Matthew 11:25; Luke 18:9-14).

The man's path shows what faith looks like in John: it begins in a response to an act, grows through testing, and arrives at worship of the one who gave sight. That Jesus accepts worship is significant in a Bible where angels and apostles refuse it (Revelation 22:8-9; Acts 10:25-26).

This chapter is fulfillment. Isaiah promised that God would open the eyes of the blind (Isaiah 35:5) and that his Servant would do so (Isaiah 42:7), and Jesus does it in a way no one had ever heard of (9:32). Isaiah 29:18 and 42:16 speak of the blind seeing, and Matthew 11:5 gives the opening of blind eyes as one of the signs by which Jesus answers John the Baptist's question. The Old Testament has accounts of sight given or restored (2 Kings 6:17-20), but no account of a man born blind receiving sight.

John also points to Jesus as the Sent One. He translates Siloam as 'Sent' and ties it to Jesus' words about 'Him who sent Me' (9:4, 7). The sending of the Son is one of John's central themes (3:17; 5:36; 17:3). More tentatively, the mud made from the ground may echo God forming Adam from the dust (Genesis 2:7), a hint that the Creator is at work, as John 1:1-3 would lead a reader to expect.

Finally, the chapter reveals Jesus as the Son of Man to whom judgment is given (5:27; 9:39) and who accepts worship. The man who once knew only 'the man they call Jesus' kneels before him. The Pharisees, who see the evidence and refuse it, are left with their guilt.