I heard a sermon on John 9 years ago from a man who could barely see the pulpit in front of him.
He was legally blind, worse off than I am. He used a cane. He used a magnifier. He had people physically walk him from one room to the next. At the time, he was teaching at a sister seminary, and we’d started having our own conversations about what it looks like to serve as a blind pastor in the church – conversations that kept going after he came to my synod as bishop. And in that sermon, he said something I had never heard a sighted preacher say about that reading: the church has not done a good job of accompanying people with disabilities. It still doesn’t know what to do with us.
That was about eight years ago. I don’t think I heard him the way I hear him now.
John 9 is the story of a man born blind. The disciples ask Jesus a question before they ask anything else about him: who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born this way (John 9:1-2)? It is one of the first things anyone thinks to ask about a person with a disability. Not his name. Not what he wants. What went wrong, and whose fault it was.
Jesus says neither. He says this happened so that God’s work might be displayed in him. Then he heals him (John 9:3-7).
I used to hear that and feel relief. Neither. Nobody sinned. Good.
I don’t feel relief anymore. I feel a harder question underneath it.
The question I actually carry
I have prayed for my eyes the way that man’s neighbors must have prayed for his. I have wished, more than once, for the version of this story where a hand touches my face and something opens that has been closed. It hasn’t happened. My vision isn’t getting better. It’s the kind of thing that, medically, only moves one direction.
So what do I do with a Gospel full of people who saw?
Bartimaeus called out and got his sight back (Mark 10:46-52). The man in John 9 got his. The man at Bethsaida got his, in two stages, blurry and then clear (Mark 8:22-25). I read these stories and I have to ask a question I don’t think the reading wants me to skip: was healing available to them because they were near Jesus, in the body, in that place, in that moment – and unavailable to me because I’m twenty centuries and a couple thousand miles too late? Is that really the point of these stories? That if you’d had the timing, you’d have gotten the miracle?
I don’t have a neat answer for that. I’m not sure the Gospels give one.
What I’ve come to instead, slowly, is this: maybe presence mattered more than proximity. Maybe what these stories are actually about isn’t Jesus’s hands on someone’s eyes. It’s Jesus stopping. Bartimaeus is shouting at the edge of a crowd that wants him quiet, and Jesus stops walking (Mark 10:46-52). The man born blind gets interrogated by an entire religious establishment about whether he’s really who he says he is, and Jesus goes and finds him afterward – the only person in the whole reading who does (John 9:35). The healing is real in these stories. I’m not spiritualizing it away. But the thing underneath the healing, the thing that might actually be for me too, is that somebody stopped. Somebody didn’t let the man become an argument instead of a person.
I don’t know if that’s the whole answer. I think it might be enough of one to keep reading.
What I didn’t notice as a kid
I wasn’t always this alert to the blindness metaphors running through scripture and through the church. As a kid, I think I was mostly trying to be normal. You don’t have a lot of energy left over for close reading when most of your effort is going toward not standing out.
I have more energy for it now, partly because I’ve stopped spending so much of it trying to pass. And what I notice is this: seeing and blindness get used constantly as stand-ins for other things. Now I see, meaning now I understand. Blind faith, meaning naive faith. Eyes to see, meaning finally getting it. I used to hear those phrases and assume they meant something like enlightenment. I didn’t think about what they implied about people who, medically, cannot see.
Here’s what I know now: words carry weight whether or not the person saying them means any harm. What we say and how we say it has real effects on people who are listening, even when we never meant them to be listening at all. And what we don’t say does too.
I’m honestly not as bothered by this as I used to be when it comes from someone I have a relationship with. I know the metaphors. I use plenty of them myself – I’m a writer, I know exactly what “I see it now” is doing in a sentence. Context and relationship change a lot. But I’ve also met people who use this language and have no interest in learning why it might land differently on someone in the room. That’s not a small thing. I don’t want blindness to become shorthand, in anyone’s mind, for lesser than. Not bad. Not less. We need more help and more accommodation than a lot of people around us. That doesn’t make our hopes smaller or our dreams less real.
There are things I will not get to do because of this. I will never referee AYSO soccer for the kids in my community – I can’t track a ball and a field full of moving players well enough to make the calls. I wanted, at one point, to fly commercial planes. That takes a kind of vision I will never have. Those aren’t tragedies. They’re just true. I don’t need them narrated as inspiration and I don’t need them erased either.
What I actually want from the church
My bishop was right, and I think about what he said more now than I did when he said it. The church has not figured out what to do with people who can’t see, or hear, or walk, or process the world the way most of its architecture assumes. Buildings, bulletins, hymnals, sermon illustrations, mission trips, committee meetings – most of it gets designed for a version of a person who doesn’t include us, and then we get invited in afterward, as an accommodation instead of a starting assumption.
I don’t need every sermon on John 9 to resolve the way mine used to. I’d rather hear a preacher admit that the healing stories raise a hard question for anyone whose body hasn’t been healed, and let that question sit in the room instead of rushing past it toward the miracle. That’s closer to honest. And I’ve come to believe that’s where hope actually starts – not in the reassurance, but in the honesty that comes before it.
I still don’t know exactly why some people got healed and I haven’t. I don’t think I’m going to resolve that on this page. But I keep coming back to the man born blind, sitting outside on his own after the religious leaders threw him out, and Jesus going to find him. Not to heal him again. Just to find him.
Maybe that’s closer to what these stories are actually for.
If this is a question you’re carrying too – about healing, about disability, about what faith asks of a body that doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to – I’d love to have you along for Faith, Upgraded.
