As He passed by, He saw a man blind from birth. 2 And His disciples asked Him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” 3 Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him. 4 We must work the works of Him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. 5 As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” 6 Having said these things, He spit on the ground and made mud with the saliva. Then He anointed the man’s eyes with the mud 7 and said to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). So he went and washed and came back seeing.
8 The neighbours and those who had seen him before as a beggar were saying, “Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?” 9 Some said, “It is he.” Others said, “No, but he is like him.” He kept saying, “I am the man.” 10 So they said to him, “Then how were your eyes opened?” 11 He answered, “The man called Jesus made mud and anointed my eyes and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’ So I went and washed and received my sight.” 12 They said to him, “Where is He?” He said, “I do not know.”
13 They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. 14 Now it was a Sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. 15 So the Pharisees again asked him how he had received his sight. And he said to them, “He put mud on my eyes, and I washed, and I see.” 16 Some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, for He does not keep the Sabbath.” But others said, “How can a man who is a sinner do such signs?” And there was a division among them. 17 So they said again to the blind man, “What do you say about Him, since He has opened your eyes?” He said, “He is a prophet.”
18 The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight, until they called the parents of the man who had received his sight 19 and asked them, “Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?” 20 His parents answered, “We know that this is our son and that he was born blind. 21 But how he now sees we do not know, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is of age. He will speak for himself.” 22 (His parents said these things because they feared the Jews, for the Jews had already agreed that if anyone should confess Jesus to be Christ, he was to be put out of the synagogue.) 23 Therefore his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.”
24 So for the second time they called the man who had been blind and said to him, “Give glory to God. We know that this man is a sinner.” 25 He answered, “Whether He is a sinner I do not know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” 26 They said to him, “What did He do to you? How did He open your eyes?” 27 He answered them, “I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become His disciples?” 28 And they reviled him, saying, “You are His disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. 29 We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where He comes from.” 30 The man answered, “Why, this is an amazing thing! You do not know where He comes from, and yet He opened my eyes. 31 We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if anyone is a worshipper of God and does His will, God listens to him. 32 Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a man born blind. 33 If this man were not from God, He could do nothing.” 34 They answered him, “You were born in utter sin, and would you teach us?” And they cast him out.
35 Jesus heard that they had cast him out, and having found him He said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” 36 He answered, “And who is He, sir, that I may believe in Him?” 37 Jesus said to him, “You have seen Him, and it is He who is speaking to you.” 38 He said, “Lord, I believe,” and he worshipped Him. 39 Jesus said, “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.” 40 Some of the Pharisees near Him heard these things, and said to Him, “Are we also blind?” 41 Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your guilt remains.
In John chapter 9 we come to the 6th of 7 signs recorded in John’s Gospel that Jesus performed - the healing of the blind man on the Sabbath.
In chapter 2 He turned water into wine at the wedding in Cana, He healed the official’s son in chapter 4, the paralytic at the Pool of Bethesda in chapter 5, and in chapter 6 He fed the crowd of 5000 and walked on the water. We are still to come to the 7th sign in chapter 11 where Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead.
These were not the only miracles witnessed by John, as he tells us in 20:30-31, “Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name.” John records these signs to teach us about the salvation that Jesus came to give.
Chapter 8 ends with Jesus leaving the temple when the Pharisees threatened to stone Him, and as He left, this blind man was begging at the temple gate. When His disciples questioned Jesus as to the reason he was born blind, He replied that the man’s blindness was not an accident, but so that “the works of God might be displayed in him.” (9:3) The man’s blindness was designed to glorify God, and to once again confirm the true identity of Jesus as the Son of God. The man’s physical blindness is also a picture of the spiritual blindness of the Pharisees, and everyone else who fails to turn to Jesus for salvation from sin and its consequences.
The blind man was outside the temple. Because of his disability he was barred from entering, just as Adam was banished from God’s presence in the Garden of Eden. Sinful man, without a Saviour, is cut off from the God who created us. The blindness of the man also depicts the inability of the lost to see the truth of God, despite the fact that as in this case, Jesus was standing right there. Throughout the previous chapter, Jesus, who is truth personified was standing in plain view of the Pharisees, but because of their darkened hearts, they did not really see Him.
Psalm 82:5 says, “They have neither knowledge nor understanding, they walk about in darkness.” This is why Jesus told Nicodemus in John 3:3, “Unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” (John 3:3).
Another important point to note about this man’s condition is that Jesus healed him without the man asking for healing. He made no effort to seek healing and salvation. He was blind, and had resigned himself to life in the darkness. There were some lively theological discussions in the previous chapter, so in all probability, this man would have heard something of the conversations between Jesus and the religious leaders, or he would at least have been aware that there was something going on, yet there is no record of this man calling out for help or seeking for Jesus. Man in sin is without hope, and unless God seeks us, we will not seek salvation.
When we come to the next chapter we will spend some time looking at the wonderful words of Jesus in verse 27. “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.” This verse in particular has been dreadfully mangled and taken completely out of context to support the false theology taught and believed by so many that God continues to speak in an audible voice to His followers today. More on that in a couple of weeks, but the point, as illustrated by the blind man in chapter 9, is that we don’t seek Christ. He seeks us.
He said in verse 5, “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” This miracle proves these words and reinforces the reality of the deity of Jesus.
It is no coincidence that one of the most common miracles performed by Jesus and recorded in the 4 Gospel accounts is healing of the blind. These miracles are found in Matthew 9 and 20, Mark 8 and 10, Luke 18 and John 9. This is at least 8 people, but Matthew 15:30 and 21:14 say, “Great crowds came to Him, bringing with them the lame, the blind, the crippled, the mute, and many others, and they put them at His feet, and He healed them. The blind and the lame came to Him in the temple, and He healed them.” So Jesus gave sight to far more than just 8 blind people. What is the significance of this? Receiving the gift of spiritual eyesight is what it means to be saved, as we are transferred from the kingdom of darkness to the Kingdom of Light. As John Newton wrote in his most well-known hymn, “I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.”
There has been much speculation as to why Jesus rubbed mud in the man’s eyes to heal him, before sending him to the Pool of Siloam to wash his eyes. One of the most popular explanations is that by using mud, Jesus reminds us that we were created out of the dust. John Calvin writes, “Just as man was at first made of clay, so Christ used clay in restoring his eyes, to show that He had the same power over a part of the body that the Father had exercised in creating the whole man.”
Another important detail is the fact that John takes the time to explain in verse 7 that Siloam means sent. Why would he do this? Jesus taught consistently that He was the “Sent One.” He was sent by the Father to bring light into our dark world, to bring sight to the spiritually blind. D. A. Carson, in his commentary on John’s Gospel wrote, “Jesus Himself is the sent one, and the granting of sight to this blind man symbolises the spiritual illumination without which one cannot see the true light from God.”
Jesus was sent from God to bring salvation to the lost, and here He sends this blind man to the pool at Siloam to wash his eyes as he receives his sight. Again, this proves that Jesus is who He said He was. He is the Saviour sent by God to a world stumbling around blindly in spiritual darkness. It was when the blind man obeyed Jesus by going to the pool to wash that he was healed. Jesus didn’t need to do that. He could have healed the man without him having to go to Siloam, but the man had to respond in order to receive his sight.
We need to respond to the Gospel message in order to be saved, and the way we respond is by believing in His name. He said to Nicodemus in the most famous verse in Scripture, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16) In verse 36 He said, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.”
We are saved by grace alone, but saving faith is the instrument of that salvation. Jesus sent the blind man to the pool to receive his sight. He sends us to His cross to receive our salvation, because it is at the cross where we are set free from darkness and sin.
This man then became a powerful witness of the grace of God. Verses 9-10, “They said to him, ‘Then how were your eyes opened?’ He answered, ‘The man called Jesus made mud and anointed my eyes and said to me, “Go to Siloam and wash.” So I went and washed and received my sight’”.
The first thing he did was to tell them it was Jesus who healed him. His focus was not on the rather strange procedure Jesus used, but rather, it was on Jesus Himself. As Christians, we do have a story to share. By all means, tell others about what God has done for you, but it is far more important to highlight who has saved you. We hear a lot about “sharing our testimony.” Yes, there is a place for that, but the heart of our witness and our testimony is always Jesus Himself. John wrote in 1 John 5:11-12, “This is the testimony, that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.”
And then true to form, the Pharisees miss the entire point of this miraculous healing in John 9. Verses 13-16, “They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. Now it was a Sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. So the Pharisees again asked him how he had received his sight. And he said to them, ‘He put mud on my eyes, and I washed, and I see.’ Some of the Pharisees said, ‘This man is not from God, for He does not keep the Sabbath.’ But others said, ‘How can a man who is a sinner do such signs?’ And there was a division among them.”
They focused not on what happened, but when it had happened - the Sabbath. Jesus did not accept the authority of human traditions, especially when the Pharisees’ legalism was in direct conflict with the heart of the Law of God.
Jesus did nothing without a purpose, and in those days, saliva was believed to have some healing properties, so by deliberately using saliva to heal on the Sabbath, Jesus not only ignored but He openly violated the Pharisees’ rules.
The Pharisees had written a long list of man-made rules which they proudly obeyed, but this resulted in them looking down on others with contempt. This was never the purpose of the Law of God. He gave us His Law in order for us to see our need for a Saviour. God’s perfect and holy law is designed to show us our sin and bring us to God for mercy.
Matthew Henry describes Jesus’ contempt for man-made rituals by writing, “He would not seem to yield to the usurped power of the scribes and Pharisees. Their government was illegal, their impositions were arbitrary, and their zeal for the rituals consumed the substantials of religion; and therefore Christ would not give place to them, by subjection, no not for an hour.”
Verse 16 tells us that there was a division among the Pharisees. This was a huge problem for them. Some dismissively said that Jesus was not from God because He didn’t keep their Sabbath laws, but some of them asked the question: “How can a man who is a sinner do such signs?” Of course, if they accepted that Jesus was who He said He was, this whole debate would not have been necessary, but they had to somehow find a way of explaining away this miracle without losing face.
So in desperation they turn to the blind man. Verse 17 says, “What do you say about Him, since He has opened your eyes?” He said, “He is a prophet.” This answer didn’t really help them. They would have been familiar with the teaching of Moses in Deuteronomy 13. Moses taught that if a man claimed to be from God and seemed to perform miracles, his teaching should be tested for faithfulness to the Word of God. They should have tested the works of Jesus by using the Law of God, and had they done so, they would very quickly have realised that Jesus’ teaching on the Sabbath was Biblical, unlike theirs. This would have proved that He was a prophet, but that would not have suited their agenda.
The Pharisees took the blessing of God’s Sabbath Day, a day of rest from the routine of what was for most people, a life of hard physical work, and distorted it so much that what was meant to be the best day of the week was now the hardest. Instead of this day being a blessing, it was now a burden as they used the Sabbath for their own purposes rather than for God’s. James Montgomery Boice wrote, “They were ready to kill Jesus for breaking the Sabbath, but they were not prepared to let Him heal on it. The man had been blind for his entire lifetime, and now he was healed. We might expect the leaders to have rejoiced with him. But did they? Not at all! Instead, we see them dredging around in the dark recesses of their minds to discover what they can do about this unfortunate event.”
Questioning the previously blind man did not help the Pharisees, so they turn to his parents in their attempts to discredit the miracle they just couldn’t deny. John writes in verse 18-19, “The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight, until they called the parents of the man who had received his sight and asked them, ‘Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?’”
Talk about mixed emotions. They must have been rejoicing that their son, born blind, was able to see, but now they find themselves dragged before a court of inquiry. You can’t blame them for deflecting the question onto their son. The reason they told the Pharisees to ask their son directly is given to us in verse 22. “His parents said these things because they feared the Jews, for the Jews had already agreed that if anyone should confess Jesus to be Christ, he was to be put out of the synagogue.”
The Pharisees would do whatever it took to deny the true identity of Jesus, even if it meant excommunicating those who did receive Him as the promised Messiah. Why did they stubbornly reject Jesus, despite the evidence? It is because they did not want the kind of Saviour He was. They did not want to accept they had a need they could not provide for on their own.
They wanted to be accepted by God on their own merits, not forgiven through a Saviour, and people continue to reject Jesus today for the same reason. They object to confessing their sin before God and admitting their need for the kind of Saviour Jesus is, the Lamb of God who died for our sins.
Romans 3:23 tells us very plainly, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” You have to accept that truth if you want to be saved. Confess your sins before a holy God and accept that you cannot save yourself, and He will save you. But if you reject it, you will be lost in your unbelief.
And so the Pharisees question the man a second time, and things just go from bad to worse. “‘What did He do to you? How did He open your eyes?’ He answered them, ‘I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become His disciples?’ And they reviled him, saying, ‘You are His disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where He comes from.’ The man answered, ‘Why, this is an amazing thing! You do not know where He comes from, and yet He opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if anyone is a worshipper of God and does His will, God listens to him. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, He could do nothing.’ They answered him, ‘You were born in utter sin, and would you teach us?’ And they cast him out.” (John 9:26-34)
You have to admire this man’s bravery here as he challenges the Pharisees and their blindness. So what do they do? They simply refused to listen to him, and they cast him out. The Reformation Study Bible says of verse 34, “The excommunication from Israel’s worshipping community that his parents feared is imposed on the once-blind man himself. This is done in retribution for his clear-sighted perception and confession that God listened to Jesus, a fact supported by Jesus’ power to grant sight to a man born blind.”
Taking a stand for Christ and faithfully proclaiming the Gospel will bring persecution. This man had his life totally transformed, and he became a bold witness for Jesus. He focused on what Jesus had done and what happened when he trusted Jesus. He chose his words carefully, fully aware that his confession that Jesus is the Christ would result in him being barred from the temple, but he had personally experienced the saving power of Christ, so he became a faithful witness.
Jesus opened his eyes, when no one else could. Jesus will do that for you, if you will trust in Him. Verses 35-38 are the key verses in John 9. “Jesus heard that they had cast him out, and having found him He said, ‘Do you believe in the Son of Man?’ He answered, ‘And who is He, sir, that I may believe in Him?’ Jesus said to him, ‘You have seen Him, and it is He who is speaking to you.’ He said, ‘Lord, I believe,’ and he worshipped Him.”
Compare this conversation with the last verses in chapter 9. “Jesus said, ‘For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.’ Some of the Pharisees near Him heard these things, and said to Him, ‘Are we also blind?’ Jesus said to them, ‘If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your guilt remains.’” (John 9:39-41)
What a remarkable contrast between the Pharisees and the man who was born blind. The Pharisees were blindly focused on their own agenda, while the man who now could see was focused on Christ. Don’t worry about what the scoffers and doubters say. Focus on the glorious person and saving work of Jesus.
The question Jesus asked him in verse 35 is the most important of all questions: “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” James Montgomery Boice writes of this verse, “There are many things in your mind that you think are important and that the world judges to be important, but none of them are as important as the great matter of salvation. Do you believe in Jesus?”
This is a question each of us needs to answer. Some think that by not answering, they are merely putting the question off, but they are not. If you hear the Gospel message and turn away, you are rejecting the truth of God, and you are rejecting the only Saviour He has sent.
If you have yet to turn to Christ in repentance and faith, you need to know that time is running out. The chance to be saved might never be given to you again. Turn to Him before it is too late, and before your heart becomes hardened by unbelief. The way to eternal life is simple. The apostle Paul said in Acts 16:31, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.”
Allow Him to cure your spiritual blindness, fix your eyes on Him, and He will guard and keep you from returning to your former life of darkness.
Homegroup Study Notes
Read John 9:1-7
Discuss Jesus’ reply to His disciples in verse 3.
Jesus could easily have healed the man without rubbing mud in his eyes or telling him to wash in the pool.
What is the significance of this?
Read 9:13-17
It is no coincidence that this healing took place on the Sabbath.
Why do you think the Pharisees refused to see Jesus for who He really is?
How do we see this same spiritual blindness in the world today?
Read 9:24-34
This man had previously been a blind beggar, but here we see him boldly confronting the religious leaders, something very few people had the courage to do.
How does salvation in Jesus change our lives here and now, and what can we learn from this man regarding taking a stand for the Gospel in a world which is hostile to Jesus?
Compare the faith of the man in verses 35-38 and the unbelief of the Pharisees in the remaining verses.
How do we receive the gift of salvation, and what are the consequences of rejecting Christ?