For several months, I have been thinking about Jesus’ healing of the man born blind (John 9).
The facts are simple. The man was born blind. Jesus gave him sight. This is not a fable. It is not even a parable. It actually happened.
But the rest of the story is about people asking and dogmatically answering the wrong questions. The disciples asked a wrong question. The neighbors asked several wrong questions. The Pharisees asked more wrong questions. Even the man healed asked a couple wrong questions.
The questions were understandable, reasonable, properly composed, asked sincerely, and raised by recognized stakeholders in the community—and they were still the wrong questions.
“Who sinned?”
“Isn’t this the same man who used to sit and beg?”
“How, then, were your eyes opened?”
“Where is this man?”
“Who did this on the Sabbath?”
“How can a sinner perform such signs?”
“What have you to say about him?”
“Is this your son?”
“Is this the one you say was born blind?”
“How is it that now he can see?”
“What did he do to you?”
“How did he open your eyes?”
“Why do you want to hear it again?”
“Do you want to become his disciples too?”
After all the wrong questions, Jesus asks the only right question, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” Jesus asks the question with eternal implications—the question no one else is asking.
At the end, the Pharisees ask a relevant question, “What? Are we blind too?” But they failed to answer it.
Interestingly, apart from Jesus the only people who didn’t ask wrong questions were the man’s parents. And when they were asked wrong questions, they simply answered, “We don’t know.” It seems like a terribly inadequate answer, but they back it up with facts. “He is our son. He was born blind. How he can see, we don’t know.”
John 9:22 is an interesting verse. It says, “His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jewish leaders, who already had decided that anyone who acknowledged that Jesus was the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue.” Apparently, his parents believed the miracle but were intimidated by the threats of the Jewish leaders.
Asking the wrong questions and answering them dogmatically is how dogma is reinforced and perpetuated. We can expand the circle of dogmatists, reproduce the circumstances scientifically, lengthen the list of wrong questions, repeat them over and over, publish the answers, and even be drawn into thinking these questions are important and answering them ourselves—and they will still be the wrong questions.
Because God is still performing miracles.
