The Man Born Blind

This morning I read the ninth chapter of the gospel of John, sitting cross-legged on my bed, waiting for my children to wake up so we could all get ready for church. I would like to tell you that I do this every morning, full of disciplined piety, but I don’t. My Bible reading, even after two master’s degrees in the subject, is haphazard and fly-by-night.

But today I was sitting cross-legged on my bed reading John 9 and thinking of my husband. John 9 always makes me think of my husband. My undergraduate advisor always told us that we could not understand the Bible until we take time to know the characters, and the summer before I met my husband, I had read through the gospel of John, trying to understand this character Jesus. Along the way I met the man born blind in chapter 9, that irascible old coot, and when I met Az the Husband I recognized him instantly as a sighted version of the same.

The story in John 9 is not so much about Jesus’ healing the blind man as the aftermath of that healing. In John’s Gospel, the religious leaders of Jesus’ day are out to get him from the beginning, and the nameless blind man becomes a pawn in the argument. They question him, trying to get him to either deny that Jesus healed him or deny that there is any significance to the healing.

And through all the theological and political wrangling, the former blind man refuses to participate. He is stodgy and crabby and clearly thinks the whole argument is stupid. Instead of joining in the debate, he stubbornly sticks to what he knows: “One thing I know: I was blind, but now I see.”

When his questioners exhaust his patience completely, he throws out a final retort dripping with sarcasm: “Why, this is an amazing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does his will, God listens to him. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.”

When I first got to know Az the Husband, he reminded me of two characters from literature. The first was this blind man, lovably cantankerous, rock-solid certain of what he knows and scornful of rationalizations that seek to overcome uncomfortable evidence.

The second was Giles Corey from The Crucible, a man accused of witchcraft in the Salem trials. Crafty old Giles knew that the court would convict him regardless of evidence, so he refused to enter a plea, thereby preventing the trial from taking place. In order to force him to enter a plea, the court had him slowly crushed with rocks, adding more to the pile and asking for his plea.

His dying words were “More weight.”

I love this irascible man I married, in part because I want to be like him. The temptation of fundamentalism - whether the organized kind or a strictly idiosyncratic bigotry - is to quash the evidence we don’t like, to sift the world so that only those things that confirm our opinions are allowed to matter. There is a dark selfishness inside many of us, regardless of the religion we belong to, that whispers to us that we already know the answers before we ask the questions, and who is this or that person or thing to contradict us anyway?

And when I hear that whisper, I remember the Giles Corey sitting across the dinner table from me, and I thank God for certain kinds of blindness, and pray for a certain kind of sight.

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