Illness, healing and sin....John 9

When Christ's disciples ask him why a particular man was born blind, they suggested two reasons. "Who sinned?", they ask "This man or his parents, that he was born blind?" Our Lord's answer? "Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but that the works of God should be made manifest in him....." Jesus then proceeds to heal the man by making mud with spit and sending him to wash in the pool of Siloam.

According to St. John Chrysostom, the disciples ask the question rhetorically, not believing that anyone had sinned, but therefore wondering why this man was then born blind.
Christ responds to this in both his words and his actions. Why does Christ say "that the works of God be made manifest."? Does He mean to tell us that God engineered this man's blindness so Christ could do this miracle and thereby prove Himself divine? Is that what is really being said here? I hope not.

Looking at what happens after this, we may see a little more of what Jesus is really after. The man is healed through obedience to Christ's command. He went and washed and then saw. The man had a part to play in his own healing. Further, the man attested to Christ as his healer. He did not try to pretend that the pool of Siloam was magical or that God had used some other means to heal him. Persecuted by the religious authorities and abandoned by his own family the man still holds to Christ. This faithfulness to the source of Life was in itself part of the man's healing and the manifestation of the work of God. Upon his faithfulness to Christ, which got him kicked out of the synangogue, Christ comes to him and reveals Himself as the source of all healing and life. This man then becomes the first person recorded as worshipping Christ in John's gospel....and one of only a very few pre-resurrection worshippers, period.

So here is the work of God manifest, not a miracle as the occasion to show Christ as the Son of God, but rather Christ showing Himself as God in order that the miracle of salvation be worked in this man's heart. A physical healing, yes. A physical healing to show everyone that He was God? No. He healed this man in order that the man might see Him. The man did see Christ and asked for a second gift of sight. He asked Christ to show him the Son of God, that he might worship Him.

The sad, pathetic backdrop of this man's beautiful journey is the religious authorities taking the rhetorical question of the disciples as their answer to the whole thing....

"They answered and said to him, You were altogether born in sins, and do you teach us? And they cast him out."

They believed, in the end, that the man 's parents must have been dreadful sinners and passed it on to him in the form of blindness and in his willfulness in not trusting their judgment of Christ.

May I not be found to follow the corrupt inclination of my heart but instead be found to say with he who was also born blind..."Lord, I believe!"