Biblion Bible Commentary
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Who Sinned?
John 9:1-12
1 As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. · WEB
The disciples see a theological problem; he sees a man, and the question about blame is refused.
As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth John 9:1.
He sees him. Nobody has asked for anything, and the man is a fixture — he sat and begged John 9:8, so he was part of the scenery outside the temple.
"Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" John 9:2.
The disciples look at the same man and see a puzzle. The assumption behind their question was standard: suffering implies guilt, so the only issue is whose. And the alternatives they offer are both awkward, since a man blind from birth cannot have earned it beforehand.
What is worth noticing is that they discuss him in his hearing. He is sitting there while his condition is used as a seminar topic.
"This man didn't sin, nor did his parents, but that the works of God might be revealed in him" John 9:3.
The first half refuses the question outright, and it is one of the most liberating sentences in Scripture. The link between a particular affliction and a particular sin — which Job's friends made at length and which people still make quietly about themselves — is denied in a clause.
The second half needs care. Read as though God caused a lifetime of blindness in order to stage a miracle, it makes the healing cruel. The Greek carries no punctuation and no verb in that clause; what is being supplied is purpose, and the purpose that the sentence goes on to describe is what is about to happen: I must work the works of him who sent me while it is day John 9:4. The blindness is not being explained. It is being taken up.
That is this book's consistent way with suffering. It does not offer a cause; it shows what God does with it.
"The night is coming, when no one can work" John 9:4. A note of urgency in the middle of a healing, and the daylight in question is his own remaining time.
"While I am in the world, I am the light of the world" John 9:5. The claim from the feast is repeated John 8:12, and this time it is followed immediately by a demonstration. Light is about to be given to a man who has never had any.
He spat on the ground, made mud with the saliva, anointed the blind man's eyes with the mud John 9:6.
The method is strange and physical. Nothing required it — a word had healed at a distance in chapter four. Making clay from dust and applying it to a man who has been that way since birth is an act of forming rather than of repair, and the reader who has been told that all things were made through him John 1:3 may hear an echo of dust in the second chapter of Genesis.
It is also, incidentally, a violation of the Sabbath under the traditions, which counted kneading as work. That is why the chapter turns into an inquiry.
"Go, wash in the pool of Siloam" (which means "Sent") John 9:7.
The writer stops to translate, which he does only when the meaning matters. Siloam was the pool the water was drawn from during the feast, fed by a channel cut through rock — water that was sent down to the city. And sent is the word this Gospel uses of him on nearly every page.
The man is told to go and wash in a pool named for the thing standing in front of him.
So he went away, washed, and came back seeing. Six words for the miracle, and the obedience is the whole of his part: he walks across the city with mud on his eyes on the word of a stranger he has never seen.
"Isn't this he who sat and begged?" John 9:8. The neighbors cannot agree that it is the same man, which is its own small comment on how invisible he had been. He said, "I am he" John 9:9.
"Where is he?" He said, "I don't know" John 9:12. He has never seen his healer's face and cannot pick him out of a crowd. Everything he says for the rest of the chapter, he says without having met the man he is defending.
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