The man born blind – the gift of true enlightenment

There are many instances in the gospels of Jesus restoring sight to the blind, but this episode is different: the blind man was born blind.

So, Jesus was not restoring something to him that he had lost but giving him something he had never had. He sees for the first time.

And yet, great as the gift of sight is, this healing miracle is only a prelude to and a figure of something even greater: it is about the gift of faith. The episode is not primarily about sight, but insight.

The blind man’s real enlightenment comes about when, by the light of faith, he’s enabled to see Jesus for who he really is. And when, newly sighted, he utters the words, “Lord, I believe”, he's acknowledging that Jesus is the source not just of his sight, but of his very being and salvation.

The early Church saw huge significance in this episode in John’s gospel. Like last week’s gospel about the Samaritan woman at the well, it was thought to sum up the entire Gospel, as solemnly announced in the majestic prologue: Jesus, the Word made flesh, the light of the world, has come to enlighten all human beings, without exception. That universal inclusiveness is registered by the fact that, as in last week’s gospel, the central character is an outsider.

According to conventional wisdom, the man’s congenital blindness would have been linked to sin, either his own or his parents’. So ingrained was this view that it was widely believed that the sins of a pregnant mother rendered her child guilty too.

But here, in common with all his healing miracles, Jesus definitively overturns the depressing belief that connected misfortune with bad behaviour and disability with sin, whether your own or that of your forbears.

From very early on, the Church also saw in this encounter the meaning of baptism, known from the earliest times as the “sacrament of faith”. Significantly, some of the very earliest Christian writers, Justin Martyr (100-65), for instance, spoke of baptism as “enlightenment”.

Again, there are no fewer than seven Roman catacomb paintings associated with the sacrament of baptism that use this miracle as an illustration.

Again, from the third century, and possibly earlier, the account of this healing was used in the preparation of catechumens for baptism: in particular, it was used in the third Great Scrutiny, when candidates were asked, as was the man born blind, if they believed that Jesus is the Son of God, to which they would reply, in the blind man’s words: “Lord, I believe.”

The story’s connection to baptism can be seen in other ways. Jesus’ use of spittle might strike us as odd (as well as unhygienic), but until the reform of the liturgy after Vatican II, the priest would anoint the child’s lips with his own spittle at the beginning of the baptismal rite, in direct imitation of Jesus in this episode.

In the less precious ancient world, spittle was widely used for medicinal purposes. Indeed, the spittle of a distinguished person was thought to be especially curative. Tacitus (56-120AD) tells of a visit of the Emperor Vespasian (9-79AD) to Alexandria, where he cured a man’s eye-disease with his spittle. Pliny (d.79AD) has a whole chapter of his natural history on the healing power of spittle.

Notwithstanding our relative squeamishness, we, too, along with most other animals, still instinctively use the healing qualities of spittle. What’s the first thing we do if we burn our finger or hit our thumb with a hammer? The metaphors of “licking your wounds” and, in the case of children, “kissing it better” are rooted in everyday reality.

Lastly, the fact that the blind man’s healing was complete only when he’d washed himself in the pool of Siloam is also an echo of baptism.

If, as St Augustine (354-430AD) says in his commentary on John’s gospel, the man born blind represents the entire human race in need of enlightenment, so this miraculous healing also represents what has been given to each of us in the gift of faith: not mere sight, but insight, the gift which enables us to grasp that Christ, the Light of the World, is the light by which we see everything, in both our living and dying.

But, like the man born blind, what we were given in faith is not just a faculty of recognition, but a capacity for living a new kind of life, the life of grace, God’s own life.

And, finally, as with so many other episodes in the gospels, Jesus here dispels illusions and misconceptions, reversing our perspective. The story starts with the supposed “sinner” receiving the gift of sight for the first time; but it ends with the supposedly “righteous”, in this case the Pharisees, being blinded by their own “wisdom”.

It ends, in other words, on the sober note of judgment, more specifically, the self-judgment of the Pharisees who, despite all they’ve witnessed, are still blind, not only to who Jesus is, but even to their own blindness; unaware, in other words, that they are blind.

The light of Christ enlightens all who know their need of faith: “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief”, as the father of the epileptic son in the gospel of Mark says.

But to those who think they see more clearly than anyone else, it is a blinding light, that serves only to deepen their darkness.