The student

One day as Jesus walked in Jerusalem with his disciples, He saw a blind man who had been that way since birth. His disciples asked, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents?” according to the common belief that misfortunes such as these were the punishment of sin. “Neither”, Jesus replied, “but that the works of God should be revealed in him.” Jesus proceeded to spit on the ground and mix his saliva with the dust, and spread the mixture on the man’s eyes. “Go”, He said, “wash your eyes off in the Pool of Siloam”.

The man did so and became able to see for the first time in his life. He did not go directly back to Jesus; in fact he did not really seem to know who He was, because when his neighbours asked him how he had come to see, he could only tell them that “a man named Jesus” had put clay on his eyes. Not Jesus the Messiah, or Jesus the Wonder Rabbi, but Jesus the random passerby.

The people brought their formerly blind neighbour to the Pharisees, who apparently deduced who had healed him, because they seemed disturbed by the news. Perhaps they were thinking of what Jesus had said of Himself in the synagogue at Capernaum while reading from Isaiah:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free….”

The man was the unwitting carrier of an unspoken message from Jesus to the teachers of the people. Here I am. I am the fulfilment of these words of the prophet. What will you do with Me? And that was the problem, the Pharisees didn’t know what to do with Jesus, because they had already ruled out the possibility of recognizing that He was from God. So they tried to reason their way out of the dilemma.

Some said, “This man is not from God because he did not observe the Sabbath in healing you”. But others saw a problem with that, because the same theology that saw disease or disability as the result of sin left no room for the idea that miraculous healing could come from a sinner.

The healed man shared nothing of this wrestling, for when the Pharisees asked him what he thought of Jesus, he said straightforwardly, “He is a prophet”.

Their next move was to probe the miracle. The Pharisees called the man’s parents to them. “Is this really your son? Was he indeed born blind? How is it that he now can see?” Perhaps the man only resembled the blind man; perhaps his blindness was a more recent condition that had cleared up on its own; or perhaps it had spontaneously begun to heal before Jesus came by.

The parents wanted nothing to do with this inquiry. They knew who Jesus was, they knew what the Pharisees thought of Him, and they knew what they were in the middle of. They confirmed that the man was their son, that he was indeed born blind, but for every other question they said, “He is an adult, let him speak for himself”.

The miracle could not be impeached for the time being, so the Pharisees brought back the man. “Give glory only to God! We know that this man is a sinner.”

One wonders why they were so concerned what this nobody, who just that morning had been a beggar, should think of Jesus. But the problem was that this nobody was a witness to the work of Jesus – a source of testimony which they were concerned to suppress.

But the man only brought the hard, awkward fact of his healing back up in their face. “I don’t whether or not he is a sinner, I only know that I was blind, but now I see.” This brought the Pharisees back to their earlier line of questioning: “What did he do? How did he open your eyes?” The man began to lose patience. “Why do you want me to tell you again? I’ve already told you once, and you didn’t listen. Do you also want to become his disciples?”

The Pharisees sneered and said, “You may be his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God spoke to Moses, but we don’t know where this fellow is from.”

At that the man became very bold and replied, “Why, this is a strange thing that you, the teachers of Israel can’t work out where this man is from, even though he opened my eyes. We know that God doesn’t hear sinners , but He hears those who worship Him. If this man were not from God he could do nothing.”


The Pharisees lost all pretence of civility: “You are nothing but a sinner. How can you presume to teach us?” and they threw the man out.

Afterward, Jesus found him and asked, “Do you believe in the Son of God?” The man now saw Jesus for the first time, though he must have recognized his voice from earlier. “Who is he, Lord, that I should believe in Him?” Jesus said, “You are looking at Him and He is the one speaking to you.” The man said, “Lord, I believe!” and knelt to give homage to his King.

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Here are some applications which I believe this event has for us as believers:

1) Even if you are a nobody, your witness is important. If you have received Jesus, then God has done a true work in your life. It may be opposed, or questioned, but it cannot be resisted because it is powerful.

Do you believe that your testimony is powerful? The world does, that’s why it wants to suppress it.

2) A lot of us struggle with timidity in sharing our faith. So it is worth asking, what was the source of the man’s boldness? I believe that it was his sure knowledge of God’s work in him in healing his blindness. What keeps me from being bold? It is the lack of that knowledge in me when I have not stayed current in my walk with Jesus. It weakens my confidence in the good news I have to share.

How can I authentically invite someone to have fellowship with God if I’m not consistently walking in that fellowship myself?

3) Why was it so hard for the Pharisees to accept Jesus when for the blind man it was so simple? For the Pharisees their starting point was their tradition, and they could find no place in it for Him. I don’t believe that their point of stumbling was so much Jesus' innovative teachings or that His coming didn't fit the prophetic specs as they understood them. It was more that they believed fervently and devoutly in the coming of the Messiah as a religious, other worldly event. It fell into a category outside of their daily life, and they couldn’t associate it with the flesh and blood man who stood before them in dusty feet. Nor did their conception of practical reality include his miracles.

Religious unbelief. This reminds me of Del Tackett’s question in his video series The Truth Project: “Do we really believe that what we believe is really real?”

The blind man, on the other hand, knew little of the Pharisees' theology, but that didn’t matter because his starting point was what Jesus had done. It was a foundation he could stand firmly upon while scholars paced around him. What he needed to know of God he would learn from the man who had done God’s work in him.