Signposts to Life
A second time they summoned the man who had been blind. “Give glory to God,” they said. “We know this man is a sinner.” He replied, “Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I can see!” Then they asked him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” He answered, “I have told you already and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples too?” Then they hurled insults at him and said, “You are this fellow’s disciple! We are disciples of Moses. We know that God spoke to Moses, but as for this fellow, we don’t even know where he comes from.” John 9:24-29
A remarkable miracle has taken place. A man blind from birth can now see. His healing happened when Jesus applied His own spit to dirt and put the wet mud on the man’s eyes and then told the man to go and wash. All this happened on a Jewish Sabbath day.
The Pharisees want to drive a wedge between Jesus and God. If anything good happened, they say it was God’s work alone and Jesus had nothing to do with it. The formerly blind man is puzzled and probably feeling a little afraid. His own parents have left him to face the Pharisees alone (9:18-23). But by insisting both on his miraculous healing and Jesus’ part in it, he is clearly inferring God is at work both in and through Jesus.
In our passage above the Pharisees say three things that ripple with irony.
“Give glory to God” they say to the man born blind, meaning: if it really did happen, God alone did it. It had nothing to do with Jesus. But the healed man is giving glory to God by sticking to his story. He knows Jesus healed him and that God must have worked through Jesus for such a mighty miracle to have happened.
“We know this man is a sinner.” They mean by this that because the healing happened on the Sabbath, God couldn’t have been working through Jesus. God doesn’t break His own Sabbath. Jesus did break it so that makes Him a sinner. Their view makes an enormous assumption, that their codifying the Law is what God had in mind in keeping the day ‘holy.’ By this time there were thirty nine forms of work added to clarify what one couldn’t do. They were not given by God but added by religious leaders. These same leaders had lost God’s heart for what the Sabbath’s original purpose was. The negatives, the “thou shalt not’s,” had obliterated God’s deeper purposes for the day.
“We are disciples of Moses.” But Moses spoke of Jesus Himself (5:45-47). God did speak through Moses but on closer examination the Law itself pointed forward to the only one who could ever perfectly fulfil it. Israel’s story has a conclusion. It has come in the Messiah. He is the climax. Jesus is not only the end of one story but the beginning of another. The new grows out of the old.
The Pharisees had an unassailable wall in their thinking between what God had done and His doing anything new. They failed to see the very clues to the new thing that were embedded in the old.
When you read the Old Testament, look for the signposts to where this story is going. This can give your reading of the Old Testament a depth you’ve not before known.
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