Religion versus Jesus | A Journey From Darkness to Light
From the Blind Beggar in John 9:1-41
Front Note: This is a fictional retelling capturing the first-person experience of the blind beggar healed at the Pool of Siloam.
Some Pharisees who were with him heard him say this and asked,
“What? Are we blind too?”
Jesus said, “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin;
But now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains.
-John 9:39-41
“I Was Blind. I Met Jesus. Now I See.”
I’ve shouted it in temple courts and whispered it to skeptics who stared at me like I’d lost my mind. That’s the truth that dismantled my old life and lit the new one on fire. Believe it or don’t, but those nine words tell the story that tore the blinders from my eyes like a lion ripping open a cage. The cage that held me captive for half a lifetime!
For most of my days, complete and utter darkness was my identity. A blind man is not just missing a sense; he is incapable of being normal. It was all I knew. Sure, I’d hear friends and family describe light, color, the beauty of a child’s eyes, but it’s like trying to imagine a language you’ve never known. It escapes you before it ever finds you. I lived in a world saturated by the other four senses. Touch. Breath. Footsteps. Texture. Shifts in vibrations and sounds. But not the saturation of colors and abundance of shape.
After years of being “that blind guy by the pool,” I had lost hope. I had given up on answers to my questions and solutions to my problems. I had accepted that awkwardness that often made others squirm when they looked into my whitened eyes staring off-center, blankly into what I thought was their face. As far as I knew, I would live out my days in this body without sight, begging for other passers-by’s hard-earned wages, hoping for pity.
Most days, I sat by the temple gates. Not because it made me feel more accepted, but because it made other people feel generous. Or guilty, I didn’t care which. A blind beggar perched beside a temple gate is the perfect object of a guilty soul’s penance. Each ping of their coins in my beggar’s cup made them feel lighter, regardless of what it did for me.
People talked around me more than they spoke to me. When you’re a broken-down beggar in the dark corner of life, somehow, people think you can’t hear their mocking and accusations.
“Who sinned?” The whispers pierced my overly sensitive ears. “This man or his parents?”
Somehow, they totally forgot, or just didn’t care, that I was standing RIGHT THERE as the arrows pierced my heart once again. Sometimes I wondered if they knew and found some kind of enjoyment in mocking my brokenness. Surely not, I thought, but that’s the kind of game your mind plays when you are the object of curiosity.
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But that day!
Oh, thank You, Father, in Heaven for that day that I heard to footsteps coming closer! I had heard tens of thousands of feet walk past me as I sat near the temple gates. At first I heard a dozen or so sets of feet coming a group. But my hearing is so keen that I felt the rhythm change. One set of feet slowed a bit. As if he intentionally veers from the rest and began to walk toward me.
A guilty donor to my beggar’s cup? No.
A Roman authority asking me to make way for royalty? No.
As this mysterious figure neared, the sun's heat turned to the coolness of shade cast by a sort of… shall I say… comforting presence?
How could a man that I’d never met, who represented a faith I’d never known, make me feel this way? As if his arrival thrust a ray of hope through the prison wall of utter hopelessness. I extended my cup toward the vibrations of his breath.
Silence.
It felt like an hour had passed before I heard a loud voice to the left of the figure breathe out the accusation. I’d heard it a thousand times before. It has become almost like silence to me as I’ve learned to let it roll past my consciousness to protect myself from the pain.
“RABBI, WHO SINNED, THIS MAN OR HIS PARENTS, THAT HE WAS BORN BLIND?”
“Of course, another theological pontification,” I thought as I awaited the teacher’s response. My hope leaked from the cracks in my heart.
Silence again.
And then an answer that I wouldn’t have, no, that I couldn’t have, dreamed in a lifetime worth of nights. An answer that cracked the hard outer shell of my heart wide open like the walls of a dark, dusty dungeon, letting light shine into the blackness for the first time in eternity.
“Neither this man nor his parents sinned. This happened so that the works of God might be displayed in Him.”
THE WORKS OF GOD?
What God would be so cruel as to force this lifetime of misery on me against my will? What kind of deity would use another man’s lifelong agony to bring glory to his name? How could this kind presence belong to a man who would mock my brokenness and use it to spew his vile teaching?
And then what happened next I couldn’t have imagined in a dozen lifetimes!
I heard the presence begin to move. I could hear the sound of him kneeling to the ground. And then the scraping of his finger into the clay and dirt, the same as I’d heard it countless times playing in the sand with my friends at school.
Why is he scraping the ground?
And then he spat, also a familiar sound from my childhood, as the bullies would spit at me as I walked by with my cane. Dirt. Spit. What could he be doing now?
I heard his fingers start to roll something. It sounded like my mother, rolling dough to make cookies at the fire. And then the strangest thing happened. I felt his hands moving toward my face. You can’t really understand the feeling of movement unless you’ve been blind and trained your brain to pick up what you’ve never had a need to sense before. It’s like a learned trait skill that you pick up to protect yourself from danger. But, his hands moved toward my… MY EYES!
I felt a gritty moisture on my eyelids as he rubbed back and forth and then up and down. Is this some kind of joke! Some torturous mockery?
“Go. Wash in the Pool of Siloam.”
No explanation.
No promises.
He didn’t bargain with me. He didn’t offer anything. Just what sounded like an empty request.
But, somehow, I knew better. Some light inside me began to shine brightly and warm my cold, hopeless heart. Somehow, I couldn’t say, “no.” As much as I feared humiliation. As much as I thought He was using me as a cheap visual aid for some lofty lesson He was trying to teach His followers, I couldn’t deny Him. My feet began to move.
I knew the pool. Siloam. The Sent One. Fed by the spring, Hezekiah carved to save Jerusalem centuries ago. The water was always moving, living, cold. Two men helped me walk there to the pool at the bottom of the City of David. They were laughing. I couldn’t decide if they were laughing at me or for me. They must have been his followers, because they volunteered so quickly and without question. One on each arm, like Aaron and Hur, making it possible for Moses to do what was impossible for him to do on his own.
We made it to the pool. I felt my way down the steps into the shallow water. It engulfed my ankles. My heart thumped so hard it felt like it might break my ribs. I cupped water in my hands, lifted it to my eyes, and washed.
The mud slid down my cheeks.
Light! Light broke the plane of darkness like the day He spoke into nothingness on the day of creation. Just brightness at first. No shape. No clarity.
Just BLINDING, BURNING, LIVING, LIGHT!
I tried to hold back the emotion, but it came bounding out of me like a gushing river breaking through a broken wall. I screamed out of shock. Out of sheer sensory overload. My whole world had previously been sounds, smells, tastes, and now the explosion of light and color and brightness.
As my eyes adjusted, shapes began to form. Shimmering, wavering, coming into focus slowly, but with certainty. Blue water. Green trees. Human form.
HANDS!
My hands. Trembling, dripping with water and mud, five fingers, dark skin tones!
I look up and see FACES! Mouths and ears and noses. Real human expressions as I’d never known! Are they happy or sad? I had nothing to compare them to before.
“Where is He?” I screamed at the top of my lungs. I must see Him! I must thank Him. I must offer Him my life in return for this!
But He was nowhere. Nowhere to be found.
“Isn’t that the blind beggar?”
“No, it just looks like him.”
“No, that’s him, I’m certain of it. How did this happen?”
“It’s me! It’s really me!” I shouted. “Where is my family? Tell them what’s happened!”
As I celebrated like never before, I felt myself being grabbed by each arm, but not by the same hopeful friends this time. But, by fierce, angry souls dragging me toward the temple mount. Before the Pharisees, I landed on the ground still weak from what had happened. It felt as if they were witnessing a crime rather than a miracle.
“How did this happen?” they asked.
“He put mud on my eyes. I washed in the pool. Now I see!”
They argued instead of rejoicing. They interrogated instead of celebrated. They turned my healing into a courtroom drama, my joy into a criminal’s courtroom.
“Give glory to God,” they said. “We know this man is a sinner.”
I do not know how or why, but the next thing out of my mouth was laughter. In the midst of the courtyard among the powerful men who had walked by and scoffed at me countless times, I simply laughed and cried with tears of joy.
“Whether He is a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know: I was blind… and now I see.”
I was dragged back out of the courtyard and thrown back in the place where beggars roam. I was celebrating and seeing the other beggars for the first time in my life. My parents showed up, and other friends were dancing with me at the gate.
I turned around as if something were calling my name, and I saw Him! I SAW His eyes! I saw His compassion. I saw His joy. And then I heard him speak.
“Do you believe in the Son of Man?”
“Who is He, sir? Tell me, so I may believe.”
“You have now seen Him. In fact, He is the One speaking with you!”
I now know, many years later, that this is the Messiah, the Savior of the World, and that He didn’t just come for my sight, He came for my heart.
But at that moment, all I knew was to fall facedown at this healer and prostrate myself to the ground and proclaim, “Lord, I believe!”
It was the only appropriate response because…