Fr. Stephen: In just a minute we’ll be starting at the beginning of chapter nine, the Gospel according to St. John. And just to sort of briefly get us caught up with where we were. We mentioned before that St. John’s Gospel is structured around a series of visits that Jesus makes from Galilee to Jerusalem, generally connected with the Jewish feasts on their festival calendar. And we were in the midst of Jesus’ visit during the Feast of Tabernacles. And during that feast he had had yet another confrontation with the Pharisees and some of the other Jewish authorities and chief priests. This had already been brewing from a previous visit during which he had healed a paralyzed man on the Sabbath. They were still angry with him about that, as we saw.

And so, when he came back, things sort of took off and escalated from there. Jesus has been preaching very publicly in the temple and they’ve been confronting Him publicly and so Jesus has been answering them publicly and he hasn’t minced words, especially where we left off last time.

Last time we got to the point where they were accusing Jesus of being demon possessed and Jesus told them that their father was the devil. So things are not in the most productive spot right now in terms of their relationship. But as we mentioned several times, the fact is Jesus is continuing to talk to them, he’s continuing to try to communicate with them, he’s continuing to try to connect with them. Now as we mentioned last time, and I don’t know if I was clear enough about this last time, Jesus has mentioned several times during these dialogues, statements the effect that he’s not there for his own glory or to glorify Himself, that he’s there to glorify the Father. And it’s important that we understand what that means that he doesn’t testify about Himself because we’ve also seen, I mean, we saw the culmination last time that Jesus said before Abraham was I am, where he basically said that he’s God. So it’s not that he’s saying I’m not talking about myself ever or saying anything about myself.

But it’s important to remember that even though Jesus continues to come to the Pharisees and Jewish leaders, He doesn’t write them off or give up on them. Jesus also is not needy, He’s not coming and saying, “Oh, I really need you all to love me. I really need to be popular”. He’s there to tell them the truth, because the truth, as he said, has the potential to set them free. The truth has the potential to save them. And so he’s telling them the truth, and he wants them to hear the truth. But if they reject Christ and reject the truth, they’re only hurting themselves. Jesus doesn’t need their approval of his message. He doesn’t need their belief or worship. He doesn’t need it. He wants it for their sake, not for his own, not for their sake, because of what it will do for them if they come to believe.

Interlocutor: I’m glad you brought attention to that because I was thinking, how are we supposed to quite understand this when he makes this distinction between Himself and His Father? And he says, “I’m not glorifying me. I’m glorifying the father.” Well, he and the Father are not the same, but they’re both God…

Fr. Stephen: But they’re one. Yeah.

Interlocutor: I’m not sure how to take that, because he does, of course, want them to recognize Him as God. They’re not yet at a point where they can conceive of the Trinity or anything, so the way they would hear it would be I think they would hear it as, “I’m not God, I’m just a prophet calling attention to God,” and then the next minute he says, “I’m God”. So that would be somewhat confusing.

Interlocutor: Right. And so that’s not the distinction he’s trying to make. The distinction he’s trying to make is the false messiahs who have come and were going to continue to come after Jesus, come in their own name. They’re coming trying to get a following for themselves because they want to be king, and they think they’re going to… Jesus is not coming in his own name in that sense. He’s coming to try to reconcile these people to God. And so that’s the distinction he’s making. Now, he is God in that sense he is trying to reconcile them to Himself, right? But there’s still a distinction there that he’s trying to make that he’s not just there in a self-aggrandizing kind of way, which would be his right as God, right? Jesus could…

Interlocutor: How can you self-aggrandize more than being God?

Fr. Stephen: Well, but he could have not been born from a human woman in a manger. He could have descended out of the sky, ripped the sky open and revealed his power to everyone immediately. And sort of compelled their belief. He’s God. He could have. But that’s not how God reveals himself. That’s not how God reveals who he is to us as human beings.

And so, it’s important that we see the revelation of God for what it is and it’s significant that God reveals himself through weakness and through the cross and through suffering alongside of us and weeping with us and mourning with us over the consequences of sin and over death. That’s how God chooses to reveal who he is rather than in sort of might and power. Because it shows that the true God, who we worship is a very different type of God than, for example, the Roman gods. Zeus would never have done what Jesus did, right? Zeus, when you read Greek myth, comes down out of the sky throwing lightning bolts or chasing… Or he’s going to try to seduce women, right? That’s how their gods behave. But the Roman gods, the way pagan religion worked generally, is that you look at the gods and the gods are embodiments of power, strength, beauty, all these sorts of human excesses, and they believe that by worshipping those things, they became like them. You worship the god of war and you become a powerful warrior victorious in battle. You worship out of power, you become powerful, you worship, you’ve got a beauty, you become beautiful. And so that was sort of how they were.

And that’s part of, in the Old Testament, the argument against idolatry is that the prophets come and say, yeah, you’re right, you become like the gods you worship and the gods you worship are dumb pieces of wood and stone and you become just like them by worshipping them, right? That’s part of their argument. This is why Paul is going to say that the cross is foolishness to Greeks, because they’re like, “Why would you want to become like that? Why would you worship weakness, this peasant who had nothing? Why would that be the path that you choose?”

So, our God is a very different God, and you say, “Well, then why would anyone expect the Jewish people to be able to figure this out?” Well, if you really read the Old Testament, I mean, we’ll just take the Torah, the Pentateuch, first five books, you read the law god over and over again says that he’s the God of the widow, the orphan, the stranger. He says, I came to you to be your God and to make you my people when you were a bunch of slaves in Egypt. Who would worship the God of slaves? That makes no sense. So it’s not that all of a sudden god was like the other gods of the Old Testament. He was this angry thunderbolt throwing God of power that in the New Testament, all of a sudden, Jesus is weak. God presents himself through the whole scriptures the same way. It’s just the incarnation, the person of Jesus Christ. We see sort of the sine qua non that. So if you were really reading the New Testament carefully and you understood who God was, then it would make perfect sense to you that if God became a man, it would not be as the roman Emperor, right? It would not be as this wealthy person or senator or something that if God became, if that God, the Old Testament God, became a man, it would be one of his people who was poor like them, who suffered like them, who was oppressed like them. That would make total sense to you. And so that’s part of what Jesus is doing when he says to the Pharisees, “Haven’t you read Moses? If you’d read Moses, if you understood, you know, who I am, this would make sense to you because you would have already seen that connection. But because you clearly don’t know who God is, you think God is a God who’s going to come down here and smite the Romans and make them your slaves, right? Where would you get that idea?” From the way God has behaved in the past. So he says, “You don’t know God in the first place. That’s why you don’t recognize Him when he’s standing right in front of you.”

So that’s a lot of the undercurrent here in these last few chapters. So that’s probably a good catch up to where we’re going to, because we’re also about to see another miracle. As we mentioned before, in St. John’s Gospel, miracles are called signs. That’s the word he chooses to use. That’s the word that’s used a lot in the book of Numbers especially. But throughout the Pentateuch, throughout the Torah, when miraculous things sort of happen with the Israelites, when they’re in the wilderness, they refer to them as signs and wonders. And even the plagues on Egypt are signs, meaning they’re supposed to signify something greater than just, “Oh, wow, look, that’s miraculous and wonderful.” You’re supposed to conclude from that something else. And as we’ve seen, the people who are close to God see Jesus do a sign and they say, “Oh, this must mean the Messiah is here.” And they believe that people who are very far from God see those signs that have the exact opposite reaction of hatred and anger… not to spoil, but that’s about to continue here as we begin in Gospel according to St. John, chapter 9, verse 1:

Now as Jesus passed by, He saw a man who was blind from birth

So this is important because there have been people who are blind who are healed in the Scriptures before, but they were people who had been blinded. They had some sort of eye injury that was healed. This person was born without eyesight. This person has never seen. He’s been blind from the very beginning. So it’s a different situation than just someone who has an injury and needs to have the injury healed.

And His disciples asked Him, saying, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

So you see a little bit of the folk wisdom right here that was going around. And this is very parallel to what you find in the book of Job in the Old Testament with Job’s quote-unquote, “friends”. They referred to as friends. With friends like that, I don’t know… who Job suffers all these great losses. He loses his children, he loses all of his wealth, he loses his health. He’s covered in boils. By the end of it, he’s literally sitting on the city sort of communal dung heap, the trash and feces from the city, sitting in it with taking broken pieces of pottery and using them to scrape open and then drain his boils. That’s where he ends up from being a very wealthy man with lots of children and a big family. So he’s fallen on these hard times, and his so called friends keep coming to him and saying, “Okay, what did you do? You must have done something. You must have done something really bad. You committed some horrible sin, and that’s why God is doing this to you, to punish you.” And Job keeps saying, “If you know something, tell me. I don’t know what I did.” His wife is even more drastic than that. Job’s wife keeps coming to him and telling him to curse God and die. Just put yourself out of your misery. And Job refuses.

The book of Job is sort of this meditation on the nature of suffering, and it’s trying to attack just this kind of idea which comes from a misreading of God’s law. God’s law ends at the end of Deuteronomy in chapters 28 to 30, where God says, “Today I set before you life and death, blessings and curses. If you go and you walk in my ways and follow my law, you will be blessed. If you go and do these evil things, you’ll be cursed.” Well, it didn’t take long for people actually living in the world… And if you read the Psalms, starting with Psalm 2, right near the beginning of Psalms, people begin to notice that’s supposed to be true. But I see a whole lot of wicked people who live to a ripe old age and who seem to be doing pretty well. And I see a whole lot of really good and righteous people who aren’t doing so well. So how does that work?

And so one misunderstanding of that is, well, really, those wicked people must not be all that wicked and those righteous people must not be all that righteous, or it’d be the other way around. The correct response to that, as we see in the Old Testament, as we see in the Psalms that bring that up, is that there is going to be justice. There’s going to be a Last Judgment when God is going to set things right and where the righteous who have suffered will receive a reward and the wicked who have prospered will receive judgment; that will not endure forever because of the sinful state of the world. People like Hugh Hefner living into their nineties… not to be overly topical… and children die young ages of cancer. That’s the way things are in the world, because there is sin in the world and the world is not the way God created it to be. But there will come a time when God will set that right.

But so the disciples, not only here we see, don’t really get what Jesus has been trying to communicate to them, but they don’t even really get what God has already communicated in the Old Testament. They don’t even really understand the way the world works, such that they see only two possibilities. Either this person sinned, which would imply “Oh, see, God knew this person was going to be a horrible sinner, and so he made them blind from birth. Or the parents did something bad, and so God punished them by making their child blind.”

And this is a very technical Jewish debate at this point in history too. There were two schools of thought on whether God punished children for the sins of their parents or not. And that was based on, in Jeremiah and Ezekiel there are comments that sort of in the new Covenant, when God restores Israel, that no longer will children suffer for the sins of their parents, but that each person will die because of their own sins. And this is a misinterpretation of that too, because what that’s pointing to in the new covenant is the way Christ is going to overcome death. He’s talking about the fact that we’re born into the sinful world because of the sins of not our immediate parents, but going all the way back, and that Christ is going to undo that. So if someone perishes in their sins now after what Christ has done, it’s because they’ve rejected Christ had chosen to go their own way, not because through no fault of their own they were born into this sinful state. So they have this misunderstanding.

Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but that the works of God should be revealed in him.”

So he’s not saying when he says neither this man nor his parents sinned, he’s not saying they were perfect and never sinned. He’s saying the blindness has nothing to do with some specific sin, but that the works of God might be revealed in him. Now, one way in which this passage is fairly often misinterpreted is that “Oh, God made this man blind so that Jesus could come and heal him.”

Interlocutor: Yeah that always bothered me.

Interlocutor 2: That was my thought.

Fr. Stephen: Which is not what this is saying, because Jesus is not just speaking about this specific case. He’s not saying to the disciples. “Well, yes, in general when someone suffers it’s because they or their parents sinned. But in this particular case this was to set me up for this miracle.” That’s not what he’s saying. He’s commenting on their whole way of thinking. So what Jesus is really saying here is that when we suffer, whatever it is, whatever it is, whether it’s because of a handicap like this, whether it’s some other type of suffering, whenever we suffer, the reason why we suffer is so that the works of God can be revealed in us.

This is why St. Paul, when he talks about the thorn in his flesh and people debate what that was, whether it was some sin, whether it was… he apparently had a severe condition with his eyes, where his eyes sort of oozed fluid, which made it hard for him to read and hard for him to see, whatever that was he’s referring to, he says he had this thorn in his flesh. He prayed again and again for God to remove it, for God to heal, and for God to take it away. And God’s response to him was that his grace was sufficient for him because God’s strength was made perfect in Paul’s weakness. And so Jesus is not saying God makes you suffer, we depend on Him. It’s that God allows suffering, but he brings good out of it. He brings good out of it because through our suffering we learn and draw closer to Him.

I do not often wake up in the morning, am not sick and thank God for the fact that I’m not sick. I don’t even think about the fact that I’m not sick until I get sick. Then when I’m sick, I pray and ask to not be sick anymore. And maybe if I’m being particularly good that week, the day I wake up and I feel better, I thank God that I feel better. But a week after that, when I still feel better, I’m probably not, I’ve probably forgotten about it. It’s when we’re weak, when we suffer loss, not that we become dependent, but we realize, when we become thankful, when we realize what God has done for us.

And so, the most horrible things that can happen to you and being born blind is pretty horrible, in the Greco-Roman world, there was no Romans with Disabilities Act. There were no public accommodations. You were condemned to a life of begging and having people take advantage of you because somebody comes by and takes all the money out of your begging cup. What are you going to do about it? But that doesn’t mean that God had cursed him because of his sin or his parents’ sin or anything else, but it meant that God is working in him.

Interlocutor: Would it also imply that there couldn’t be acts of mercy if there weren’t people in need of acts of mercy.

Fr. Stephen: Well, that is true, that is true. But we also don’t want to say God makes these people handicapped so that you can feel good about helping them, right? But when these things happen, I mean, see, we judge the quality and value of someone’s life by their external circumstances. So, we see someone who’s physically or mentally handicapped, and we feel we feel horrible for them, or someone who’s poor or someone who hasn’t had the virtue of an education or whatever, things haven’t worked out for them in some way. And then if we see someone the opposite, someone who’s healthy, someone who has, we say, oh, well, they’re doing well. They have a good quality of life. But if life, if the way we define life is the way the Scriptures define life, the way the Church defines life, which is knowing God, which is our closeness and our relationship with Christ, somebody could be severely physically and/or mentally handicapped and have a much closer relationship with Christ than me. And if that’s the case, then I should envy that person because what’s the toys and stuff I have compared to that in the long run.

So, we judge by the wrong standard. This person who was born blind may be very close to God. He may be the most holy and righteous person in the whole city of Jerusalem, but to the disciples, all they see is “Oh, he’s blind. He must have been cursed for somebody’s sins.” It’s a complete misunderstanding, a complete misunderstanding of how God relates to human beings and what suffering in this life and poverty in this life means compared to real wealth and real poverty in terms of our relationship with God. So Jesus continues:

“I must work the works of Him who sent Me while it is day; the night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”

So he’s speaking thematically about this person’s blindness because we, in the age of the electric light, do not see night the same way night was seen in the ancient world. You couldn’t flip on a light switch. There were no streetlamps of any kind, there’s no ambient light. So when it became dark, if you’ve ever been out camping on a moonless night, you know, it can get so dark you can’t see your hand in front of your face. There’s not this sort of ambient city light. And that’s how night was at this time. So when it was night and you couldn’t see, that was a very fearful thing because you were vulnerable. You could be attacked by a person, by an animal, by whatever. You could be robbed. Something could be broken into. You were sort of helpless and powerless. And so, for someone who isn’t blind, they associate being blind with being in that state all the time. So this poor person, he’s that way all the time. He could be attacked, he could be robbed. He could be able to do anything they want, and he can’t see it coming. He can’t defend himself. He can’t protect himself. He can’t work. He can’t do these things. And so Jesus is commenting off of that. So he makes this comment. He said this before. He has this work to do that he’s setting about doing, and that he has a certain time to do that, because when the night comes, you can’t work, you can’t do anything.

And then he comments again, “as long as I am in the world”. Remember, he’s talked several times. Remember the Pharisees misunderstood it about departing where they can think what’s it going to go to Greece and preach to the Greeks? And what does it mean? He’s going away, right? He’s obviously talking about his ascension ultimately. And so what he’s saying is, “While I’m here, I am the light of the world.” This goes back to what we were just saying. This person is blind and you pity him and you think he’s cursed. Why? Because he doesn’t have any light, right? He can’t see Jesus saying, “I am the light of the world. So if he knows me, he has light. He has light and he’s not in darkness. It’s the people who don’t see me who are really in darkness and who are really cursed.”

When He had said these things, He spat on the ground and made clay with the saliva; and He anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay.

Now, this is what is the odder… There’s a version of this that’s recorded in St. Mark’s Gospel also. It’s a much briefer version of this. Normally, Jesus doesn’t use materials. He just lays hands on people. He touches them, or sometimes he just speaks. He doesn’t even touch them. But in this case, he goes and rather than just speaking, he goes… And does that remind anybody of anything from the Old Testament?

Interlocutor: Well, the creation of man.

Fr. Stephen: Right. The creation of man. When God creates the world, he does it by speaking. But then when he comes to create a human being, he forms them out of the clay, out of the dust of the earth. So what’s implied here is that this man who was born blind, the reason he’s blind, as he has no eyes. And so what Jesus is symbolically doing here is he is making him eyes, He’s creating eyes for Him, okay? He’s creating eyes with clay.

Interlocutor: Ah OK, this whole thing never made sense to me.

Fr. Stephen: And so again, he’s just said “Before Abraham was, I am”. He just basically said he was God. Now he’s doing what God does. He’s creating. He’s creating God originally. And remember, he also just said, “I have work to do.” And how is the creation described? God completes all his work in six days and then rests in the tomb on the Sabbath, right? So that’s a theme that’s going to continue to be developed in the Gospel of John, because St. John is really going to emphasize the fact that Christ rests in the tomb on the Sabbath because he’s finished his work and so he rests.

So, we see sort of shades of that already here, that the work that Jesus is doing is sort of a recreation. God’s creation has gone awry because of human sin, and now Jesus is recreating and restoring the creation.

And He said to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which is translated, Sent). So he went and washed, and came back seeing.

So this is one of the pools in Jerusalem that was used for ceremonial washings before you went into the temple, before you went to the places, if you’d become unclean, you had to go and ceremonially wash. Jesus tells him to go and wash. When he goes and washes the clay away, he can see. He has eyes and he could see. So you’d think everyone would think this was wonderful.

Therefore the neighbors and those who previously had seen that he was blind said, “Is not this he who sat and begged?”

Some said, “This is he.” Others said, “He is like him.”

He said, “I am he.”

Therefore they said to him, “How were your eyes opened?”

He answered and said, “A Man called Jesus made clay and anointed my eyes and said to me, ‘Go to the pool of Siloam and wash.’ So I went and washed, and I received sight.”

Then they said to him, “Where is He?”

He said, “I do not know.”

Well, I mean, he was just blind, right?

That’s what he noted, someone called Jesus. Because why? Because he could hear. He heard them talking to him.

They brought him who formerly was blind to the Pharisees.

So they’re like, “Wow, this is amazing, right? I mean, who’s ever heard of this? Not just a blind person who can now see.” So they go to the religious authorities and say, “Hey…” Why would they go to the religious authorities?

Interlocutor: Yeah, why?

Fr. Stephen: Well, because again, remember, these are signs.

Interlocutor 2: I mean, everyone would recognize this as a miracle, right? This is a religious thing.

Fr. Stephen: Right. But also that this is a sign meaning it signifies something greater. What it’s thinking about is this must be the Messiah if he’s doing things like this. So they go to the religious authorities and say, “Hey, look, there’s this person who healed his blind man.” Apparently not knowing that the Pharisees are not so fond of Jesus.

Now it was a Sabbath when Jesus made the clay and opened his eyes.

All: Well, there you go.

Interlocutor: And Jesus called it work.

Then the Pharisees also asked him again how he had received his sight. He said to them, “He put clay on my eyes, and I washed, and I see.”

Therefore some of the Pharisees said, “This Man is not from God, because He does not keep the Sabbath.”

Interlocutor: Hey, buddy, couldn’t you be blind for one more day?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, exactly. So this clearly… why would he do it on the Sabbath, right? We think that’s silly, right? But from their perspective, if Jesus really has the power to do this and he really has that power from God, he can do it anytime he wants to. Why would he choose to do it on a day when you’re not supposed to do work? That’s how they’re approaching it.

Interlocutor: So is there a point in doing it on the Sabbath.

Fr. Stephen: Well, you’re not supposed to do any work on the Sabbath. And they had, as we talked about it, the Pharisees, their strategy for keeping the law was they called it, referred to as building a hedge around the law. So probably the best example of it is, there’s a commandment, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.” And so they said, well, what does that mean exactly? When are you taking in vain? When you’re not taking in vain. Tell you what, if we just never say it, right? If we never say the name of the Lord, then we can’t ever take it in vain. Right? So we’ll just make a rule. We won’t say it, we won’t write it, and then we never have to worry about taking the order in vain. They did the same with the other commandments. So you’re not to do work on the Sabbath. And so people said, well, what constitutes work? Right? Does that mean you can’t do anything? You have to stay in bed all day? Well, no, obviously it doesn’t mean that. They came up with a long list of rules of what constitutes work. You can walk this far. If you walk farther than that, that’s work. And if you do this, you start a fire, that’s work.

Here, the problem would not necessarily be the healing, but definitely making clay, right? If you’re making clay, that’s work. You’re working the ground, technically. So that constitutes work. That’s right out.

Interlocutor: And Jesus wanted it to be on the Sabbath.

Fr. Stephen:

Interlocutor: So he’s challenging the Pharisees?

Fr. Stephen: Well, we’ll see, because there’s going to be more to this.

Some of the Pharisees say, okay, obviously he can’t be the Messiah, because if he was the Messiah, he would have known better than to do this on the Sabbath. He would have waited, or he would have done it earlier.

Others said, “How can a man who is a sinner do such signs?” And there was a division among them.

So some of the other Pharisees said, “Well, wait a second, okay, yeah, he did it on the Sabbath. But when was the last time you saw someone who wasn’t from God make someone who was born blind able to see? That doesn’t make any sense. Who else has the ability to do that?” So they’re arguing and fighting amongst themselves.

They said to the blind man again, “What do you say about Him because He opened your eyes?”

He said, “He is a prophet.”

So the man, he starts easy. He says, “Well, clearly, if he could give sight to the blind, he’s a prophet.” Meaning, he’s saying he’s from God. He has to be from God to be able to do this.

But the Jews did not believe concerning him, that he had been blind and received his sight, until they called the parents of him who had received his sight.

So some of them say, “Well, I don’t buy this. I don’t buy that this guy was really born blind. Maybe he had something happen where he couldn’t see for a few days and he got better.”

Interlocutor: This is exactly the way modern people treat miracles, right? It could not have happened, and it must be explained by this or by the other, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right. So they haul in the guy’s parents, go find his parents.

And they asked them, saying, “Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?”

Notice who you say was born blind. So they identify him, yeah, this is our son. Yeah, he was born blind. And they’re like, okay, really? He was born blind? And how come he can see now?

His parents answered them and said, “We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind;”

“We were there. He was born blind. This is him.”

“but by what means he now sees we do not know, or who opened his eyes we do not know. He is of age; ask him. He will speak for himself.”

So they say, we weren’t there, right? So we don’t know exactly how he can see now, but he’s an adult. Ask him what happened.

His parents said these things because they feared the Jews, for the Jews had agreed already that if anyone confessed that He was Christ, he would be put out of the synagogue. Therefore his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.”

So we’ve already seen all this conflict and that they want to kill Jesus. They said, “Look, if anybody shows up and starts saying that this Jesus guy is the Messiah, they’re out. They’re out, because we don’t need anybody stirring up any more trouble about this, right?” So the parents, in part, even though they’ve obviously heard their son’s story, they just say, “Well, ask him.” Therefore, his parents said, “He is of age. Ask him.”

So they again called the man who was blind, and said to him, “Give God the glory! We know that this Man is a sinner.”

So they try a different tack. They say, “Okay, we’ll accept you were born blind and now you can see. But you need to just say that God healed you, right? Leave Jesus out of it, because he’s a sinner, he’s no good. Forget about him. Just say God healed your blindness, and then we’ll all be fine, right?”

He answered and said, “Whether He is a sinner or not I do not know. One thing I know: that though I was blind, now I see.”

So he says, “Look, I don’t know Him well, and I haven’t been traveling with Him. You say you know he’s a sinner. I don’t know. Here’s what I know. I know from my birth until this morning I was blind. And now I can see. That’s what I know for sure. And he was involved.”

Then they said to him again, “What did He do to you? How did He open your eyes?”

Because we’re getting to that clay part, right? He worked on the Sabbath.

He answered them, “I told you already, and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become His disciples?”

So he kind of takes a jab back at them, right? “Do you want all the details because you’re interested in going and following him?”

Then they reviled him and said, “You are His disciple, but we are Moses’ disciples. We know that God spoke to Moses; as for this fellow, we do not know where He is from.”

So they’re not willing to commit right here, even to slandering him. They just say, “Look, we know Moses spoke from God. This guy, no.” Why is Moses so important here? Well, remember Ten Commandments “Honor the Sabbath day.” We got the Sabbath commandment from Moses. Moses, we know, spoke to God. And so this guy breaks the Sabbath. That clearly shows he’s not on the same team as Moses.

Interlocutor: They thought they were hedging the law as being from Moses originally.

Fr. Stephen: As being from Moses. Yes.

The man answered and said to them, “Why, this is a marvelous thing, that you do not know where He is from; yet He has opened my eyes!”

He says, “This is fascinating, right? I was born blind. He made it so I can see. And you have no idea how he could do that? There seems to be one obvious option to me, that he’s from God.”

“Now we know that God does not hear sinners; but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does His will, He hears him.”

Now, notice what’s happening here. This person who was born blind, who the disciples, as soon as they saw him, said, oh, this guy’s cursed by God. He is lecturing the Pharisees on theology. He is giving a lecture to these people who are supposed to be the religious leaders, who are supposed to know the Scriptures. He is explaining to them who God is and how God operates, because they don’t understand. He says, “Look, if someone who’s sinful, if someone who’s wicked asks God to do a miracle through him, God’s not going to do it, right?” This is pretty basic, right? We know that. But if someone’s a worshiper of God, if someone follows God, if someone keeps the law, if someone draws close to God, then God hears their prayers. This is sort of Theology 101 stuff.

“Since the world began it has been unheard of that anyone opened the eyes of one who was born blind.”

There’s no other examples of this besides me. It’s not like this happens all the time. No one’s ever heard of this happening.

“If this Man were not from God, He could do nothing.”

So he breaks it down and makes it real simple for the Pharisees. If he was really a sinner and he tried to do something this amazing, restoring sight to a blind person, there’s no way he could do it. There’s no way that God would do it through someone like that. So the fact that he did this means he’s from God. It’s very simple. Very simple. I don’t know why you Pharisees don’t get it right.

They answered and said to him, “You were completely born in sins, and are you teaching us?” And they cast him out.

Interlocutor 2: They’re right back to the disciples’ idea that he must have…

Fr. Stephen: Right. The response is not to answer any of his arguments. But just say, “Who are you to come in here, you no good sinner, and try and lecture us, the wise people, the teachers, the law, the leaders? How dare you?” And so they throw him out.

Interlocutor 2: That was maybe one of the first ideas, what he meant by the sentence at the beginning, since he said this is not his father’s mistake, but to show the Lord’s act in him right now. He’s showing the Lord’s act with him by wisdom. He is not a teacher, he is not anything big that he can give a lecture for the Pharisees, but he does.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Because he actually knows God. Yes, right. The person who sees Christ has light, the person who doesn’t…

Interlocutor: And he’s speaking from actual experience, not from study…

Fr. Stephen: Right. From his knowledge of God, right. He’s come to know, despite the fact that he was blind, possibly because of the fact that he’s been blind and has had this difficult life, he’s come to know God very well. And these Pharisees have not. They know a lot of things about God they think.

Interlocutor: Something you said early on about how someone who was blind or otherwise disadvantaged might know God better than anyone else. It seems like there’s sort of an implication that this man was a pretty perceptive Godly man himself, right? In all of his blindness, he spent a lot of time thinking about God, and so he can recognize….

Fr. Stephen: Right. God has been working in him all this time.

Jesus heard that they had cast him out

Now this “cast him out” I should add is not just they threw him out of the room, this is referring back to what his parents knew. They’ve thrown him out of the synagogue, the equivalent in church terms of they’ve excommunicated him. He’s officially been declared a sinner. He’s one of those no-good tax collectors and sinners who aren’t welcome around here, right? So Jesus hears that this has happened to him.

and when He had found him, He said to him, “Do you believe in the Son of God?”

He answered and said, “Who is He, Lord, that I may believe in Him?”

So remember, the Son of God is, at this point, primarily a messianic title. In the Old Testament, the king was referred to as God’s son. And they meant sort of by adoption. That was part of the ritual when the King was coronated in the Old Testament. It was pronounced, “Today you are my son. Today I have begotten…” that they were sort of adopted. And St. Paul’s going to pick up on that adoption language and use it to refer to all of us who are Christians, that we’ve all been adopted into God’s family, not just the King, but that all of us have. Now, Christ obviously is the Son of God in another sense as well, right? And being the begotten son of God from eternity. But in terms of how he would have heard it, how this blind man would have heard it, this would be, do you believe in the Messiah? Essentially, that’s what he said. Do you believe in the Christ? And so the man asks Jesus in response, who is he that I may believe in him? Now, he may look at that as being obtuse. Well, obviously Jesus was talking about himself, but not necessarily. He’s accepted that Jesus is a prophet. But remember St. John the Forerunner was a prophet. He was not the Messiah himself he pointed to. But what the man is saying to Jesus right now is you tell me who he is and I will believe in him. He’s telling Jesus whatever you tell me, I’ll believe it because of what you’ve shown me and what you’ve done.

And Jesus said to him, “You have both seen Him and it is He who is talking with you.”

Then he said, “Lord, I believe!” And he worshiped Him.

So immediately Jesus says, “I’m him”. He says, “I believe it”. So this man who was born blind, recognizes Jesus immediately. The Pharisees have spent all this time with him going back and forth and still have no clue who he is.

Interlocutor 3: So people who are not struggling are at a disadvantage?

Fr. Stephen: Well, if you’re living in a sinful world and you’re not struggling, that’s a bad sign.

Interlocutor 4: I get hung up on… when we say struggling, what does that mean?

Interlocutor 3: It has some sort of something that’s apparently disadvantaged to most people like from what we just read.

Fr. Stephen: Well, for example, not everyone has physical… a lot of people do, but not everyone has physical ailments… But if we take this to the level of sin, there’s sin in all of our lives. So if you’re not struggling with sin, that doesn’t mean you’re perfect. That means you’re not struggling with the sin in your life.

To give you an example, this is an old monastic story. There was a monk at this monastery who was assigned… the monastery was up on a hill, and he was assigned to stay in this sort of little house down at the base of the hill, which is where they received visitors and guests. They would come there to that house first, and he would greet them and tell them how to get up to the monastery, whatever rules and whatever else that they needed to know. And he was assigned to do this. But this particular monk was drunk all the time, stone drunk all the time. And so he was an embarrassment to the other monks. The other monks were always saying to the abbot, why do you have him out there greeting guests? Of all people, right? Of all people, this is the impression you want to give, and why do you have him out there?

And so the day came when that monk died. They found him dead down at the guest house. And so, the other monks went back to the abbot to tell him that this monk had died. And before they could even say anything, the abbot said, “I know he died because I saw angels come down from heaven to escort him, his soul to heaven.” And the monks all said, “Wait, you remember who we’re talking about, right? The drunk. The one who was down there all the time, trashed.”

And the Abbott said, “I know exactly who you’re talking about”. He says, “What you don’t know is when he came here, he drank twelve drinks every day, every year. When Pascha came, he gave up one drink. So at the time he died, he was still having four drinks a day, and he was still drunk all the time, but he had gone from twelve to four.” He said, “God honored his struggle and rewarded his struggle.”

So we tend to think God honors victory. I have to be victorious over whatever it is, right? I have to, you know, become sinless. But what God is looking for in us is not he knows our weakness. What he’s looking for in us is that struggle, that effort in the sinful world we live in.

And so, it’s not that people who aren’t struggling are disadvantaged. It’s that people who aren’t struggling are generally not struggling because they’ve given up. Those are really the two options. They’ve either given up or they’re actually actively wicked. They’ve fallen victim to sin, they’ve fallen in battle.

But that’s a very different way of looking at our life in Christ than this idea that anyone who’s struggling or anyone who’s at a disadvantage is being cursed by God because they’re somehow less than or a lousy Christian, which is how those monks looked at it. That guy is a no good drunk because his sins were obvious, and those other monks’ sins weren’t as obvious, but that monk was holier than they were because he was struggling against his sins, whereas they weren’t. And so that’s part of the dynamic that’s going on. The disciples see him and say, well, this guy was cursed. This guy’s a… And the Pharisees look at him and say the same thing, right? But what they don’t see is that this man is struggling with his sins to do God’s will and to become close to God. And they’re very pleased. The Pharisees especially are very pleased with their own righteousness and how well they’re doing and how holy they think they are. Does that help?

Interlocutor: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So immediately, he worships Jesus.

And Jesus said, “For judgment I have come into this world, that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may be made blind.”

Now, this sounds like it contradicts some of the things we read earlier at first blush, right? Like John 3:17, remember said, Jesus did not come to condemn the world, but the world might be saved through him. And so the English word judgment has sort of a purely negative connotation. But the word that really lies behind this from the Old Testament in Hebrew and Aramaic, is mishpat, which is usually translated judgment, but can also just mean justice, that the order is reestablished. So as we mentioned, things are out of whack, right? There are wicked people who are prospering. There are righteous people who are suffering. And so when God comes to judge the world in the Old Testament, he’s coming to fix that. He’s coming to balance the scales. So judgment is something to be afraid of if you’re one of the wicked who’s been riding high. Judgment is something to look forward to if you’re one of the righteous people who has been suffering.

Interlocutor: And here [in Arabic] I have a different word. It’s not the same translation like judgment, it’s Dinouna

Interlocutor 2: It’s more justice.

Fr. Stephen: Right, more justice, that idea that there’s going to be that these things are going to be set right. So that’s what Jesus is saying. I came into this world to set these things right. And so when he talks about those who are blind may see, those who see may be made blind, he’s referring to this man into the Pharisees before Jesus comes. The Pharisees are the ones riding high and think they can see and think they know and think they understand. I think this man who’s been born blind is a sinner. But once Jesus comes, what’s revealed? Well, now that man who was blind can see, and it’s revealed that he’s the one who’s really righteous. And those Pharisees, whoever that was righteous, they’re really blind. They’re really blind. They really can’t see. They really don’t know. And they’re the ones who are not righteous because you just outside of it.

Interlocutor: The Pharisees, how was their line of secession? How would one become a Pharisee?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the Pharisees are really I mean, sect isn’t a good term. They were a religious party, so there wasn’t sort of like an initiation rite. It was a set of beliefs. It was a way of interpreting and understanding the law. And so you became a Pharisee. You would sort of be mentored and taught by a rabbi who was a Pharisee, be educated by them. And that’s how St. Paul became a Pharisee. Before he became St. Paul, when he was Saul of Tarsus, he was educated by Gamaliel, who was a rabbi, and he took the Pharisaic view of how the law should be interpreted and applied, as opposed to, like the Sadducees, who only accepted the Torah, didn’t accept the prophets. They had their own other views. But yeah, the Pharisees, it was that particular way of understanding the law. So probably school or school of thought would be a better way of thinking about it.

Interlocutor: What’s the relationship of the Pharisees to the ordinary Jews? I get the impression from the New Testament that the ordinary Jews don’t do the things the Pharisees do, but they look up to them and sort of consider them to be the righteous leaders.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Because the Pharisees… and this is, remember, the big criticism of the Pharisees by Jesus is not that they’re wrong, it’s that they’re hypocrites. They talk a good line. Right. He says at one point, do whatever the Pharisees say, but don’t do what they do, because they had spent their lives studying the Torah. Right. So if they tell you what the Torah says, listen to it, do what the Torah says, but don’t follow their practices because they’re not really keeping it. The Pharisees believed… they saw themselves as sort of an Israel within Israel. Remember, the purpose of Israel originally in the Old Testament was that they were called to be a light to the nations. They were to follow God’s law. The other nations would see it. So the Pharisees looked at themselves the same way. They said, we need to go out and follow God’s law and be righteous in public. So they’ll see us and they’ll learn to come and be like us.

Interlocutor: They also thought that those people, the people who hadn’t joined them yet are the problem.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Are the problem. Are the problem. But they weren’t strictly go and kill them all. They were willing to. If you would come and become one of them, as Jesus says to them, at one point, you cross heaven and earth to make one convert, to get one person to become a Pharisee like you, and then you make them twice the Son of Hell you are. Saying you go through all this trouble to try and get them to become like you and condemn them if they won’t. Cut them off if they won’t, potentially kill them if they won’t. But once they become like you, where you’re not leading them toward any kind of salvation, you’re just making more hypocrites like you.

Interlocutor: Some Pharisees recognize Christ, right?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. I mean, St. Paul notably becomes Christian. And so what happens is we’re going to see this in the Book of Acts and then in Galatians and then in other places, is that the first major crisis in the early Church is that there are Pharisees who become Christians who want to take their interpretation of the law with them into Christianity and sort of enforce it on everybody. They especially want to enforce it on the Gentiles who are becoming Christians, who they consider still to be unclean and still to be yes, there are some who come to Christ, but there’s this sort of trouble of, okay, you accepted that Jesus is the Messiah, that has consequences now for how you’re going to live your life. And so you’re not going to be able to be a Pharisee in the same sense. You’re not going to be able to live in the same way, because, again, that was a hypocritical way of life.

Interlocutor: But by this point, we already have Nicodemus, who’s sort of on the way.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, well, we just saw there was this division in the Pharisees, at least at first, where some of them were saying, “Well, hey, wait a minute”. So, yeah, it’s not 100% of the Pharisees, but yeah, that group and that party or that school is sort of looked up to by… it’s sort of like, well, this is going away in the United States. But there was a time in the United States where if someone came on TV and had a PhD in something and was an expert on something and they explained it to you, people generally would accept that. I know that’s not the case anymore. There was a time, right, Dr. So and So from the Institute of Whatever came on and said here’s, people would kind of nod and say, “Oh, okay, well, that’s how an atomic bomb works, okay.” Because a physicist came and explained it to them.

So, it was the same kind of thing that was with the Pharisees, right? Well, these people spent their life studying the Torah and the Scriptures. They really know what they’re talking about. And because they would make this public ostentation, they’d go and stand in public and pray these big, long, eloquent prayers. Oh, wow, they must be really holy. Wow, look at that. And Jesus keeps pointing out, no, that’s hypocrisy. That’s show… in Matthew there’s a whole series of those things, in St. Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus says, don’t pray like that when you pray. Go into your house and pray, because God hears you praying in your house in secret. Don’t go stand on the street corner and make a show. He says, when you fast, don’t go out in public and hollow out your cheeks and, oh, I haven’t eaten for a day. Make this big show of how you’re fasting. He says, wash your face. Don’t let anyone know you’re fasting. Right? God knows you’re fasting. So Jesus made a whole list of them, because the Pharisees did the opposite. The Pharisees made this big show, but that show worked on the common people said, oh, wow, those good, man, they’re really holy.

Interlocutor: The same when they come to church and she wants everybody to see…

Fr. Stephen: Right. Flap the bill around in the air. And so there’s that element. So they’ve fostered this public impression that they are the religious experts. They are the authorities. They are the ones who know, unlike you people. And so if they made a pronouncement, there were a lot of just the common people who would say, oh, well, I mean, they must know what they’re talking about on a religious matter, which is why they brought him to the Pharisees in the first place, right? “Well, this is amazing. Maybe this guy is the Messiah. Well, let’s go ask the experts, right?”

But the reality here, as Jesus points out, is they’re not the experts. They’re blind, and they don’t know anything. And the fact that Jesus has come is now revealing that it’s always been true. It’s always been true that this blind man was closer to God than the Pharisees. But now that’s being revealed by the fact that Jesus has come and encountered both.

Then some of the Pharisees who were with Him heard these words, and said to Him, “Are we blind also?”

So the Pharisees aren’t all stupid. There are some Pharisees who are nearby. You hear Him say that to the man and go, “Wait a second. Did he just call us blind?”

Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have no sin; but now you say, ‘We see.’ Therefore your sin remains.”

What he’s saying to them is if you realize the fact, he’s confirming, “Yeah, you’re blind.” But he’s saying, if you acknowledged it, if you understood how blind you are, if you had the humility, if they came to Jesus and said, “We don’t understand. We don’t know who you are. We don’t know how you’re doing these things. We don’t know God as well as we’d like.” They would not have sin, and Jesus could teach them. Jesus could show them. Jesus could give light to them. Jesus could heal them the way he healed this blind man. But that’s not what they say. They say, “We see.” They say, “We know. We know God. We understand. We understand better than you, Jesus, because you go around doing this stuff on the Sabbath, so clearly, you don’t know anything about the Law. You don’t know anything about Moses. You don’t know anything about God.” And so he says, “That’s why you’re the sinners. Not because you’re blind, but because you think you can see and you claim you can see even though you’re blind.”

And this gets back to what we were talking about, about struggling. The person who is righteous is the person who knows that he’s a sinner. It’s sort of a play on that old thing. Why was Socrates the wisest man in Athens? Because he was the only one who didn’t think he was the wisest man in Athens. The person who’s the most righteous is the person who’s most aware of his own sin. Because the people who think they’re righteous just aren’t aware of their sin. They’re not less sinful. And so the sin that isn’t forgiven is the sin that isn’t repented of. So as long as we claim we’re sinless, we can’t receive forgiveness, we can’t receive healing. You can’t be healed of your blindness if you won’t admit you’re blind. That’s what Jesus is getting at here, right? And again, he’s still talking to these Pharisees. He’s still talking to them. He’s still trying to explain that.

Interlocutor: He’s talking to them more than anybody, right? And what he’s just said to them is that he would be willing to heal them. They’re offended that he called them blind. And his response is, if you would just admit you’re blind, I’d heal you and you’d see.

Interlocutor: So I picture, one of these Pharisees, doesn’t change anything in his life, but he suddenly realizes that Jesus has got the truth and he comes to him and humbly says, “Please teach me.” At that point, he goes from being blind to seeing, from being a sinner to being a sinner on the way to redemption.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And that’s exactly what happens with St. Paul. And notice St. Paul is struck blind when he sees Christ. That is when he’s baptized, that he could see again, that he’s illuminated.

Interlocutor: It’s not just an example that he’s used. It is just to let us know the difference between the light and the dark. Because blindness is the dark that we live in with the sin. So mainly that’s what he’s trying to give to us, to let us know…

Fr. Stephen: Right? We look at things like the physical ailment of blindness, right? And Jesus is talking about what real blindness is, what real darkness is. Real darkness is not knowing God. Real darkness is not knowing Christ. That’s when you’re really in danger. That’s when you should really be afraid. That’s real darkness to live in that way, not knowing Christ. And so real light, then really being able to see is coming to know, coming to know Christ. St. Paul, when he’s Saul of Tarsus, the Pharisee, he’s going out and persecuting the church. He thinks he understands, he thinks he knows, he thinks he’s righteous, right? He says later in one of his epistles that he was blameless as far as the law was concerned when he was a Pharisee, he had no sin. He was not one of those sinners. He’s a Pharisee and comes to realize just how blind he’s been. That he’s been persecuting the messiah. He’s been persecuting the God he thought he was following. He comes with how blind he’s been and now he really sees.