“For no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him.” – John 3:2b (LSB)

Recently, as I was in my home office studying John 9:13-16, I was taken aback at the blindness of the Pharisees who, upon hearing that Jesus had healed a blind man (John 9:13) — from the formerly blind man himself (John 9:15) — complained only that Jesus has dared to perform such a fete on the Sabbath (John 9:16).

What hardened hearts the Pharisees had (John 9:41)! If you’re suddenly able to see, after being blind literally all your life, why should anyone care, Pharisee or not, what day of the week it was that such a miraculous and beneficent gift was bestowed upon you?

To be so obdurately tethered to the Law as to willfully ignore the literal eye-witness testimony of something the Pharisees knew was humanly impossible is, frankly, astounding! It is no wonder, then, that Jesus would so severely admonish the Pharisees, saying, “For judgment I came into this world, so that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may become blind” (John 9:39).

But despite their self-righteous incredulity, there is one thing for which I do give the Pharisees credit and it is this: they at least appeared to have understood that no sinful person could have done what Jesus did in restoring sight to a man who was indisputably and unarguably congenitally blind. That much is affirmed by the Pharisees pondering among themselves this profound question in John 9:16, “How can a sinful man do such signs?”

Indeed, how can a sinful man – any sinful person – do such signs? The answer to that question, of course, is that no sinful man can do such signs.

Even the recalcitrant Pharisees knew that.

Our whole business, brethren, in this life is to heal this eye of the heart whereby God may be seen. To this end are celebrated the Holy Mysteries; to this end is preached the Word of God; to this end are the moral exhortations of the Church, those, that is, that relate to the corrections of manners, to the amendment of carnal lusts, to the renouncing the world, not in word only, but in a change of life: to this end is directed the whole aim of the Divine and Holy Scriptures, that that inner man may be purged of that which hinders us from the sight of God [emphasis added].

St. Augustine

Notwithstanding their indignant refusal to acknowledge that Jesus was in fact the promised Messiah (Luke 24:27), the Pharisees were acutely aware of at least the following two realities: 1) blindness was humanly incurable, and 2) no sinful person could ever be imbued by a holy God with the power to restore the sight of a blind person. Despite their rigid, inflexible, and unyielding allegiance to the Law, if the Pharisees knew nothing else, they at least knew those two things.

If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your guilt remains. – John 9:41

Ironically, the Pharisees, as a result of their own zealous study of the Law, knew objectively that no mere mortal — and every mortal is a sinner (Gen. 6:5; Eccl. 7:20; Lam. 3:39; Rom. 3:23) — could ever make a blind man see. The Pharisees knew that whoever could perform such a miraculous fete would have had to have been as holy, pure, righteous — and sinless — as God Himself. Which is to say, he would have had to be God incarnate.

And that is exactly who Jesus was—God in human flesh (Jn. 8:58; 12:45; Col. 2:9).

In Christ,

Darrell