Biblion Bible Commentary
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One Thing I Know
John 9:24-34
24 So they called the man who was blind a second time, and said to him, “Give glory to God. We know that this man is a sinner.” · WEB
A beggar with no education takes a council apart with the plainest argument in Scripture, and is thrown out for it.
"Give glory to God. We know that this man is a sinner" John 9:24.
The formula was a solemn charge to tell the truth Joshua 7:19, and it is being used to instruct a witness what the truth is. They have told him the verdict and invited him to agree with it under oath.
"I don't know if he is a sinner. One thing I do know: that though I was blind, now I see" John 9:25.
It is the finest sentence in the chapter and one of the great sentences of the New Testament. He concedes everything he cannot speak to and holds the one thing he can. No theology, no argument about the Sabbath, no claim beyond his competence — and a fact that cannot be got round.
"What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?" John 9:26. They ask a fourth time, which is what an inquiry does when it wants a different answer.
"I told you already, and you didn't listen. Why do you want to hear it again? You don't also want to become his disciples, do you?" John 9:27.
His patience gives out and what comes out is a joke, delivered to the most powerful men he has ever stood in front of. It is the moment the account stops being about a healing and becomes about a man.
"You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses. But as for this man, we don't know where he comes from" John 9:28–29.
They take the bait and state their position, and it hands him his argument.
"How amazing! You don't know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes" John 9:30.
He has spotted it instantly. The experts have just admitted ignorance about a man who performed an unprecedented act — and their business is precisely to be able to tell where such things come from. The one thing they are qualified to rule on, they concede they cannot.
"We know that God doesn't listen to sinners, but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does his will, he listens to him" John 9:31.
He argues from their own maxim, and it is their maxim — they had used it two minutes earlier John 9:24.
"Since the world began it has never been heard of that anyone opened the eyes of someone born blind" John 9:32. The claim is checkable and true. No such thing appears anywhere in the older Scriptures, not from Moses or Elijah or Elisha.
"If this man were not from God, he could do nothing" John 9:33.
The conclusion is three steps from premises they supplied, and it is unanswerable. A beggar with no training has out-reasoned a panel of professionals using nothing but their own principles and one fact about himself.
"You were altogether born in sins, and do you teach us?" Then they threw him out John 9:34.
The reply is not a rebuttal. It is the assumption the disciples started the chapter with — that his blindness proved sin — thrown at him as an insult, and it has already been denied by the only person entitled to deny it John 9:3.
And then they expel him, which is what the policy in verse twenty-two had prepared. He has lost his synagogue, his standing and, in effect, his family, on the day he received his sight — and the last thing he did before losing them was tell the truth.
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