John 9:26Meaning & Commentary from the Church Fathers

Having failed in this way to reject and destroy the event, they return again to the former matter. They examine the manner of the healing, like men searching everywhere for a beast lying in a safe place, running here and there. They return to the earlier words, but again so that, by repeated questions, they may display all their own worthlessness.

Do you see the boldness of the beggar before the scribes and Pharisees? So powerful is truth, and so powerless is falsehood. Truth, even when found in simple people, makes them glorious. Falsehood, even when on the side of the powerful, shows them weak.

The beggar's words mean this: you do not heed my words, so I will speak no more. I will not answer your frequent and empty questions. You ask not in order to learn, but to mock my words.

Then, when they again asked him, "What did He do to you?" charging the Savior with having performed the anointing with clay on the Sabbath, this man understood that they were asking not in order to learn, but in order to accuse.

Again they pry and examine the manner in which the divine miracle was performed. They do this not from a good intention or a desire to learn the truth. They regarded it as the most shameful of all vices, and surpassing every evil, for anyone to glorify Christ.

Yet again they seek out all this, hoping that perhaps the man will not repeat the same account. Perhaps he will err in recounting the event, and say something contrary to his former words. Then, seizing on the discrepancy, they could declare him deceived and a liar.

Excessively puffed up by their own reasoning, they imagined that the force of the miracle lay only in the man's words. They did not see that, on the contrary, it lay in the deed itself.

Already angered by the hardness of the Jews, seeing after blindness and unable to endure the blind, he answered them: "I have already told you, and you heard. Why do you want to hear it again?"

He answered them, "Whether He is a sinner, I do not know. One thing I know: I was blind, and now I see." They asked him again, "What did He do to you? How did He open your eyes?"

And he, already indignant at the stubbornness of the Jews, having become seeing after blindness and unable to endure the blind, answered them: "I have already told you, and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become His disciples?"

What does "do you also" mean, except "I already am"? Do you also want to? I already see, but I do not envy you.

Refuted on every point and having accomplished nothing, they return again to the first question. Therefore the healed man, reproving them, answers fearlessly and with complete freedom.

Then, with mouths closed and minds troubled, not knowing what to do, they return again to the disease, to the examination of the disease. They try to learn whether he was blind from birth and question the man's parents. They show themselves exact investigators of every detail, not to confirm the accomplished miracle, but to obtain from somewhere a refutation of it.

They hope, by contriving some treacherous deceit, to turn the believing people away from being carried along. This is the height of wickedness: to fight against the truth, not to worship Him who does all things, but to subject the Benefactor to mockery. They do not marvel at the power, but try to diminish the wondrous works.

Careful and repeated inquiry is good when its end is good, since it clarifies the truth being sought. But the Pharisees craftily proposed the same questions, thinking that the blind man would either forget something from the circumstances he had presented before, and thus his proof would lose force, or else again mention the making of the clay, the anointing, and the washing. Then they would bring the violation of the Sabbath into the open and accuse Jesus as a breaker of the Sabbath. But listen how wisely the blind man answers, taking their second question in a good sense.

Seeing that the parents' testimony did not agree with their thoughts, they turned again to the man born blind. They wanted to frighten him, confuse him, undermine his opinion, and trip him up in his testimony. "Give glory to God!" This was an adjuration. "We know with certainty, whereas you only think that He is a prophet, that this Man is a sinner." In other words, "Confess that it did not happen that way." And they began interrogating him again: how had He opened his eyes? They hoped to find something in his words that could be reinterpreted and presented as contradicting his own testimony.

The great miracle of healing the man blind from birth caused all the stronger excitement in Jerusalem because the healed man was very well known in the city as a beggar blind from birth. Therefore, when this miracle was brought to the Pharisees' attention, they began a most careful investigation of the event.

All their efforts in this case were directed toward casting doubt on the reality of the miracle. For this purpose they questioned, about what had happened, now the former blind man and now his parents.

But the parents of the healed man, out of fear of being excommunicated from the synagogue, refused, under the pretense of ignorance, to give testimony about how their son had received sight.

"What did He do to you? How did He open your eyes?" the Pharisees asked him again. This question irritated the healed man. "You have already asked me about this, and I answered you," he says. "If you did not wish to listen to me then, what do you want from me now? You examine the details of the miracle performed upon me so carefully and are so interested in them that one might think you too wish to become His disciples."

Then they again began their tedious and empty cross-examinations: "What did He do to you? How did He open your eyes?"

"They asked again," and so forth. The Pharisees felt the force of the healed man's words and the strength of his position in the dispute. Therefore they again ask him about the circumstances of his healing (Jn 9:15), hoping to find in some detail of his account a pretext for suspicion, or for removing the reality of his miraculous healing. They failed to refute him dogmatically, and now wish to strike him, so to speak, critically. This return to a point of inquiry already explained seems to anger the blind man who received sight. He becomes still bolder and harsher. He triumphs over their powerlessness and gives more and more freedom to his deep, though previously restrained, irony.

The demand that he repeat the story of how the man born blind received sight is clearly made in order to detect some new detail. They hope it might be developed into an accusation, or that the narrator might be caught changing his first testimony. Then they could find a pretext to accuse him, and perhaps the Lord Jesus Himself, of deception. We see that the methods of judicial false sophists are always and everywhere the same.

The man who received sight appears deliberately and decisively to break his bond with the synagogue, seeing falsehood and evil in its influential members. He lets them understand that he knows very well where their questions are tending. He asks them ironically whether they too wish to become disciples of the Lord Jesus.