Seeing and Knowing

A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on March 15, 2026, by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Reading for address: John 9: 1-41

There are two versions of why I got my name, Sam. The pious version is this: my parents had experienced significant grief in conceiving children and bringing them to term, and when I survived, they called me by a name that means ‘God has heard.’ The less pious and I suspect more accurate reason is that Sam was my grandfather’s nickname. That was because when he was at school, his classmates all read Charles Dickens’ novel Pickwick Papers, in which one of the main characters is called Sam Weller. The book gives several examples of a Wellerism. A Wellerism ridicules clichés and proverbs. My father inherited his father’s favourite Wellerism: ‘“I see,” said the blind man, as he shook his wooden leg.’ My father belonged to the school of thought that believes a joke becomes funnier the more your repeat it. Hence he trotted out this phrase whenever I was trying to explain something complicated. What I’m not sure he ever realised was that he’d perfectly expressed the meaning of today’s gospel reading.

John chapter 9 is about seeing and knowing. The word ‘see’ and the word ‘know’ each occur around a dozen times. The story’s about the difference Christ makes, and it depicts how various social groups respond to that difference. It’s a whole gospel in miniature, because it portrays what’s wrong with the world, who Christ is, why he’s here, how he works, how we are to respond, and how we’re not to respond. It comes alive when we realise how significant the story is at the time John is writing it, perhaps 50 years after the events it describes; and recognising that makes it easier to understand why it matters for how we respond to Jesus today. I’m going to explore the story and the main characters and then see what it shows us about what Christianity is really about.

The story comes in seven parts. They work as a chiasmus, which means part one corresponds to part seven, two to six, three to five, with part four as the centre of the story. Part One describes the world Jesus enters. There’s plenty wrong with the world; but that’s not why Jesus is here. He’s just walking along, in the company of his disciples. He’s among us to be with us, not to fix us. But he sees our plight. Straightaway he sees the man born blind. Now it’s important to recognise in this story blindness isn’t an illness or disability – it’s a metaphor. Blindness is a distinctive not a deficit. Indeed many blind people today don’t aspire to become sighted, but instead celebrate their uniqueness. The point is, in this story it’s the blind person who truly sees.

Suddenly the disciples try to make this a story about sin; just as many people still make Jesus coming among us a story about sin and its removal. But see how Jesus is having none of it. He says this isn’t a story about sin and deficit – this is a story about beholding the glory of God. As for this episode, so for Christ’s incarnation as a whole – it’s a story about God meeting us as we are and enjoying us, and our beholding God’s glory through him. This episode is about the irony that those who think the story’s all about sin end up not being able to see or understand Jesus at all.

Quickly Jesus returns to the earth, from which, according to Genesis, humankind came; and makes mud. He opens the man’s eyes, which in this story means he enables the man to see who he, Jesus, really is. Immediately, in a gesture to baptism, the man washes – and the name of the pool makes clear the man straightaway becomes a missionary. This is a story not about terrible things we or others have done in the past but about wonderful things the Holy Spirit may do through us in the future.

The rest of the story is about various parties’ response to Jesus. Since the disciples and neighbours are somewhat peripheral figures, I’m just going to talk about three. I’ll start with the man born blind. He does what Jesus tells him. Then he says, ‘I am.’ He says it multiple times. They’re exactly the words Jesus uses in John’s gospel to describe himself. Remember ‘I am the good shepherd,’ ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’ and several others. It’s the closest Greek approximation to the Hebrew name for God in the Old Testament. He’s becoming like Christ. Then he says what he knows – and, crucially, says what he doesn’t know. He doesn’t exaggerate, posture, or pretend. He’s totally transparent. Eventually he says of Jesus, ‘He is a prophet.’ Next he patiently explains again what he knows and what he doesn’t know. Then he winds up Jesus’ opponents by asking provocatively, almost sarcastically, ‘Do you also want to become his disciples?’ Finally he realises who Jesus is and worships him. He’s the model of a perfect follower of Jesus. He’s not a hero: he’s a plain man who speaks the truth and won’t be intimidated. He’s what John wants you and me to be.

Then there’s the second group, the Pharisees. The Pharisees are the pantomime villains in this story and elsewhere in the gospels. The reason for this is they’d reinvented Judaism as a religion not of the temple and sacrifices but of the home and the heart. Which meant after the temple was destroyed in 70 AD, they were the only show in town, because the religion of temple and sacrifice was finished. The reason this matters is they were the principal alternative to early Christianity. What appears to be going on in this story is a confrontation between legalistic Pharisees and the man born blind, representing the simple plain Christian believer. But what’s really going on is John showing the early Christians that they couldn’t go on being both Jews and Christians: they had to choose. The story is telling them whose side they should be on.

So the Pharisees are made to look ridiculous. They rule out any consideration about the blessings of Jesus, because he’s broken the law about working on the sabbath. They dismiss Jesus as a sinner. They rather ironically say, ‘We don’t know where he comes from.’ They get further and further away from understanding Jesus – as the man born blind gets nearer and nearer to realising who he is. John sums them up in part four when he says, ‘They did not believe.’ The story is one in which seeing and knowing are contrasted. At the start of the story the man can’t see, but still he knows. He doesn’t know much, but when his eyes are opened, which is a metaphor for conversion, he starts to see, and his knowledge, from humble beginnings, begins to grow. The point is, so long as you see Jesus, you don’t need to know very much. All this man knows is, he can see, Jesus changed his life, he believes, and he worships. He doesn’t know; but he does see.

By contrast, the Pharisees are obsessed with knowing; but they can’t see. They know about the law, about Moses, about the sabbath, about sin. They know that no one in the Old Testament was ever given their sight, but that this was precisely one of the signs the Messiah was expected to perform. They know sin and adversity are supposed to be related. They know God only listens to them and not to sinners. They know an awful lot; and their power lies in what they know. But their obsession with knowing renders them unable to see. Jesus sums them up in part seven when he says, ‘If you were blind, you would not have sin.’ This is a total reversal of where the story started off, when it said, ‘You’re blind because you or your parents sinned.’ Blindness has become the key to seeing, which is a metaphor for believing. Blindness in this story means humility: the humility to recognise what we don’t know, and the simplicity of saying that all we know is Jesus. Then Jesus says, ‘Now that you say, “We see,” your sin remains.’ The Pharisees’ real problem is that they’ve persuaded themselves that their form of knowledge and law is what believing is, and they impose that belief as a power that controls others. Their knowledge is exposed and dismantled not by domineering authority but by the disarming humility of a blind man who knows nothing but sees everything.

But I said at the start the story is arranged in seven parts: rendering the fourth part the middle and crucial one. Curiously, almost bizarrely, Jesus doesn’t appear in the middle part; neither does the man born blind. But the clue to the whole story is found in the line, ‘Anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue.’ What’s clear is that at the time of the gospel being written, anyone who came out as a Christian was in danger of being ostracised by the Jewish community. The parents of the man born blind become the central figures in the story, because they have to choose whether to follow their son and truly see Jesus, or whether to abide by what the Pharisees know. It says, ‘They were afraid.’ Imagine living in a country where the Romans were violently hostile and by declaring your Christianity you were putting yourself at enmity with your own people. The stakes were seriously high.

The portrayal of the parents is ambivalent. On the one hand they’re like their son, because they transparently communicate the simplicity of what they see, and don’t buy into the culture of claiming to know. But on the other hand, they fail to stand with their son by not upholding his version of events and telling the Pharisees to speak to him. While we’d all love to be the man born blind in the story – simple, humble, transparent, disarmingly faithful – in reality we’re the parents, easily offended by the suggestion we might have sinned, aware of the wonder of Jesus but frightened by the consequences of declaring who he truly is, and unreliable when it comes to standing up for the courageous disciple, even when it’s our own son.

This is a story about what Christianity is; how not to respond; who Jesus is; and how to be a Christian. What is Christianity? It’s renouncing the desire to know when knowledge becomes a form of control, and instead having the simplicity to see who Jesus is and the difference he makes. What does responding not mean? It doesn’t mean clinging to precise formulations and throwing people out of the community, let alone judging and imposing and threatening. Who is Jesus? Jesus enters his world, leaves aside philosophical questions about how the world is, and simply sees us, dwells with us in our predicaments, meets us in our need, and offers us life with him. How are we to be a Christian? Being a Christian means seeing Jesus as Jesus sees us. We don’t need to be full of knowledge, which often gets in the way. We don’t need to compare ourselves to other people, because looking askance at them takes our eyes off Jesus. But we do need to respond with simplicity, humility, and courage.

‘“I see,” said the blind man, as he shook his wooden leg.’ Faith is trusting what you’re seeing even when you don’t know. Being a Christian in the light of John chapter 9 comes down to two questions. Are you willing to let Jesus see you – really see you? And are you willing to let Jesus open your eyes, dismantle your knowledge, bypass your efforts at power and control – and really see him?