Usually when I read John 9, the story of Jesus healing a blind man, I am drawn to the rebuke Jesus gives to the people who asked who committed sin such that the man was born without sight. His blindness had nothing to do with any wrongs done by him, his parents or ancestors, Jesus said, but it was so that “God’s works might be revealed in him.”
Indeed, what was viewed by others as a person paying the price for an offense against God was lifted up by Jesus as an opportunity to show God’s mercy, grace, and capacity to heal.
But the passage points to another type of blindness—spiritual blindness. The religious authorities questioned the formerly blind man afterward about how he could possibly be healed, given that Jesus was not deemed to have the proper pedigree or hew to all of the orthodoxies to be anything other than a “sinner” incapable of displaying Godly power. And when they were not satisfied with his answer that the person who healed his blindness had to be of God, they threw him out of the temple.
Jesus later reconnects with the newly sighted man, who commits to following Christ. Jesus says at that point that “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.“
In other words, there is a seeing that can take place with our minds, hearts, and souls—a seeing into the nature and effects of racism and other forms of discrimination, a seeing into the systems that drive poverty and deprivation, a seeing of how unaddressed emotional and even physical trauma can cause the sufferers to inflict trauma upon others. We see the effects all around us, but many of us only see the outward signs. The conclusions we draw from those outward signs, or the folk wisdom that we accept unchallenged, blind us to what lies underneath. A connection with Christ actually reveals how blind we are.
When we see other people as God sees us, and thus strive to love others as God loves us, it is like washing the mud off our eyes. We can see what really keeps people from living the lives they were divinely intended to live. We can see that the condition of a person’s life is not necessarily divine retribution for the mistakes they made. These are opportunities for God’s power to be revealed—and opportunities for us to be instruments of that power.