Here are my five Bible heroes that I want to meet when I get to heaven. The first, scroll down, that I wrote about was Joshua. The next is the nameless blind man from John 9.
The Man born blind
In His travels, Jesus comes upon a man who is likely to be begging. He was blind. There were no government resources for people with Handicaps in Jesus’ day, and money was tight for everyone. It was considered a religious obligation to give to people with such needs in order that they might live. But for the most part, they were shut out of society.
Bad things have always happened to people both good and bad. But majority opinion in Jesus’ day was that if something bad had happened to you, it was generally because someone sinned. Jesus and his disciples were aware that this was a man who was born blind. Unlike many that become blind, even at an early age, this person was born completely without the ability to see. For this, fault must be assigned. There were two possibilities: The parents sinned and this was their punishment; the child had sinned in the womb.
Can you imagine the kind of pressures this brought this family? The pain? The soul searching and sorrow?
Unless you have been raised in a family that is long on blame and short on grace, you probably can’t really enter into that kind of sympathetic feeling. And, here there really was no one at fault! Jesus gave the final definitive “no” to those ideas. There are other reasons why people have disaster fall on them. Here was one of them: It was for the demonstration of the glory of God.
God’s glory. Some might thing that seems hard. Yet this man, because of what he went through, brings great glory to Jesus Christ and to His Father for what he experienced. He experienced the power of God to restore his sight. He experienced the grace of Christ who welcomed him as a disciple. Bear in mind that the man was a sinner, deserving of Hell, just like you and me. But he got double grace: a healing of the body and of the soul. But that’s not all. He is a trophy of God’s greatness. But this man is yet more.
Keep this in mind: to cross the leadership of your town/village was basically to cause yourself to be out cast in your community. And they had already made it known that to identify yourself with this prophet from Nazareth was to be “put out of the synagogue.” That meant that you were cut off from good community, from your business ties, from good people who gave alms, etc. You were alone.
This man, when called to account for the healing (just think about that for a moment) testified to what he experienced with the Christ. He stuck with it. There was a powerful incentive to not own Christ. The pharisees themselves give him an opening to deny Christ. They ask him, “What do you say about him?” The man could have said “I don’t know” as apparently another man (the one healed by Siloam) Jesus healed did. He said, “He is a prophet.”
He simply follows reason:
I was blind
Now I see
I don’t know if this man (Jesus) is a sinner or not
God does not listen to sinners
God listens to godly men
Nobody has ever opened a man’s eyes who was born blind
He must be from God or he could not do it.
Therefore: He’s a holy man/ prophet.
Today, we might quibble a bit on who God can or does listen to. It does not matter. He follows the assumptions he has been taught by these same men all of his life. The inescapable conclusion is that Jesus is a holy man and a prophet.
He tells this boldly to these men who by now in this process have become very hostile. Its so strange to see this hostility! The Blind man has done nothing! He was the recipient of a benefit, and that’s it. Instead of questioning their own assumptions about God and their doctrine, they accuse him of wrong on the basis of the assumption about the connection between sin and his blindness. They throw him out.
This is a brave man. He is my hero. I have stood with my knees shaking when people have begun talking about faith in God, and questioning my faith. I have felt the doubts and fears I think everyone experiences when confronted about what I believe. Here is a man who has only met Jesus once apparently, has not been grounded in his faith, and he is so firm in his conviction about what he has seen and heard that he cannot be induced to lie about it...even to the point that he is cast out of the synagogue. And community life.
He is a brave man. He is a warrior in the soul.
I don’t know why he remains nameless. Perhaps he dies soon after this incident. Perhaps John seeks to protect the family of the man. I don’t know. All I know is that this guy is incredibly brave. I look forward to meeting him in heaven.
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