Unholy Sh+t: Jesus failed at healing a blind man and I've got a lot of questions about that

Our pastor was standing behind the pulpit and was beginning to lean into it. This is how you always knew things were about to get very serious. He was a ridiculously funny man, and most Sundays felt more like a comedy set than a sermon until he started leaning. He looked sternly out at the congregation and said, “If you trust in God, he will take care of you. If you are in the will of God, he will bless you. If you want to know where someone stands with the Lord, look at their life! What do they have? I promise you right now, if you are right with God, you won’t even buy a lemon. That is what God promises us, amen?”

Everyone said amen except my dad and me.

I was about thirteen years old at the time and extremely confused about God not particularly caring for lemons. I wasn’t sure if maybe that was the fruit that Eve ate or something. I mean, I knew that Jesus wasn’t particularly fond of fig trees, but I didn’t think he had a lot of opinions about fruits in general.

At the time, my family was experiencing homelessness. No one at the church knew what was going on. To look at us on Sunday morning, we didn’t fit the stereotypes. Even though I didn’t know what a lemon was, my dad did. The pastor essentially said that if you were on God’s good side, nothing bad would happen, not even purchasing a bad car. However, if you were outside of the favor of the Lord, then all kinds of nasty things would happen: death, famine, plague, and, I suppose, homelessness.

Even though I didn’t understand the lesson the pastor was teaching that day, I learned it through the attitudes of those at church. I began to believe that all of the things that happened in our life, the negative moments, were caused by my father's failure in some way. Worst of all, my siblings and I were suffering because of the sins of our father.

Turns out, Jesus thinks that is absolute bullsh+t.

Unholy Sh+t: An Irreverent Bible Study

Fifth Sunday of Lent

Today’s Reading: John 9:1-41

When it comes to the miracles of Jesus, he sort of starts out as a low-level street magician. Sure, turning water into wine is a great party trick, but it's not really that helpful, you know? I mean, I have seen videos of Criss Angel turning water into beer, so, like, big whoop. Plus, I am sure the Wine Makers Union probably wouldn’t appreciate Jesus being an industry disruptor. Fortunately for all involved, it seemed like a one-off kind of deal. However, as Jesus continues on with his Signs and Wonders Tour, things start to get a bit darker. He was entering his David Blaine era, ultimately culminating in him locking himself in a tomb for a couple of days before appearing before a very stunned live audience. I digress; the miracles of Jesus move from the explainable to the “Whoa, did he just do that?”

Anyone can heal someone if they are shady enough. All you need is a dude willing to lie, put them on a stretcher, and then tell them to start walking. BAM! You’ve got yourself a bonafide miracle. Faith healers have utilized this technique across multiple denominations and religions. It’s why you never see these folks healing complicated cases like people with missing limbs. Until now, nearly every miracle Jesus performed could be replicated today by any magician worth their salt. I have personally seen folks walk on water (Matthew 14:22-33), float up into the sky (Acts 1:1-9), make money appear (Matthew 17:24–27), and seemingly change the molecular structure of drinking water into an alcoholic beverage (John 2:1-11). His disappearing act is on point, though; I would like to see David Copperfield disappear for two thousand years *taps mic* is this thing on?

Up to this point, Jesus has substantially annoyed the authorities but isn’t quite yet a household name. At the time, Messiahs were kind of like the social media influencers of the day, and if you wanted to break through the noise to get noticed, you had to do something a little more exciting than the equivalent of a card trick.

Jesus and the squad are walking around town. They pass a blind guy, so they hit Jesus up for a little Q&A, “Teacher, who sinned, the blind guy or his parents, like, why is the dude blind?”

The prevailing thought at the time was that if something terrible happened to you, it was because you were a sinner or you were paying back the universe for what your parents did wrong, kind of like Millennials are doing now. The belief was that if something was wrong in your life, it was because someone screwed up along the way. If God liked you, then everything went stellar, and if you had made God mad, well, then buckle up, buttercup, because you are about to join a long list of disabled folks discarded by the Almighty.

I’m not exactly sure where this idea comes from because God is constantly destroying the sh+t out of the people They like the most (See: Job).

One of the things I have personally found annoying about Jesus is how f+cking aloof and cavalier he seems to be about the whole being God thing. I’m not sure who asked Jesus the question; it doesn’t say, but it's a kind of dumb question, so I’m guessing it was Peter. What’s strange to me is that the question even had to be asked. I don’t know about you, but if I had infinite cosmic powers (made you say it), wouldn’t you not casually just walk past people who needed help? I guess I think Jesus would have been more of an Oprah-type character walking around the Roman Empire, going, “You get a miracle. You get a miracle! Everyone gets a miracle!” I just always found that baffling. Then again, that’s because I was taught to believe that Jesus was basically like a Judean version of Superman, and none of the pastors I ever knew talked about the fact that Jesus also had a kryptonite. Turns out, he used to get very exhausted from performing miracles.

Jesus tells the disciples that none of this was caused by sin, casually spits on the ground, and then spreads the clay across the guy’s eyelids. He tells the man to wash his face, and when it's all done, the man can see.

This miracle totally freaks everyone out. At first, they just flat refuse to believe that the guy is the same guy. They think Jesus has brought in a ringer. The local authorities open up an entire investigation into the miracle and even go so far as to interview the healed guy’s family. So, what is so different about this guy's healing versus all of the previous miracles Jesus has performed?

Everyone knew this dude was blind. He had been blind from birth. This wasn’t some random Tony Robbins using hypnosis to convince a guy that he doesn’t have a stutter. No, what is happening here is entirely different, and no one knows what to do about it. Every one of us has had a moment of genuine desperation where we cried out to an invisible God, begging that they would care enough not to let them die, heal our children, don’t take the girl, moments and got back nothing but crickets. Now, imagine the shock you would have, laying there with your tears staining the bedsheets of your loved one’s cot at the local hospital, and there He is. Jesus casually walks by the room; at first, you are shocked, “I thought he would be taller?” you might think. You rush up, grab him by the cloak, beg, and plead, and he walks back with you. He looks down at the one you love; maybe he sighs for a moment and reaches out his hand before hocking a loogie, and then that person you love sits up in bed. The doctors had said there was no hope, they had said that there was nothing left to do but pray. That shock you would be feeling is what the people in this town are struggling with; at first, you believe your eyes, but then you start to second guess it all: miracles aren’t real! Everyone would crowd into the room to see for themselves; there is the news station pulling in. This is the ancient world equivalent of that.

Jesus is about to go viral and his follower count will skyrocket as a result.

I’ve always found it odd that Jesus used mud, made from his own spit, to heal someone. There is seemingly little explanation as to why he did it, though there is plenty of speculation. One theory is that it’s against the law to knead (mix any two substances together) on the Sabbath, so if Jesus was going to break the law by healing on the Sabbath, then he intended to drive the point home. That theory has always seemed a bit too subversive, even for Jesus. I have come to wonder if it’s a callback to creation. Humans were made with clay, and then the Creator breathed life into them through the Word. Well, Jesus is the Word, and he took clay and put it in the eyes of the man. It also tells us that the man was “blind from birth,” and it later says, “his eyes had been shut.” Maybe Jesus was making eyeballs or restoring retinas with the clay? Like, he just looked down at the ground and was like, “I did it once, me damnit, I can do it again.”

The Scriptures only reference Jesus healing someone from blindness a couple of times. There is some ambiguity on whether they are the same story or not. The version of healing found in John’s Gospel is pretty detailed, but Mark doesn’t go into all of the bits about the fraud investigation or mud (in Mark’s version, Jesus just spits in the guy's face). However, there is a part in the tale that Mark gives us that is possibly the more shocking part of the story for those of us who grew up being told that Jesus was all-powerful.

The Gospel of Mark says that folks bring a blind man to Jesus and ask him to heal the guy. Jesus takes the man by the hand, leading him far away from the crowd. When Jesus asks the man what he sees, the response isn’t, “I’m healed!” Instead, he tells Jesus that he can see but that everyone looks like trees. Jesus lays hands on the man once more; this time, his sight is restored on the second attempt. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again. Growing up, I was always told that this was Jesus trying to make a point. The trick not working the first time is a metaphor or something. Yet, nothing in the verse implies that it was anything other than a shotty miracle. This makes sense because everyone knows that if you rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.

I don’t find anything in the scriptures, early church fathers, or theology that can explain better why the miracle took twice than that Jesus was tired. Just so that I am abundantly clear and there is absolutely no ambiguity as to what I am saying here, allow me to double down; I think Jesus was out of juice.

After miraculous moments, we often see Jesus excuse himself from the crowd, become hangry, or talk about how tired he is. I have begun to speculate that Jesus might have even performed the miracle outside of sight of the crowd because he knew he was worn out. You know what else happens in Mark chapter Eight? Jesus had just fed the multitudes. He is literally walking away from doing the ol’ copy and paste of the loaves and fishes, followed up by an absolutely exhausting conversation with Peter, and then he is stopped by a crowd of folks begging him to heal someone.

I think Jesus was pooped.

But if that is true and my theory holds correct, it poses a deeper question. Is Jesus only exhausted because of the limitations of the human body, or is it possible that we have misjudged God this entire time? Is it possible that God is not nearly as all-powerful, all-knowing, and omnipresent as we were taught to believe? I mean, what does it tell us what God did after creation? They rested.

For me, if these verses are a metaphor for anything at all, it is Jesus establishing that he is the God of Creation. When asked if the man was sinful, Jesus said he was good. When he does provide healing, he uses the same materials for the restoration as he did when we were first made, and when it was all said and done, he was very, very tired.

Maybe the other metaphor that I can extrapolate from this verse is this: neither Jesus nor the man seemed particularly interested in the healing. Jesus doesn’t go to heal the man just because he is blind, and the blind man doesn’t ask to be healed just because God can do it. In both versions of the story, it is a seeing person who has a problem with the man being blind. Society is the one who decided he was broken and that someone’s failure caused it, to which Jesus responded, just as They did during the creation, and declared it all good. Maybe it’s not the blind man who needed healing; it was society that made him beg outside the city gates, and Jesus just knew it was easier to heal the one man than an ableist world.