Now We Can See

DEVOTION

THE GOSPEL OF JOHN

NOW WE CAN SEE

John 9:12-17

12 "Where is this man?" they asked him. "I don't know," he said. 13 They brought to the Pharisees the man who had been blind. 14 Now the day on which Jesus had made the mud and opened the man's eyes was a Sabbath. 15 Therefore the Pharisees also asked him how he had received his sight. "He put mud on my eyes," the man replied, "and I washed, and now I see." 16 Some of the Pharisees said, "This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath." But others asked, "How can a sinner do such miraculous signs?" So they were divided. 17 Finally they turned again to the blind man, "What have you to say about him? It was your eyes he opened." The man replied, "He is a prophet."

NIV

It is amazing how these Pharisees looked at life. They surely must have thought they were not sinners, as well as thinking they actually kept the Sabbath. They also had absolutely no second thoughts about making judgments about other people. It also seems interesting that we just heard the healed blind man tell his neighbors that it was Jesus who had put the mud on his eyes and told him to go wash it off, but now when asked who did this, he merely says a prophet. We are in the middle of this whole account and it is a lacking some of the other information that completes the account, but there is some truth here we should pay close attention to. We certainly can learn a lesson from the attitude of the Pharisees, even if we already know they are a bunch of self-righteous fools. It is clear that if people do not believe exactly the way they do, those people are sinners. They judge people according to their ideas of what it is to be religious. We also can learn a lesson from this blind man. Although he knew it was Jesus, and as we will see later, so did his parents, but neither of them would tell the Pharisees it was Jesus, but that he was just a prophet. Why was he so afraid of telling the Pharisees it was Jesus? We will see his parents were afraid because they feared being thrown out of the synagogue, but was the blind man filled with the same fear? Was it because he felt the Pharisees were more intellectual, more knowledgeable about the scriptures and he feared being ridiculed? Was he simply afraid they would make him into a laughing stock, because Jesus healed him. Or did he actually know that they wanted to find a way to put Jesus to death, so he was protecting Jesus, keeping him out of the conversation? We will see more of this later, but for now we should be concerned with how we handle ourselves among all sorts of people, our neighbors and as well as those who think themselves superior to us. We should surely be ready willing and able to testify that Jesus has healed us, that once we were blind but now we can see.