John 9:24-34

“ They called, for the second time, the man who had been blind, and they said to him, Give glory to God; we know that this man is a wicked person. 25. He answered them, Whether he is a wicked person, I know not; one thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see. 26. They said to him again, What did he to thee? How did he open thine eyes? 27. He answered them, I told you already, and you did not hear. Why would you hear it again? Do you also wish to become his disciples? 28. They reviled him and said to him, Thou art this man's disciple; we are disciples of Moses. 29. As to Moses, we know that God has spoken to him; but as for this man, we know not whence he is. 30. The man answered them and said, Herein is the marvellous thing, that you do not know whence he is; and yet, he has opened my eyes! 31. Now, we know that God does not hear the wicked; but if any one is his worshipper and does his will, him he hears. 32. Never has it been heard that any one has opened the eyes of one born blind. 33. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing like this. 34. They answered and said to him, Thou wert altogether born in sin, and thou teachest us! And they drove him out. ”

After this confronting, a deliberation intervenes; it is determined to extort from the blind man the disavowal of the miracle in the name of the Sabbatic principle, in other terms, to annihilate the fact by dogma. The expression: to give glory to God, denotes the homage rendered to one of the divine perfections momentarily obscured by a word or an act which seems to be derogatory to it (Joshua 7:19; 1Sa 6:5).

The blasphemy here was the declaration of the blind man: He is a prophet. It was in contempt of the holiness and truth of God to give this title to a violator of the Sabbath. This culpable assertion must be washed away by the opposite declaration: He is a wicked person. “ We know” say the rulers (John 9:24; John 9:29), setting themselves up as representatives of theological knowledge in Israel; in virtue of their knowledge, the miracle cannot be: therefore it is not. On his part, the blind man, while admitting his incompetency in theological questions, simply opposes fact to knowledge; his language becomes decidedly ironical; he is conscious of the bad faith of his adversaries. They feel the force of his position, and ask him again as to the circumstances of the fact (John 9:26), hoping to find in some detail of his account a means of assailing the fact itself. Not having succeeded in overthrowing the miracle by dogmatics, they wish to undermine it by criticism.

This return to a phase of investigation already settled at once renders the blind man indignant and emboldens him; he triumphs in their impotence, and his reply borders upon irony: “You did not hear? You are deaf then!” They then cover their embarrassment by insult; between Jesus and the Sabbath, or, what amounts to the same thing, between Jesus and Moses, their choice is made. The blind man, seeing that there is a wish to argue with him, becomes more and more bold, and sets himself also to the work of arguing. If he has not studied dogmatics, he at least knows his catechism. Is there an Israelite who is ignorant of this theocratic axiom: that a miracle is an answer to prayer, and that the prayer of a wicked person is not answered. The construction of John 9:30 is doubtful. Meyer, Luthardt and Weiss explain: “In such a condition of things (ἐν τούτῳ), it is astonishing that you do not know whence he comes, and that he has opened my eyes.” But, in this sense, the last words are useless.

More than this, the idea: “and that he has opened my eyes” being the premise of the preceding conclusion: “whence he comes,” should be placed before it. We must therefore make the ἐν τούτῳ, as is so frequently the case, refer to the following ὅτι : in this that, and give to the καί which follows the sense of and yet (as in so many other passages in John): “There is truly herein a marvel (without τό); or (with τό): “The real marvelous thing consists in this: that you do not know whence this man comes: and yet He has opened my eyes!” This last reading is evidently the true one. “There is here a miracle greater than even my cure itself; it is your unbelief.” The γάρ (for), in Greek, often refers to an understood thought. Thus in this case: “You do not know this? In fact, there is something here which borders upon the marvelous!” We know; that is to say, we simple Jews, in general (John 9:31); in contrast to the proud we know of these doctors, in John 9:24; John 9:29. The argument is compact; John 9:31 is the major premise, John 9:32 the minor, and John 9:33 draws the conclusion.

Defeated by his pitiless logic, whose point of support is simply the principle that what is, is, the adversaries of Jesus give way to rage. Saying to the blind man: Thou wert altogether born in sin, they allude to his blindness from birth, which they regard as a proof of the divine curse under which the man was born (John 9:2-3); and they do not perceive that, by this very insult, they render homage to the reality of the miracle which they pretend to deny. Thus unbelief ends by giving the lie to itself. The expression: they drove him out, cannot designate an official excommunication; for this could not be pronounced except in a regular meeting. They expelled him violently from the hall, perhaps with the intention of having the excommunication pronounced afterwards by the Sanhedrim in pursuance of a formal deliberation.

It is asked what is the aim with which John related this fact with so much of detail. No striking testimony of Jesus respecting His person marks it as worthy of attention. It refers far more, as it seems, to the history and conduct of a secondary personage, than to the revelation of Jesus Himself. Evidently John accords to this fact this honorable place because it marks in his view a decisive step in the progress of Israelitish unbelief. For the first time, a believer is, for his faith, cast out of the theocratic community. It is the first act of the rupture between the Church and the Synagogue. We shall see in the following chapter that Jesus really regards this fact in this light.

The whole scene here described has an historical truthfulness which is obvious. It is so little ideal in its nature that it rests, from one end to the other, upon the brute reality of a fact. Baur himself acknowledges this. “The reality of the fact,” he says, “is the point against which the contradiction of the adversaries is broken.” And yet this fact, according to him, is a pure invention! What sort of a man must an evangelist be who describes, with greatest detail, a whole series of scenes for the purpose of showing how dogmatic reasoning is shattered against a fact in the reality of which he does not himself believe? Does not criticism meet the same experience which here happens to the Pharisees in John 9:34 ? Does it not give the lie to itself? This whole chapter presents to modern criticism its own portrait. The defenders of the Sabbath ordinance reason thus: God cannot lend His power to a violator of the Sabbath; therefore the miracle ascribed to Jesus does not exist. A non posse ad non esse valet consequentia. The opponents of the miracles in the Gospel history reason in exactly the same way, only substituting for a religious ordinance a scientific axiom: The supernatural cannot be; therefore, however well attested the miracles of Jesus may be, they are not. The historical fact holds good against the ordinance, of whatsoever nature it may be, and it will end by forcing it to submit.