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 Who
sinned? (v. 2)
This logic of a casual relationship between disease and sin is at
least as old as the Job story. Such a law of logical consequence was
easier to understand when bad things happened to adults, but what
about infants? Rabbinic teaching pointed to Exodus 20:5—"I,
the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the
fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation . .
." Thus, some of the rabbis held that not only could the sin of
the parents leave its mark on an infant, but also the infant could
sin in the mothers womb!
- Mud-pie in the eyes?
(v.6) Irenaeus sees the mud in the
eyes as a symbol of humans being created from the dust of the
earth; also see Job 4:19.
- Wash in the pool.
(v. 7) There are earlier stories of
persons being sent to wash-and-be-healed: 2 Kings 5 where Elisha
does not perform an instantaneous healing but rather sends Naaman
off to the Jordan for seven dips in the dirty Jordan River.
- This man is not from God
(v. 16). The idea behind
this assertion is simple. Deuteronomy 13:1-5 warns: even a wonder
worker must not be believed but be put to death if he draws people
aside from the way which God has commanded.
Put out of the synagogue – most scholars interpret the
phrase to refer to excommunication, though little is known about
such legislation in the 1st century.
 What
questions—social, theological, personal—does this story raise?
-
If a picture is worth a thousand words, what’s it like to
have no pictures hanging on the walls of your mind?
- How would we feel to be the brunt of some godawful
theology of illness? "See that woman over there; she must have
committed adultery or else she would be able see like everyone else."
- Who is really blind in this story? The disciples?
("Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born
blind?") The man born blind? ("I was born blind.")
The neighbors? ("No, but it is someone like him.") The
parents? ("Ask him . . . for they were afraid . . .") The
Pharisees? ("Give glory to God! We know that this man is a
sinner.")
Reversal —the very
ones who do see materially and theologically are blind, while the one who is
physically blind suddenly begins to see beyond horizons of the seeing public—his
theologians and neighbors and parents.
 For
an example of how this narrative might be framed, please refer to
this week’s homily.
_____________________________
Raymond E. Brown, Anchor Bible,
vol. 29 (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1966), page
371.
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