Blind Beyond Eyes

Text focus: John 9:1-41

Have you ever noticed how quickly we try to explain someone else’s suffering? When something difficult happens, an illness, an accident, a diagnosis, we have a tendency to start asking questions.

What happened?

What caused it?

Whose fault is it?

Often those questions are an attempt to make sense of the world, but they also reveal something deeper. They indicate our discomfort with things that don’t fit our expectations.

This story in John begins with the disciples asking similar questions. Jesus and the disciples encounter a man who has been blind since birth. And the disciples ask a question.

Not “How can we help?”

Not “What does he need?”

Instead, they ask, “Who sinned?”

It’s a question about blame, and before the miracle even happens, Jesus starts the work of healing. Healing the beliefs and systems that have caused harm to this man. Jesus does return this man’s sight, but notice that the miracle takes up a very small part of this story, the majority of this story is focused on helping people rewrite the narrative they have learned that has disenfranchised and othered people. Jesus demonstrates that there’s a difference between looking and seeing.

You can look directly at someone and still fail to see them. You can see a person every day, working beside you, sitting in your church, walking past you in the grocery store, and still never recognize their story, their dignity, their humanity. Sometimes the deepest blindness is not in our eyes. It’s in our assumptions.

Through this Gospel story, we learn by the end, that the real blindness in this story may not belong to the man without sight. As the story unfolds, we begin to realize something surprising. The man who cannot see physically may actually be the only one in the story who truly sees.

So let’s jump into the scripture. The disciples see a man born blind and they ask Jesus: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” It’s a question that assumes suffering must have a reason. Someone must be responsible. Someone must be to blame.

In the ancient world, many people believed physical conditions were the result of sin or divine punishment, but Jesus refuses that framework. He responds: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned.”

In other words, this disability is not the result of a moral failure. This is not divine punishment. Jesus rejects the assumption that a person’s body tells us something about their worth or righteousness. In that moment, Jesus dismantles a theology that equates disability with failure or punishment. He refuses the idea that a person’s body reveals their spiritual worth.

Instead, Jesus reframes the situation: “so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” This statement has often been misunderstood to mean that the man exists merely as a prop for a miracle. But the story itself indicates something much deeper than healing his eyes. The works of God revealed in this man are not limited to the moment his eyes open, they unfold through his courage, his testimony, his refusal to be silenced, and his growing faith.

The man becomes one of the clearest witnesses to Jesus in the entire chapter. That is one of the first important take aways. Because throughout history, and even still today, people with disabilities have often been treated as problems to be solved rather than people to be loved, but Jesus demonstrates that this narrative is misguided.

The disciples saw a beggar, but Jesus sees a person.

The disciples saw a theological puzzle, but Jesus sees a child of God.

What happens next is a miracle and a moment of reminding us about our creation. Jesus kneels down. He touches the ground. He spits in the dust and makes mud. Do you hear the echoes from the book of Genesis? In Genesis, we read that God formed humanity from the dust of the earth. God gathered the ordinary soil and then breathed life into it. We are dust animated by divine breath.

And here in John’s gospel, Jesus bends down to that same dust again. He takes the earth in his hands, forms mud. And he places it on the man’s eyes.

It’s a moment of new creation. The Creator is touching the earth again, but here is where we must be careful, because sometimes people read this story and assume the miracle is about fixing a defective body, but the deeper story suggests something much larger.

Because after the man receives his sight, the real drama begins. We spend the core of this passage with people, his neighbors, the Pharisees, even his parents, arguing about whether he is really the same person, if he had really been healed.

His neighbors are confused.

The religious leaders interrogate him.

His parents fail to speak up, afraid they may be punished.

Eventually, the man is thrown out of the synagogue.

As with most stories of healing in the Gospels, many scholars believe that Jesus heals this man so that he can return fully to the community. In the ancient world, physical conditions like blindness often pushed people to the margins. socially, economically, and religiously. Healing was not only about the body; it was about restoring someone to belonging, but in this story, things do not go as hoped. The man is healed, but the Pharisees don’t like what he has to say.

As the story unfolds, his understanding of Jesus begins to grow. At first he simply says, “The man called Jesus healed me.” Later he calls Jesus a prophet and suggests that he must be from God. And when he is brought in for a second interrogation, he responds with remarkable clarity, “I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see. I have told you already, what happened and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?”

That answer angers the Pharisees. Instead of listening to his testimony, they fall back on their old assumptions about sin. They say to him, “You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?” And then they drive him out. The man who has just received sight is excluded from the community once again, and that reveals something important.

The real problem in this story was never the man’s blindness.

The real problem was the community’s inability to see him clearly.

They could not imagine that someone like him could be the bearer of God’s work.

They could not accept that someone they had dismissed for so long might actually have something to teach them, but the man himself sees something they cannot.

Meanwhile the religious leaders, those who believe they see clearly and understand the way God works, grow more and more blind to the truth. When Jesus hears what has happened, he seeks the man out again. And when Jesus finds him, the man finally understands who he is speaking to. He believes, and he worships.

And Jesus ends the story with a stunning reversal, “I came into this world so that those who do not see may see, and those who think they see may become blind.”

The miracle reveals something deeper than eyesight. It reveals the blindness of assumptions.

Today many disability theologians remind the church that healing and curing are not the same thing. Curing focuses on fixing bodies. Healing restores people to dignity, relationship, and belonging, and in this story we see both.

Yes, the man is cured and his sight is restored, but the deeper healing happens when Jesus finds him again after he has been rejected, and restores his dignity, and welcomes him into relationship.

Scripture tells us that when Jesus hears that they drove him out, he seeks this man out. Jesus comes to restore his dignity. Jesus invites him into relationship, demonstrates love and belonging, and gives him worth by naming him as someone through whom God’s works are displayed.

What this Gospel story shows us is that disability does not disqualify someone from the work of God. In fact, it may become the very place where God’s work is most clearly seen. The man who was pushed to the margins becomes the one who sees and speaks the truth when the religious leaders cannot. The one dismissed as powerless becomes the one with the clearest spiritual vision.

God’s call is not limited by our bodies, our diagnoses, or the ways the world measures ability. Again and again in scripture, God calls people exactly as they are

and works through their lives in ways the world does not expect.

The works of God are revealed not because someone is perfect or even because they have been “fixed.” God’s grace so often shines brightest through human lives that the world has overlooked. So that moment when Jesus says that he was born that way so that God’s works may be displayed in him, he is reminding us of something essential about the image of God.

We are not made in God’s image because our bodies work a certain way.

We are not made in God’s image because of what we can do,

We are made in God’s image because of what God can do.

We bear God’s image because God formed us from the dust and breathed life into us.

Our worth is not measured by ability.

Our worth comes from the Creator.

I’ve recently read a book that I would highly recommend to anyone that is interested in showing dignity to those with disabilities. The book is called “My Body is Not a Prayer Request” by Amy Kenny. Dr. Kenny is a disability theologian who knows firsthand what it means to have a body that makes people believe that she is somehow less than.

Dr. Amy Kenny puts it beautifully when she responds to an interview question about what she hopes people take away from her work, “You are divine, just as you are, without condemnation, without cure. You with your crutches, your canes, your captions, your stim tools, your pacing, the way that you communicate. That you are divine, just as you are. And if you don't believe it yet, and if you can't feel it yet, to know that we will believe it for you.”

That is the good news hidden inside this story. God’s love is not conditional on how our bodies function. Every body bears divine breath. Every life carries sacred worth. And sometimes the miracle we need most is not a changed body. Sometimes the miracle we need is changed understanding. The question the disciples asked was based in their understanding.

Today we have our own questions to ask. Where we are blind? Are we blind to the ways society excludes people? Are we blind to assumptions about what “normal” bodies should look like? Or how “normal” brains should process and respond to the world? Are we blind to the quiet ways dignity gets denied?

Jesus healed a man’s sight, but he also exposed the blindness of everyone else in the story. And maybe the prayer we need today is simple,

Lord, open our eyes.

Open our eyes to see each other as God sees us.

To see each other as Beloved.

As Whole.

As the very image of God.

At the beginning of Lent many of us heard these words spoken over us, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” These words were meant to remind us of our fragility, our mortality, our shared humanity.

But John 9 takes us to dust to remind us of something else. The dust is not just where we return. It is also the material God uses to create. The dust of our lives is not shameful. It is sacred. Because the Creator still works with dirt. Still forms new life. Still opens our eyes. And still reminds us that every one of us, exactly as we are, belongs to God.