Jesus and the healing of the man born blind

There are many instances in the gospels of Jesus restoring someone’s sight, but this is not one of them. We’re told that this man was born blind, so Jesus wasn’t restoring something lost, but giving him something he had never had. He can now see for the very first time. But the gift of sight in this long and intricate passage is only a prelude to an even greater gift: the gift of insight.

This episode, in other words, is about the gift of faith. The man’s real enlightenment comes about when he’s enabled, by the light of faith, to see who Jesus is. With his words, “Lord, I believe”, he acknowledges that Jesus isn’t just the source of his sight, but of his whole being. And that insight is even more life-changing than physically seeing for the first time because to be given faith is to be given a share in God’s own knowledge and God’s own life. John plainly saw huge significance in this healing miracle. Like last week’s gospel about the Samaritan woman at the well, it sums up the entire gospel message, solemnly announced in the majestic prologue to his gospel: Jesus, the Word made flesh, the light of the world, has come to enlighten all human beings, without exception. That’s why the Church quickly came to see in this encounter a vivid illustration of baptism, the sacrament of faith. Significantly, some of the very earliest Christian writers, Justin Martyr (100-65), for instance, spoke of baptism as ‘enlightenment’.

Again, unsurprisingly, there are no fewer than seven catacomb paintings illustrating this miracle, all of them associated with the sacrament of baptism. And from the third century, and possibly earlier, the account of this healing was used liturgically in the preparation of catechumens for baptism. In particular, it was used in the third 1 First Apology, 61:13 2 Great Scrutiny, when the candidates were asked, as was the man born blind, if they believed that Jesus is the Son of God, to which they would reply, in the blind man’s words: “I do believe, Lord.” (This, by the way, is why this gospel is allowed as an alternative to that prescribed for this Sunday). The story’s connection to baptism can be seen in other ways. Jesus’ use of spittle might strike us as odd, but until the reform of the liturgy after Vatican II, the priest at a baptism would anoint the child’s lips with his own spittle at the beginning of the baptismal rite.

Though most moderns would now find it unacceptable from a hygiene point of view, spittle was widely used for medicinal purposes in the ancient world. The spittle of a distinguished person was thought to be especially curative. The Roman historian, Tacitus (56-120AD), tells of a visit of the Emperor Vespasian (9-79AD) to Alexandria, where he cured a man’s eye-disease with his spittle; Pliny (d.79AD) has a whole chapter of his natural history on the healing power of spittle. And, despite our hyper-sensitivity about hygiene, we, along with most other animals, instinctively use spittle to relieve pain. What do you do, without thinking, if you burn your finger or hit your thumb with a hammer? A parent’s ‘kissing it better’ is an example of the same instinct and ‘licking your wounds’ had a literal meaning before it acquired its metaphorical sense.

The clinching baptismal significance of the episode is the fact that the blind man’s healing was complete only when he’d washed himself in the pool of Siloam. If, as St Augustine (354-430AD) says in his commentary on John’s gospel, the man born blind represents the entire human race in need of enlightenment, so his miraculous healing also represents what has been given to each of us in the gift of faith: not mere sight, but insight, the gift which enables us to recognise that Christ, the Light of the World, is the light by which we see everything, in both life and death.

And, like the man born blind, what we were given in faith is not just a faculty of recognition, but the capacity for living an entirely new kind of life, God’s own life, the life of grace in faith, hope, and love. And, finally, as with so many other episodes in the gospels, Jesus totally reverses our usual perspective: the story starts with the supposed ‘sinner’ receiving the gift of sight for the first time; but it ends with the supposedly ‘righteous’, in this case the Pharisees, being blinded by their prejudice. It ends, in other words, on the sober note of judgment, more specifically, the self-judgment of the Pharisees who, despite all they’ve witnessed, are still blind, not only to who Jesus is, but even to their own blindness. The light of Christ enlightens all who know their need of sight and insight, but it serves only to deepen the darkness of those who think they see more clearly than anyone else.