He Had Never Seen His Face

Jesus had just walked out of the temple with people picking up rocks.

That’s the last line before this story starts. At this, they picked up stones to throw at Him. But Jesus was hidden and went out of the temple area. The chapter numbers were added centuries later. In the original there’s no break at all. He’s leaving the building in a hurry, and the very next sentence is this one.

Now as Jesus was passing by, He saw a man blind from birth.

On his way out, with stones in the air behind him, he stopped for a beggar.

The man was sitting where blind men sat, near enough to the traffic to be heard. He had never seen anything. Not a face, not a color, not the street he’d sat beside every day of his adult life.

The first thing anyone said about him in the story was a question asked over his head. Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?

He could hear it. He’d probably heard it his whole life, in one form or another, from people who meant it kindly. Somebody did something. Something like this doesn’t happen for no reason.

Jesus said neither. Neither this man nor his parents sinned. Then he spat on the ground, made mud, put it on the man’s eyes, and told him to go wash in the Pool of Siloam.

He went. He washed. He came back seeing.

And Jesus was gone.

That detail is easy to read past. The man went to the pool blind and came back sighted, and the one who’d done it wasn’t there. When the neighbors asked him where the man was, he said, I do not know. He had heard the voice. He had felt the mud. He had never seen the face.

What he got instead of a face was questions.

The neighbors couldn’t agree it was him. Some claimed that he was, but others said, “No, he just looks like him.” But the man kept saying, “I am the one.” So they took him to the Pharisees, because it was the Sabbath and somebody had made mud on it, and the Pharisees asked him how it happened. He told them. He put mud on my eyes, and I washed, and now I can see. It’s hard to make a shorter account than that.

They didn’t agree either. Some said a man who breaks the Sabbath can’t be from God. Others said a sinner couldn’t do a thing like this. And there was division among them. The text is fair to them. It was a real argument between people who took God seriously.

So they asked the man what he thought, and he said the only thing he could. He is a prophet.

Then they sent for his parents.

His mother and father stood in front of the people who could put them out of the synagogue, and the text says plainly that they knew it. The authorities had already agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus as the Christ would be put out. So the parents said what they could safely say. That’s our son. He was born blind. How he sees now, we don’t know. He is old enough. Ask him.

It’s easy to be hard on them. It’s worth remembering what was at stake. The synagogue wasn’t an hour on a weekend. It was your town, your standing, your name at a wedding, the people who’d bury you. They chose to keep it, and they left their son to stand on his own.

He stood.

The questioners called him back and told him to give glory to God, because they knew this man was a sinner. His answer is one of the most honest sentences anybody says in the Gospels.

Whether He is a sinner I do not know. There is one thing I do know: I was blind, but now I see!

If the end of that sounds familiar, it’s because a former slave-ship captain named John Newton borrowed it for the last line of the first verse of “Amazing Grace.” People who have never opened a Bible have sung this man’s sentence.

He didn’t have the theology. He couldn’t settle the Sabbath question or say where Jesus came from. He hadn’t been to school for any of it. He had one thing, and he didn’t pretend it was more than one, and he wouldn’t pretend it was less.

They asked him to tell it again. He said he’d told them already, and then, with a little edge in it, Do you also want to become His disciples? That’s when it turned. They said, you’re his disciple, we’re Moses’ disciples. He answered back once more. Nobody had ever heard of a man born blind having his eyes opened, and if this man weren’t from God he couldn’t do anything.

They replied, “You were born in utter sin, and you are instructing us?” And they threw him out.

It was the same verdict he’d heard at the start of the day, over his head, from people who meant well. Born in sin. Now it came with a door.

Here’s what he had at the end of it.

His sight, which was more than anyone had ever given him. No synagogue. Parents who had stepped back. A town that wasn’t sure he was himself. And no idea where the man who healed him had gone. He had never once seen him.

The next line is the reason this book exists.

When Jesus heard that they had thrown him out, He found the man.

He heard. And he went looking. The text doesn’t say where he found him, which is the point. Outside. Wherever a man goes on the afternoon they throw him out.

Jesus asked him whether he believed in the Son of Man. The man didn’t know who he was talking to. Who is He, Sir? he asked. Tell me so that I may believe in Him. And Jesus said something that must have landed in a way nobody else in the Bible could feel.

You have already seen Him, Jesus answered. He is the One speaking with you.

You’ve seen him. The first thing those new eyes ever got to look at, of the one who opened them, was his face, out there, after the door had shut.

“Lord, I believe,” he said. And he worshiped Jesus.

The morning started with other people asking whose fault he was. It ended with him worshiping, outside, face to face with the one who came to find him.

When he heard they’d put the man out, he went looking. And the man didn’t need to have the answers. One thing he knew was enough.

Where this meets your week

The question asked over your head. A diagnosis, a divorce, a child who went a hard way, a business that folded. Somewhere in it, somebody wondered out loud what you did to bring it on, or you wondered it yourself at three in the morning. Jesus answered that question for this man in one word, neither, and then he got his hands dirty. If you’ve been carrying a verdict about why the bad thing happened, write it down, the exact sentence. Then read his word under it. You don’t have to believe it yet. Just stop letting the first sentence go unanswered.

The people who stepped back. Somebody didn’t stand with you when it counted. A parent, a friend, a group you thought would. They weren’t monsters. Most of them were scared of losing something, the way his parents were. The man’s parents said ask him, and he answered for himself, and nothing in the story says he ever stopped being their son. Pick one person who stepped back and write them a short, ordinary note. Not about that. About anything. You’re not reopening the case. You’re refusing to let it be the whole relationship.

When someone asks what you believe now. Somebody at a dinner, a relative, an old friend from the building. What do you believe, now that you don’t go? You don’t have to produce a system. He couldn’t answer half of what he was asked, and he never pretended to. Next time the question comes, answer with your one thing and stop there. It’s more honest than a lecture and harder to argue with.

The door that closed. Maybe you were put out, formally or by a hundred small signals. Maybe you drifted until the door was simply behind you. Either way there was an afternoon when you understood you weren’t inside anymore. The record says that’s the afternoon he went looking. If you’ve been waiting to be found somewhere respectable, stop waiting there. Spend one quiet half hour this week somewhere you actually are: the car, the porch, the kitchen before anyone’s up. Say one honest sentence out loud to him. He’s already on his way.

Write your one thing.

A piece of paper, and one sentence that starts where his did. There is one thing I do know. Not what you’re supposed to know. Not what you’d need to defend in front of a panel. The one thing, from your own life, that you would still stand on if everyone in the room disagreed with you. It might be small. It might be I’m still here. His was about his eyes.

Keep it where you’ll see it. Everything else you believe can be sorted out later, or never. This one is yours.

The pool he was sent to has a name, and John stops the story to translate it. Siloam (which means “Sent”).

He went where he was sent and came back to find the one who sent him gone. Then that one came back for him.