The Pharisees

PRAYER OF CONSECRATION Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.  Abba, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice. Abba, we belong to you.  Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.  John 9:13–34 (NIV) They brought to the Pharisees the man who had been blind. Now the day on which Jesus had made the mud and opened the man’s eyes was a Sabbath. Therefore the Pharisees also asked him how he had received his sight. “He put mud on my eyes,” the man replied, “and I washed, and now I see.” Some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath.” But others asked, “How can a sinner perform such signs?” So they were divided. Then they turned again to the blind man, “What have you to say about him? It was your eyes he opened.” The man replied, “He is a prophet.” They still did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they sent for the man’s parents. “Is this your son?” they asked. “Is this the one you say was born blind? How is it that now he can see?” “We know he is our son,” the parents answered, “and we know he was born blind. But how he can see now, or who opened his eyes, we don’t know. Ask him. He is of age; he will speak for himself.” 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. That was why his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.” A second time they summoned the man who had been blind. “Give glory to God by telling the truth,” they said. “We know this man is a sinner.” He replied, “Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!” Then they asked him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” He answered, “I have told you already and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples too?” Then they hurled insults at him and said, “You are this fellow’s disciple! We are disciples of Moses! We know that God spoke to Moses, but as for this fellow, we don’t even know where he comes from.” The man answered, “Now that is remarkable! You don’t know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners. He listens to the godly person who does his will. Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” To this they replied, “You were steeped in sin at birth; how dare you lecture us!” And they threw him out. CONSIDER THIS Earlier, Jesus had healed this man born blind by placing mud on his eyes and ordering him to wash in the pool of Siloam. His neighbors could hardly believe that this person, whose sight had been restored, was the same man who used to sit and beg. They, therefore, brought this man to the Pharisees for some questioning, for they likewise were very curious about this matter. The religious leaders had a basic problem, given the judgments that they had already made. In their eyes, since Jesus did this miracle on the Sabbath, then he had to be a sinner because the faithful keep the Sabbath by avoiding work. This judgment, however, only led to further difficulties for the Pharisees, for if Jesus was judged to be a sinner, then how could such a person do this marvelous work? In fact, some among the Pharisees raised this very question: “How can a sinner perform such signs?” revealing something of the division even among them. The religious leadership then asked the man born blind: “What have you to say about him?” He responded, “He is a prophet.” Not content with this answer, they then turned to his parents, who affirmed that their son was indeed born blind, but they did not understand how he could now see. Fearful of perhaps being cast out of the synagogue, the parents then moved all responsibility over to their son, “Ask him. He is of age.” All of this was getting nowhere, and so the Pharisees began a second round of interrogation—and that’s what it was—by inviting the man to “give glory to God.” The use of this particular phrase was another way of saying that the religious leaders did not believe the account of the miracle, again since it had been performed on the Sabbath, and they were, therefore, urging the man to come clean with the truth. A similar phrase, “give glory to the Lord,” is employed in Joshua 7:19, in which Joshua exhorted Achan to confess the evil he had done.1 The Pharisees then exclaimed, speaking out of their own assumptions and presuppositions, “We know this man is a sinner.” The healed man replied by stating the clear and unshakable fact from which he would never depart in this dialogue: “One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!” Not content with this answer, the Pharisees asked the man yet again: “How did he open your eyes?” Clearly frustrated by this point, the man born blind had the audacity to shoot back, “I have told you already and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples too?” Undoubtedly angry at being spoken to in this way, the Pharisees hurled insults at the man and declared: “You are this fellow’s disciple! We are disciples of Moses!” Who would have ever imagined that this brief passage in the Gospel of John is the doorway to a great debate, a portal to one of the greatest contests possible? It’s as if we’ve stumbled onto a particular door in a very large building and entered a hallowed hall in which the debaters are already seated. We hurry to our seats, embarrassed that we are slightly late. On the one side are several religious leaders who are finely dressed, reflecting their power and status. On the other side is a single man who has spent almost his entire life begging, and so he evidently could not afford what many people would consider to be the proper attire for the occasion. The Pharisees laid out their argument for the audience in the following way: • Keeping the Sabbath requires doing no work. • Jesus healed the man born blind on the Sabbath. • In healing the blind man, Jesus did work on the Sabbath. • In doing work on the Sabbath, Jesus broke the Sabbath. • Since Jesus broke the Sabbath, he is, therefore, a sinner. The conclusion of this thinking from which the religious leaders never departed was that Jesus was a rank sinner. Since sinners cannot do great signs and wonders whose source is God, that’s why the Pharisees spent so much of their effort trying to explain away the miracle itself with their rounds of questioning. Either the man wasn’t actually blind from birth but had a temporary condition that could be remedied, or else Jesus was a charlatan. But were there other options to be considered? The man born blind, who was likely poor and obviously intelligent, argued much differently. Unlike the Pharisees, with their years of education, he had a very important fact on his side, and facts can be very powerful things even if you’re poor and have very little status. He knew beyond question that Jesus had healed him. In other words, his starting point was much different from that of the religious leaders. He began with the reality of the miracle and then branched out from there. He thought about the implications of the miracle for the identity of Jesus himself. From that vantage point, he then chipped away at the assumption of the Pharisees that Jesus was a sinner. Such a judgment just wouldn’t hold up; he knew that. The blind man showed this in two key ways. First of all, he reasoned, “We know that God does not listen to sinners.” It’s not that God doesn’t hear the prayers of repentant sinners, those who are heartily sorry for their sins. Of course, the Most High hears such humble prayers. To forgive is, after all, divine. It’s rather that God will not work in a favored way, such as to perform a miracle, through someone who is set against the divine will through a life of stubborn, willful sin. Second, the healed man argued, “If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” Since, however, Jesus did, in fact, do something—perform a miracle—then he must be from God. Observe that the miracle Jesus brought about was not something similar to what the ancient Egyptians had performed, during the time of Moses, through their use of magic when they, too, turned water into blood or called forth a colony of frogs (see Exodus 7:14–8:7). No, the miracle of Jesus was in an entirely different category. Never before had a person born blind been so wonderfully healed. The miracle of Jesus was simply stupendous. At the end of this great debate, the two different sides drew their conclusions and lived into them, so to speak. In terms of the blind man, he was evidently by now a disciple of Jesus, for he knew that this miracle worker was from God, and he would later worship him (John 9:38). For their part, the Pharisees maintained the fiction that Jesus was a sinner (utterly discounting the miracle) and they then turned around and made this judgment a plank of what it meant to be a disciple of Moses. Here was a genuine though unnecessary parting of the ways. From henceforth, being a disciple of Jesus and being a disciple of Moses would be presented as two different, even contradictory, things. In fact, as Gary Burge points out in his own observation on this passage: “In modern-day Israel, a Jew can give up everything about his or her faith, even becoming an atheist, and still be considered a Jew in order to take up Israeli citizenship. The one thing that invalidates ‘Jewishness’ is belief in Jesus. The deep irony is that an atheist is still Jewish, but a ‘messianic Jew’ is not.”2 But what if, back in the first century, the Pharisees had come to doubt some aspects of their own theology, that is, how they thought about God? What if they had recognized that healing a man born blind from birth on the Sabbath was not the work of a sinner but the work of the Holy One of Israel? THE PRAYER Jesus, you who mercifully gave us the Sabbath as a time of rest and healing, thank you that your grace extends to every hour of every day. Help us to celebrate truth wherever we find it, promote goodness in every opportunity, and behold beauty as you designed it.