Contemplative Bible Reading

John 9:6-7 (New Living Translation)

Then he spit on the ground, made mud with the saliva, and spread the mud over the blind man’s eyes. ⁷ He told him, “Go wash yourself in the pool of Siloam” (Siloam means “sent”). So the man went and washed and came back seeing!

This is part of the (hi)story of Jesus restoring the sight of a man born blind. Jesus rubbed mud in the man’s eyes, and the man washed himself. The result was the man “came back seeing.”

Medical professionals in our time know how the human vision system works physically. They can examine a blind person and state how to restore the person’s sight. “All we have to do is connect this to that and you can see.” In the vast majority of cases, even though we know what to connect to what, we cannot make those connections. We don’t have the technology.

One thing we don’t know how to do is to correct the psychology of a person who was born blind and can now see. There are documented cases of doctors restoring the sight of a person who could see as a toddler, but went decades in blindness. Those people with restored sight need years of therapy to be able to function as a seeing person. This is similar to those people who are injured and need months and years of therapy to relearn how to walk.

This man born blind was given sight by Jesus. “Aha,” some people of today say, “we could do that. The person probably had thus-and-such condition that we can cure today.”

Note, however, that the healed blind man seemed to function just fine the instant he was given sight. No one walked him around and helped him adjust to a world of sight. The power of Jesus fast forwarded all that therapy.

That fast forwarding is something we do not understand and probably never will understand. Note that this happens in all the other cases where Jesus healed people. They immediately functioned normally without any time for therapy.

God has command over time. We, certainly I, don’t understand how that one works.