Now I See
Now I See by Rev. L. John Gable
February 10, 2019
A first-person presentation of the healing of the blind beggar found in John 9.
That was my spot, right there! That is where I sat nearly every day of my entire life, year after year, calling, “Alms, alms for the poor. I am a poor blind beggar. Alms of the poor.” But all of that changed one day because once I was blind, but now I can see.
I was sitting right here, just as I always did, crying, “Alms, alms for the poor. I am a poor, blind beggar. Alms for the poor.” I was used to listening to the sounds of the street, people visiting and laughing and talking as they walked by me. But on that particular day I heard a group of men talking and they were standing very close to me so I could hear them clearly. I didn’t recognize any of their voices, but I soon realized that they were talking about me. One of them asked, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” I had often wondered that myself, so I tried to listen to what this man of God would answer. He said, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” I had never heard that answer before, so I began to wonder who this man might be and what He meant by that, but then He said something I will never forget. He said, “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” I didn’t understand what He meant by that then, but I do now.
I felt Him come close to me. Not many people get close to a beggar, only close enough to put a coin in my cup. But this man came very close and it startled me when I felt Him put His hand on my shoulder. It was the most tender touch I have every felt; then I heard Him spit on the ground and wondered what He was doing as He made what must have been little cakes of mud which He plastered on my eyes. Then He said, in a voice so soft that only I could hear it, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam.” Then He helped me up and sent me on my way. And as I washed the mud from my eyes, the most remarkable thing happened, I could see! For the very first time in my life, my eyes were opened and I could see!
I was so excited I started to shout, hysterically, and to dance around. People saw me, but even those who knew me well, didn’t seem to recognize me, and of course, I didn’t recognize them either; I’d never seen them before. They asked, “Are you the blind man who used to sit on the corner and beg?” I said, “Yes, I am! I was blind but now I can see!” I could tell immediately that some of them believed me and others didn’t. They asked, “How did this happen?”, for no one had ever seen a real miracle before. So I explained how the man put mud on my eyes and when I washed it off I could see. They asked me, “What man? Where is He?” and I said, “I don’t know. I never saw Him.
And then the most unusual thing happened. I would have expected everyone to be happy for me. Here I was, blind my entire life, being able to see for the very first time, but they weren’t. There was a group of people, religious people, who started to argue and disagree with one another, over me, which I didn’t understand at all. I was blind and now I see. What was there to argue about?
It turns out it was the Sabbath day when I was healed and apparently, according to somebody’s rules, you aren’t supposed to work on the Sabbath, so when this fellow made mud and put it on my eyes, I guess, He was doing work. So this group dragged me over to meet with the religious leaders called Pharisees and they asked me to tell them exactly what happened, detail by detail, which I was more than glad to do. I said, “Some man put mud on my eyes and told me to go over to the pool of Siloam to wash it off, and when I did suddenly I could see!” When I told them that they got in to the biggest argument I’ve ever heard and I’ve heard some big ones before. You know, people think that blind people are deaf, too. They say all sorts of things, right in front of you, thinking you can’t hear, just because you can’t see
I didn’t really understand what they were arguing about. There were so many people talking and yelling, all at once. They kept using big religious words that I didn’t understand, but I got the gist of it. Some of them were saying that this man who healed me was not from God because no God-fearing man would do work on the Sabbath. And others were saying that He must be from God because no sinner could perform such an incredible miracle. Then all of a sudden everybody got real quiet and they looked at me and said, “What do you think? Who do you think He is?” I’ve never been asked my opinion on anything, ever before. I guess people think if you can’t see you can’t think either, or that you don’t have an opinion on anything. I really didn’t know what to say, but I gave what I thought was a pretty good answer. I said, “I think He is a prophet!”
You would have thought I had said I thought He was the man in the moon. Everybody started yelling again, yelling at me, yelling at one another, yelling just to be yelling. It wasn’t long before someone said, “I don’t think this guy was really blind in the first place” and with that they hauled me off to ask my parents if I was really their son. Of course, they said, “Yes, he is our son.” Then they asked, “Then how is it that he can now see?” They said, “We don’t know. Ask him, he is of age”, which of course they already had.
You know, it was very strange and a little sad for me. That was the very first time I ever got to see my parents with my own eyes. Of course I recognized their voices but I had never seen their faces, and there they were terrified by the Pharisees. On that day, when they should have been so excited for me, instead they were afraid of being kicked out of the synagogue, which is what was happening to anyone who even hinted that this man named Jesus might be the Messiah. You know, I still don’t know why the Pharisees were making such a fuss over me; they never paid any attention to me when I was on the street begging. I was the one who blind, but they were the ones who couldn’t see. I’d hear them praying, but mostly it was prayers of thanksgiving that they weren’t like me, “blemished”. But there they were fighting over me like I was their prized possession.
Anyway, they came back to me and started asking me their big theological questions again, which I still didn’t understand, but I answered them as plainly as I could. They asked again, “Tell us, what did He do and how did He do it?” I was getting kind of tired of them asking that same old question, so I said, “Why do you want to know? Do you want to become His disciples, too?” I didn’t really mean to, but that kind of made them mad. Then they said, point blank, “We don’t know where He came from”, and I said, “I don’t either. I don’t know whether He is a sinner or a saint, and to be honest with you, I don’t really care. All I do know is, once I was blind and now I can see!” That made them even madder still, so they called me some names and then kicked me out again, and went back to their arguing.
So there I was, standing on the outside of an argument that was all about me, when a fellow walked up to me and said, “Do you believe this man is the Son of God?” I thought, “Oh no! Here we go again.” So I said to Him, “Who is He so that I can believe in Him?” Then this stranger put His hand on my shoulder, just as He had before, and said, “I am He.”
I don’t really know what happened to me. I don’t know whether I knelt down or just became so weak in my knees that I fell down, but I found myself at His feet worshiping Him, saying, “Yes, Lord, I do believe!” He took my hand and lifted me up, so that I was standing, looking Him right in the face, when suddenly I felt my vision starting to blur. “Oh, no!” I thought, “What’s happening to me? Am I losing my sight again?” Then I realized I was crying. I had never done that before. I was crying for joy because I was looking in to the face of the One who changed my life, the One who, from that moment on, has meant everything to me. He didn’t just open my eyes, He opened my heart. Ever since then I have tried to tell people about Jesus and the difference He has made in my life. People still ask me questions about what happened to me; questions that I can’t fully explain, so I answer in the only way I really know how. I say, “I don’t really know what He did or how He did it, but I do know this: once I was blind, but now I see. If Jesus did that for me, just imagine what He can do for you.”
This is the story of the blind beggar who was healed by Jesus, recorded in John chapter 9.
This the Word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.