Year A: Lent 4 | John 9:1-41
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
March 15, 2026
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
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“Those with him from the Pharisees heard this and said to him, ‘Wouldn’t that mean we’re also blind?’ – John 9:40[1]
We know of three primary factions in 1st Century Jewish society: the Herodians, the Sadducees, and the Pharisees. Although the first two appear a few times in the other Gospels, John’s writing is exclusively concerned with the Pharisees. One likely reason for this is that John appears to have been written a good bit later than the other Gospels. While all three parties were active or remained influential memories when Mark, Matthew, and Luke were writing, by John’s day, with the Temple destroyed far earlier—and Sadducee practices and cohesion erased in the process—the Pharisees were really the only religious sect that remained apart from the budding Christian community.
Despite how the Church has interpreted their presence, Pharisees were not the bad guys. Pharisees were essentially the cultural guardians of their day, people trying to figure out how to carry ancient wisdom and practices into a world of expanding knowledge and changing values. Nor was Pharisaism a monolith. There were factions and ongoing arguments about religious and cultural matters that fell under the label as a whole. Some were more strict or literal in their understanding and implementation of tradition while others continued to press to incorporate change and newer ideas. Most probably fell somewhere in the middle of the conversation, too busy trying to survive to pay all that much attention. Some of Jesus’ active followers were Pharisees—those are the guys asking questions at the end of today’s scene. So, again, despite how the Church has portrayed them, the Pharisees were not, as a whole, Jesus’ enemies.
If we pay attention to the story of the man born blind, we find that John doesn’t distinguish Jesus’ actual opponents—the Judeans—until partway through. It’s essential to remember that when we see reference to “the Jews” in John, like today, he’s almost always talking about Judeans, not what we currently understand to be Jewish people, culture, or religious practices.[2] As we talked about a few weeks ago, in John’s Gospel, Judea and Galilee—the region both Jesus and John are from—are brothers, Judea considering itself more formal and educated while looking at Galilee as a bit ignorant or even a little intellectually underdeveloped. In John, most of the conflict erupts when the Galileans spend time in Judea.
What we’re seeing in today’s passage is a conflict within a larger culture—people who are, from the outside, largely the same setting up barriers based not on reality but on perceptions of what the other party might be thinking.
John starts out with a straightforward narrative. Jesus notices a blind guy, and the disciples ask who’s fault the blindness is. Culturally, people thought that the gods used external deformities to reveal something about a person’s—or their ancestors’—moral character; the physical distortion echoed the warp or twist of the invisible self.[3]
Like he did with Nicodemus, Jesus tries to reframe the conversation, rejecting that this congenital difference has anything to do with sin or failure or corruption or what have you and instead turning everyone’s attention both to the present and to the person sitting right in front of them. This man is blind, full stop. The philosophical “why” doesn’t really matter. What does matter is taking this opportunity to reveal to[4] him God’s ongoing work in the world. If Jesus is the light of the world, as the author states at the beginning of their Gospel, how better to display that than to bring vision to someone who’s never fully experienced what light is?
Jesus smears clay on the guy’s eyes and sends him to a nearby fountain[5] to wash it off, which he does. Neighbors and other people who recognize him as a public beggar want to know what’s going on. He explains what happened and who initiated this sign. They ask where Jesus is now, but, having actually followed through with what Jesus told him to, he doesn’t know.
Every time we see the word “know” in this passage, it’s a reflection of self-certainty. The formerly blind man is never certain of anything.[6] His parents are certain who their son is and what his condition was but not of anything else. The Judeans, however—notice it isn’t the Pharisees—express no doubt in themselves. They might not be sure about Jesus, but their certainty in their tradition, in their interpretation, in their prophet, and in their idea of what God is and how God works is unflappable. In their certainty, they mock and demean someone who had just begun celebrating a life-changing event, essentially denounce him as one of God’s mistakes, and exile him from the community he was just beginning to encounter as an equal. In doing so, they choose to reject mercy, love, and any notion of God’s ongoing work of restoration, re-creation, and reconciliation throughout[7] human society.
I’ll state here that this man’s life is not a cosmic object lesson[8] and should never be understood as such, despite his situation playing out as a convenient metaphor. Someone who’s never seen the world around him, who’s only experienced it through sound, smell, touch, taste, and imagination, finally views the reality within which he’s been living. In the midst of his joy, he’s rushed before his society’s cultural guardians, only for it to become clear that many in power are blind to God’s active presence in everyday life. Certain of their own vision, they can’t see how clouded their understanding has actually become. They’ve read what it looked like when God worked in the past, but they can’t—or won’t—translate any of that into present experience. Their interpretation and expectations and obsession with shadows of the past have made their view of life so dim that they refuse to admit that the sun is rising right in front of them. So rather than questioning their own thinking, they turn their backs, plop down, and fade into the history they so adore.
But again, not all of them.
After the Judeans have expelled this person from their community—along with any social, emotional, and financial support network he may have had—Jesus hunts out the man he healed, who then pledges himself—what we misinterpret as “believes in”—to this person who provided him with the ability to finally see the world around him. But along with Jesus are some of the Pharisees—different members of the same group that so recently refused to accept God’s work in the blind man’s life—and punished him for daring to acknowledge it. These Pharisees, however, are not so certain. It may still be dark, but, like Nicodemus, they can also sense a new dawn breaking. Hearing Jesus talk about bringing sight to those who otherwise wouldn’t be able to see and, in the process, revealing how blind many who claim to carry out God’s vision actually are, they ask an important question: “Wouldn’t that mean we’re also blind?”
Catching at least a glimpse of the cruelty of their peers, the moral violence and emotional and social distress resulting from a commitment to their uncontestable view of reality, these people have begun to wonder about more “certainties” the others may have been trying to cram down their throats. If they, too, are Pharisees, does that mean that they’re also inherently corrupt, that they’re stuck on the same dark road as their colleagues from that particular council?
Our translation doesn’t particularly make it sound that way, but Jesus responds to them with hope. These people—still Pharisees—are on the right track. They’re willing to question themselves, to think about their own actions and attitudes and what just might result from where those are guiding them. Some of their certainties remain, resulting in deformities in how surrounding lives may look to them, but they’re learning to un-see, to find ways of breaking down the barriers they and their friends have erected between themselves and the reality their own neighbors are forced to endure. They’re starting to recognize the presence of some of the lenses that have been altering their vision. Their understanding may still be distorted, but things are becoming clearer. To turn Jesus’ phrase a bit, they are going blind—but in a very good way.
And in following Jesus, we can, too.
Our society teaches us to take certainty in our own perceptions and prejudices and proclivities, to question—and reject—everyone and everything but our individual selves. This is not the path of God. However, it is possible for us to unlearn those distortions, the lies of a Christianity that allows us to ignore not only Jesus’ own words but the plain realities playing out in front of our eyes. Beginning to glimpse the glory and dignity of all the people God has placed in front of us, we can celebrate and participate in the work of the Divine in their presence and existence. Re-training ourselves to distinguish light from darkness, we can see other lives not as pawns to for our games or object lessons for others but as the genuine, vulnerable, and valuable humans that they are. No matter how blind we may have become to the world’s misery and pain, like the man in the story, there’s still hope for miraculous transformation—still hope for change and life and renewal. There’s still hope for us to see—to embrace—God’s reality, to reflect for ourselves God’s mercy, generosity, and love.
[1] My translation | All Bible quotations are from the NRSVue unless otherwise noted.
[2] Or especially anything having to do with modern nation calling itself Israel.
[3] Despite advances in some areas, humans still have a tendency to think in this manner of karmic justice.
[4] I strongly disagree with common translations of the term in John 9:3. The Greek preposition ἐν (en) is remarkably flexible for English speakers, containing such meanings as “in,” “on,” “with,” “to,” “for,” “amidst,” “by,” “during,” “through,” and “within,” among (which would also be “ἐν”) others. So while “in” may be a legitimate translation, that choice reveals more about the translators’ perception of God than about God Godself.
[5] A source of living (aka fresh or moving) water, to tie into the story of the woman at the well.
[6] It’s arguable that the man expresses certainty that God doesn’t listen to “sinners” in verse 31, but to me it feels more like a mocking echo of the Judean’s argument against Jesus.
[7] Another “ἐν” word
[8] No person, disability, or tragedy exists for that purpose: again, our translation’s framing it in that manner reveals more about those interpreting than it does about God.