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Open Book: What do you see?

Jesus heals the blind man

NILS VON KALM says the Gospel account of Jesus’ interaction with a man born blind – often known as “the healing of the man born blind” – is ultimately about how we see Jesus…

Melbourne, Australia

Read John 9:1-41

Are you familiar with Rubin’s Vase? It’s a famous set of ambiguous two-dimensional forms developed a bit more than 100 years ago by the Danish psychologist, Edgar Rubin. When you look at it, you will see either a vase or two faces looking at each other.

The fascinating aspect of Rubin’s vase is that two people can look at the same image and see different things. That’s because we see what our brains have been conditioned to see.

This is what we are confronted with in the story of the man born blind in John 9:1-41.

Jesus heals the blind man

A depiction of Jesus healing the man born blind as told in John 9. PICTURE:Annalisa Jones/Shutterstock

The story is commonly called ‘the healing of the man born blind’. But it’s not really about that. It’s actually about the reactions and responses of the different people after the man was healed. 

We view the world from where we stand. If we stand on the mountaintop with other privileged people like most of us in the West, we will see life from our perspective. But if we stand in the valley with the underprivileged and people on the margins, like Jesus did, we will see life from their point of view, and, more importantly, from Jesus’ point of view.

“[T]his story is ultimately about how we see Jesus and who we see Him as. And what determines how we see Him.”

So, this story is ultimately about how we see Jesus and who we see Him as. And what determines how we see Him.

There are all sorts of analogies about sight in this story. There is:
• the man born blind.
• the spiritual blindness of the Pharisees, who believe they’re in the right and that God is on their side.
• Jesus referring to himself as the Light of the World. 

And, what does light do? It helps you see. Let’s come back to that.

In the meantime, we can see how this story is relevant for our time by thinking back to life for all of us since early 2020 when COVID-19 lockdowns changed our lives overnight.

Suddenly everything stopped. We stayed home from school and work. We had to wear masks. Most of the shops were closed and the roads were empty. Life completely changed.

Some people called the scenes apocalyptic. Which is interesting because the word, ‘apocalyptic’ means an unveiling or revealing.



The author and columnist, Debie Thomas, says that, with COVID, maybe the world didn’t change so much as it was exposed, uncovered, made plain, laid bare. Maybe we were blind before, and the time had now come to see.

The time had come to see that:
• we are fragile.  
• we are one – interdependent and interconnected.  
• our daily choices can have life-and-death consequences for other people.  
• unselfish love is risky, inconvenient, and essential. 

COVID also exposed or revealed that nurses and other care workers do the most valuable work in society, that relationships and caring for each other matter much more than making money, and that human connection matters more than anything.

Some of the outworkings of this were movements like ‘The Kindness Pandemic’, people leaving spare rolls of toilet paper out the front of their homes for people to take, and people offering to help others who were more vulnerable.

The pandemic opened our eyes, revealed our blindness, and taught us how to live.

That is what love does. And it’s why the metaphor of light is so powerful. Light helps us to see. CS Lewis once said that, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

I think it makes so much sense that Jesus is called the Light of the World. It’s Him who helps us to see. He bursts through all our rule-making that the Pharisees had in place, all the things that get in the way of being loving. This is why love is always the best measure. It’s why Jesus said we would be known as His disciples by our love. 


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Everyone appreciates love, whether you’re Christian or not. Churches spend millions on buildings and fancy lights and programs, but the main reason that the church spread so much in the first three centuries was because of their love.

It was Christians who set up the first hospitals and the first universities. Harvard, Yale and Princeton in the US were all set up as Christian institutions. Harvard was called the ‘School of the Prophets’.

Similarly, all the great social movements of history have had spiritual, if not Christian, roots. 

The abolitionist movement and the US civil rights movement were all guided by love. In fact, if you wanted to join the civil rights movement, you had to sign a pledge which had 10 points on it, and included things like meditating daily on the teachings of Jesus.

This was all because of love, the love that opens our eyes and helps us see. 

I think one of the biggest things that gets in the way of being loving is our own sense of self-righteousness. Debie Thomas says that “one of the most barren and desolate places we can occupy as Christians is a place of smugness. Of rightness. Of certainty. The more convinced we are that we have full insight, comprehension, and knowledge, the less we will see and experience of God.”

Thomas also says that, “In the story John tells, Jesus sees the blind man – a man whom no one else really sees. In the eyes of his peers, the man is contaminated, burdensome, and expendable…In his community’s definition of human worth, the blind man barely registers – he’s not a human being; he’s Blindness.” That’s his identity.  

Just like it says that perfect love drives out all fear, it’s also true that fear drives out love. We see this in this story.Thomas makes the point that, not only does the community’s legalistic approach to faith – their fear – prevent them from seeing the healed man; it also prevents them from seeing God’s love and power at work in their midst. This suggests that vulnerability, softness, curiosity, and openness are essential to real seeing.  

Listen again to what Thomas says: “In the Gospels, we see that Jesus’ true identity eludes just about everyone until after his Resurrection. Even his disciples struggle to understand who he is. Most of the people who encounter Jesus are too busy seeing what they want to see – a magician, a heretic, a political and military leader, a carpenter’s son, a wise man, a phony, a clerical threat – to notice what the blind man, free of all such filters, sees by the end of the story. It’s the blind man who sees Jesus as the Son of Man and calls him, ‘Lord.’”

Thomas also points out that we could say that this is one of the rare and beautiful moments in the Gospels when Jesus Himself is truly seen. The blind man sees Jesus as wholly and purely as Jesus sees him. Because the healed man has no preconceptions, because the spiritual ground he stands on is soft and supple, he is able to see God as God is.

What this story shows us is that it’s through the eyes of the marginalised that we see who Jesus is. If we listen to them, we are more likely to hear His voice too. This story begs the question of who Jesus is, who God is, and what love looks like.

 

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