John 9:1-38 pivots on this question: “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” The traditional answer in Jesus’ day was that God is the cause of all that happens – from the hatching of eggs, to leaves falling, to your mother-in-law “just stopping by”, to a person being born blind.

People have not changed all that much. Not just college prospects on getting selected in the NFL Draft, many are still obsessed with the causation factor and want to know the reason why things happen. There has to be a reason for everything. We live in an assumptive world, a realm bounded by certain steadfast convictions of what can and what cannot be. Many hold a set of boxes, each one a cause that explains why something happens. So, when a baby is born blind or a tsunami kills over 155,00 people, some rush in to file it away in one of those boxes.

How is God responsible for a disabling birth defect? Who has done what to provoke God to inflict such a thing upon a newborn?

Note how Jesus doesn’t buy into blame. Instead, he says the blind man exists to glorify God. Nobody had ever said such a thing to the sightless man: he exists for a purpose. And that purpose? To glorify God. Every day of his life he had been told he was useless, only a burden, and all this decreed by a vengeful God.

When something powerful happened to the blind man, he didn’t understand how it happened or who it was that placed mud over his eyes. He only knew that for the first time in his life he could see; and that the miracle had radically redefined what he had always been told about how God works in the world. 

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The man didn’t know what to believe about what happened. All he knew is that it did happen, while the religious authorities are busy trying to explain what can or cannot be, what is right and what is wrong. The only two categories that interest this man are “blind” and “not blind.”

John 9:1-38 is the contrast between those who know they are blind and those who do not know they are blind but claim to see all things more clearly than others. It’s about stubborn blindness that refuses to be surprised by God. It’s about unwillingness to accept something that doesn’t fit into a box in an assumptive world.

According to John’s Gospel, the people to watch out for are those who claim to see and see better than all others. Those not shy about telling others they do not see what they are actually seeing. The ones who want to “protect” others from wrong belief. What if something is not of God and you believe that it is? That is the type of question religious overseers love to pose. They relish pointing out what they deem to be wrong belief will place my soul at risk.

John 9 suggests there is something worse than wrong belief, and that is wrong belief! What if something is of God and I don’t believe it? What if a person’s own individual, personal belief prevents them from realizing God acts beyond their expectations? That’s the question religious overseers seldom allow to be asked.

We are given two choices. We can open our eyes and live in the light of God’s grace and compassion. We can remain in the darkness of narrow-minded intolerant lives. When something happens, we can rush to fit it into one of the little boxes of our assumptive world, or we can return with it to the waters of our baptism where God is eager to wash away our blindness.

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- Rev. Colby Smith