HEALING AS DIVINIZATION: A POSITIVE READING OF THE HEALING OF THE BLIND MAN IN JOHN 9
The Recovery of the Blind, Basilica di St. Apollinare Nuovo. Public domain.
In the popular story in John 9, Jesus’ disciples assume that something has gone wrong with the man born blind upon encountering him. Readers often make the same mistake. When focusing exclusively on Jesus as a noble healer, they often assume that disabled people need or want healing because they are broken and need fixing. Thankfully, Jesus does not share such assumptions. It is dangerous and harmful to assume that the lives of those with ability-differences are painful and meaningless, and such a reading establishes the incorrect dichotomies that the opposite of illness is health and that the opposite of impairment is the normal-body; normality is social construction of acceptable or unacceptable deviation.
To take a step towards a positive reading of the healing story, therefore, requires us to see the story as more than just a healing. When we examine the relationship between Jesus and the man born blind and the comparison between the spaces they respectively take up, we see that Jesus’ interaction with the man is inherently uplifting because not only does he respect the man’s agency, he also grants him a share in God’s salvific mission.
The story in John 9 can avoid ableist interpretations because Jesus subverts expectations: the story is not all about him, because he is largely absent. This is significant because it embodies the crucial theme of believing without seeing. In typical Gospel miracle stories, Jesus is present throughout the whole narrative, since they are meant to draw the reader's attention to Jesus, not to the people being healed. John 9:8-9 in particular draws the reader’s attention to the reaction of the man’s neighbors, demonstrating that the story’s attention is now on the man, who is not a mere object of the miraculous cure that furthers the plot. The author’s interest in him continues after the miracle has happened.
The story also grants the blind man discipleship and agency in a dramatic way. He receives discipleship not because he is blind, or that he needs to be fixed. Rather, Jesus sees him and chooses him, and he has the agency to accept the invitation or to decline. Plus, the man’s faith is rooted in Jesus' word, not in the healing; it is only through his conversation with the synagogue leaders that he comes to recognize Jesus’ identity. When he is brought to the Pharisees and questioned about the identity of the one who opens his eyes, he first responds that Jesus was a prophet. Through further interrogations, he senses the Pharisees’ anxiety and preoccupation towards Jesus’ identity, which sends him back to Jesus to learn for himself. Upon hearing Jesus’ confirmation that he is the Son of Man, he comes to firmly believe—no further question is asked. Interestingly, it is the Pharisees that call the man a disciple of Jesus, before he claims such an identity for himself. His faith is intensified by understanding, not seeing.
However, the most telling aspect of this story is that the blind man parallels Christ in significant ways. Jesus is “the sent one” or “the anointed one,” the man is sent to wash in Siloam; Jesus is the incarnation of God who comes to reveal the Truth, while the man is born to manifest the work of God; both have disputed origins or birth and have their true identity doubted (the man’s parents deny his parentage out of fear); both are divisive figures in the community and rejected by their own people; both employ the plural we (9:4, 31); both are regarded as sinners, yet both reject the polemical use of the term “sin” (9:2, 25); both are reviled by community leaders, and both provoke crises between believers and non-believers.
The most striking parallel between the man and Jesus is the interrogation of the blind man by the Jewish leaders. He is first interrogated by his seemingly well-disposed neighbors, who then take him to the Pharisees to gain a better grip on the matter. However, these religious elites also cannot come to a firm judgment of his witness. With the non-believers perplexed, the man only offers very short one- or half-verse responses (9:11, 9:15b), or even refusing to engage in conversation at all because he knows that, for those without faith, no explanation is possible. He does not elaborate, exaggerate, or hog the limelight - much like Jesus at his trial. He refuses to testify to anything except what he has seen and heard, just like Jesus throughout the Gospel. At the end, the man is elevated from a defendant to a judge who astonishes the authorities into shame and silence, as they are condemned out of their own mouths and according to their own laws - again, much like how Jesus reverses his role with Pilate in the Passion narrative.
Additionally, he is also able to boldly claim this identity for himself, stating “I am” in verse 9. “I am” statements have special importance in the Gospel of John, and occur 24 times in the text. Fourteen of these have predicates (1) and ten do not. (2) Out of these ten “I am” statements, nine come from Jesus, except the one from 9:9, and the nine of these all signify or suggest divine identity. Additionally, the phrase “I am” is likely drawn from Exodus 3 and functions as a divine name. Therefore, when the man “anointed” and “sent” by Jesus responds with “I am,” it is very likely that it means more than simply “that is me.”
We should also keep in mind that the intense intra-communal conflict in John 9 foreshadows Jesus’ promises of care and protection in in John 10, especially in verse 4 where Jesus makes an allusion to the consequence of the man’s testimony: when the gatekeeper has “brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice.” Once again, Jesus put the emphasis of discipleship on hearing and following, not on the basis of sight. What’s more, the word for “brought out” in John 10:4 and the word for “thrown out,” which is what happened to the man in John 9:35, are both ἐκβάλλω. (3) Thus, the man born blind becomes a figure that represents the sheep in a unified flock. This theme of reversal draws a connection between the promises of persecution and protection: the social outcast now becomes the substitute for the Son of God.
So, what can we learn from this close reading of John 9? I propose that when our readings of the healing stories focus on the agency of those being healed we admit that their lived experiences are integral parts of their identities, and not problems that need to be fixed. To do otherwise would result in the erasure of identity. It should also be noted that many people with disabilities do not wish to be healed at all. The blind man in John 9 does not ask Jesus for healing, but takes control of understanding Jesus’ messianic identity through being fully attentive to what has happened to him; he is stern in his responses to the doubters and the religious authorities when facing their interrogation and intimidation.
Furthermore, the example of the man born blind testifies that everyone, regardless of ability and social location, has a potential share in God’s mission. When the blind man becomes the other Christ, he also bears the face of God. His divinization articulates a “sentness,” meaning that, as the man stands in for Christ, he comes to testify to Jesus as Jesus testifies to the Father; just as Jesus reveals the Father’s salvific plans here on earth, the man testifies to Jesus’s salvation. The man grows into the faith and agency with which God identified God’s very own Son.
Therefore, God is to be found in everyone, including those whom we deem under-deserving and marginalized. The nameless man born blind is the “everyman” in the Gospel of John, a figure whom everyone regardless of ability can and should identify with. As Sandra Schneiders writes, “Our being ‘born blind,’ that is, having only the life ‘from below,’ is indeed a grievous situation, but God intends that the Light coming into the world will enlighten every human being (cf. 1:9), making us children of God (1.12-13) born not of human initiative but of God.” (4) Our mission, therefore, is to make space for those with ability-differences by uplifting their agency, and to imitate them—something the man’s community would not do—so that all shall become children of God.
John 6:35, 41, 48, 51; 8:12, 18; 10:7, 9, 11, 14; 11:25; 14:6; 15:1, 5.
John 4:26; 6:20; 8:24, 28, 58; 9:9; 13:19; 18:5, 6, 8.
Colin H. Yuckman, “‘That the Works of God Should Be Made Manifest’: Vision and Vocation in John 9,” in Journal of Theological Interpretation, vol. 12, no. 1 (Penn State University Press, 2018) 110–26, at 123.
Sandra M. Schneiders, “To See or Not to See: John 9 as a Synthesis of the Theology and Spirituality of Discipleship,” in Word, Theology, and Community in John, ed. J. Painter et al. (St. Louis, MO: Chalice, 2002), 189–209, at 194-95. “Making us children of God” is a crucial point in John based on the chiastic structure.
