John 9:24

‘So they called the man who was blind a second time and said to him, “Give glory to God. We know that this man is a sinner.”

They clearly felt that it was their duty to set the man right. So they called the blind man who now saw and said to him, ‘Give glory to God, we know that this man is a sinner', that is to say, not in a state, through obedience to the rules and regulations of the Rabbis, of acceptability to God. They were basically saying, ‘recognise that all the credit should go to God and none to the so-called miracle worker in view of his evident unworthiness in God's eyes'. They could no longer deny the miracle. Thus instead they sought to cover up the obvious conclusion.

Now in the right circumstances ‘give the glory to God' is a good and right statement. But we cannot avoid the fact that to ignore the One through whom the miracle was performed was a sign of dogmatic unwillingness to face facts. Such a healing was not just an act that anyone could perform. It required someone who was God approved. Thus the statement that his Benefactor was a sinner provoked the man to reply. This statement was so evidently self-contradictory that even the poor beggar could not believe what he had heard, even though understandably he did not want to antagonise them.

Alternately ‘give glory to God ' can rather mean ‘consider things in the eyes of God' (compare Joshua 7:19), i.e. give glory to God by recognising and admitting the truth. And that is probably what the Judaisers meant here.

‘So they called the man.' This suggests an official examination. Thus this may well have been a committee appointed by the Sanhedrin who were on the whole antagonistic to Jesus. At what stage this whole case ceased to be just a matter of interest and became an official enquiry we cannot be certain, but it was almost certainly that by this time.

On this view he was now undergoing official examination with a view to breaking his testimony. With this in mind they pointed out the impossibility of ‘a sinner' doing such a thing and asked him to be open and honest about what had happened in the sight of God.