The Man Born Blind Who Could Finally See

There was a man who had never seen anything at all.

His mother's face, the sun coming up, the color of the sky: all of it was hidden from him. He had been born in the dark, and he had stayed in the dark his whole life long.

People walked past him every day, whispering. "Somebody must have done something wrong. Maybe him. Maybe his mother and father. That is why he cannot see."

So on top of being blind, he was told it was his fault. As if his trouble were a punishment. As if God were far away, frowning down at him.

But that is not who God is.

One day Jesus came walking by, and his friends asked the same old question. "Whose fault is it, Jesus? Who did the bad thing?"

Jesus said, "Neither one. This happened so you can see what God is really like."

Then Jesus did something tender and strange. He knelt down in the dirt and made a little mud, dust and water in his hands. Do you remember how, long before, God shaped the very first man from the dust of the ground? Here were those same hands, working in dust again. He spread the mud gently over the man's eyes and said, "Go and wash."

So the man went. He felt his way to the water. He washed.

And the light came in.

The light came in! Shapes and colors and faces, all rushing into eyes that had only ever known the dark. The first thing he ever saw was the bright world God made. And somewhere in it, the hands that had made the mud.

His neighbors could hardly believe it. "Is that really him? The one who used to sit and beg?" Some were glad. Some were angry. They argued, and frowned, and asked him a hundred questions.

The man just kept saying the one thing he knew for sure. "I was blind. And now I see."

Jesus had called himself the Light of the world, and here was the proof, standing right in front of them with shining, open eyes.

There is a kind of seeing that goes deeper than the kind in your eyes. It is seeing how good God really is, seeing that he was never far away, never keeping a list of who to blame. Jesus came to open those eyes too, to let the light all the way inside.

The man could see the sky now, but there was so much more still to see. One day every eye will open. One day there will be no night, no shadow, no whispering about whose fault it is. Just the face of Jesus, and light, and more light.

That day started small, the way morning does: mud washing away in the water, and one man looking up, and seeing.