The Man Born Blind

The spittle hit his eyelids with a warm, wet shock. He flinched, a lifetime of instinct recoiling from the gesture that had so often been a prelude to a curse or a thrown stone. Then, fingers, rough with dust from the road, worked the moisture into a gritty paste, smearing mud over the sealed windows to his soul.

Why? The question screamed silently in the darkness of his mind. Why this? He could just speak a word. He healed the centurion’s servant from a distance, they say. Why must it be like this? Another person spitting at me. Is this divine power, or just another humiliation?

A voice cut through his spiraling doubt, not gentle, but charged with an authority that vibrated in his very bones: “Go, wash in the Pool of Siloam.”

The command left no room for debate. Habit took over. He rose, his hands instinctively finding the familiar walls, the well-worn path. The scoffing of the crowd was his usual soundtrack. “Off to wash the prophet’s mud away, blind man?” their laughter followed him. The doubt curdled in his stomach. This was a fool’s errand. He was a spectacle yet again.

He knelt at the pool’s edge, the cool stone familiar under his palms. With a sigh that was half resignation, half a final, fleeting hope, he cupped the cold water. He hesitated for one last second, his heart a battleground of shame and yearning. Then he plunged his hands into his face, scrubbing at the gritty clay, wanting only to be clean of the strange, messy sacrament.

The mud loosened, washed away. And with it—Light.

It wasn’t a gradual dawn. It was an explosion. A universe of color, shape, and terrifying, beautiful depth shattered the comforting, predictable darkness he had known since birth. He gasped, water and tears streaming down his cheeks. He saw his own hands, wrinkled from the water—his hands! He saw the stunned, gaping faces of those who had daily passed him by. He saw the sky, a blue so vast it made him dizzy.

Driven by a new, overwhelming impulse, he leaned over the pool again, not to wash, but to look. The ripples stilled. A face looked back. A man. He touched his own cheek, and the reflection did the same. This is me. This was the face people had pitied, ridiculed, called the “face of the blind.” It was streaked with water and tears, but it was… beautiful. It was human, yes, but in that moment, it felt more. It felt… divine. This was what God saw when He fashioned Adam from the clay and breathed life into him. This was good. The very face he thought was his curse was, in the first light of creation, a masterpiece.

He stumbled home, weeping not from sorrow, but from the sheer, overwhelming shock of sight and self-discovery. His world had been unmade and remade in an instant.

The joy was short-lived. The Pharisees came. Their questions were not of wonder but of accusation, a trap seeking its prey. They dragged him before a council of scowling faces and cold, reasoned anger.

“This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath,” one declared, his finger jabbing the air.

Another sneered, “You were born in utter sin; are you trying to teach us?”

The man who could now see looked at them, these pillars of the law he had only ever heard as judgmental voices. He saw the tightness around their mouths, the fear in their eyes masquerading as certainty. His testimony was simple, unshakable: “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”

They pressed him, twisted his words, called his parents to disown his experience. His mother’s face, when he saw her fearful eyes dart away from his, was a sharper pain than any childhood taunt. But with each attack, his vision seemed to clear further. He was no longer arguing about a healing; he was testifying to a truth they refused to see. A spark of defiance, bright and new, ignited within him.

“I have told you already, and you would not listen,” he said, his voice growing stronger. “Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?”

The room erupted. They reviled him. “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses!”

And then, the words came to him, not from learning, but from the sheer, brilliant logic of his new sight: “Why, this is an amazing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.”

The backhanded slap that followed was the first physical pain of his new life. The taste of blood was metallic and real. The words “You were born in utter sin, will you teach us?” were hissed as they shoved him out of the synagogue, into the street. The heavy door thudded shut, excommunicating him. He was cast out from the only community he had ever known, now truly alone in a seeing world.

He sat on the curb, the dust of the street settling on his new tunic. The euphoria of sight was gone, replaced by a hollow ache. He had traded a lifetime of accepted blindness for a moment of miraculous sight and a future of exile. Had it been worth it? He could see the vibrant green of a leaf, but he could also see the hatred on the faces of his leaders. The cost of this new vision was terrifyingly high.

Then, a shadow fell over him. He flinched, expecting another blow.

“The man they cast out,” a voice said. It was the voice from the pool. The voice that started it all. “Do you believe in the Son of Man?”

The man looked up, blinking through tears of frustration and fear. The figure was silhouetted against the sun. “And who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?”

“You have seen him,” Jesus said, and in that moment, the man’s eyes were opened a second time. Not to light and color, but to identity, to purpose, to love. The face before him was not just the face of a healer, but the face of the Messiah. The one who saw him not as a sinner, a beggar, or a theological case study, but as a man worth restoring.

“Lord, I believe,” he said, and the words were a surrender more profound than any washing in a pool. He fell to his knees, not in blindness, but in worship. The hollowness filled with a joy so fierce it dwarfed the fear. They had cast him out of a building of stone, but they had inadvertently thrust him into the kingdom of God. He had witnessed to a room of hostile men with logic; now he worshipped the author of Light with his whole heart. The cost was not too high; it was the price of admission.

Years later, he was a fixture in the lower city, no longer begging but serving, his eyes keen and kind. Young converts, trembling after their own first taste of persecution, would seek him out.

“Was it worth it?” they’d ask, their voices tight with anxiety. “To be shunned by your own family? To lose your place?”

The man would smile, a network of laugh lines spreading from the corners of his eyes—eyes that had seen both the depths of darkness and the face of God.

“They took away my place in the synagogue,” he’d say, his voice quiet but firm. “And in doing so, they gave me a lesson no rabbi could teach: that a prison of stone is still a prison, even if you’ve lived in it all your life. He didn’t just give me sight. He gave me a testimony. That day, they asked me for a story about my past, about my sin. But He had already given me a story about my future.”

He’d point to the bustling community around them—a mix of Jews and Greeks, slaves and free, all working together. “They called me a sinner and cast me out. He called me a witness and welcomed me in. I learned that to see is not just to perceive light, but to recognize the truth, even when it costs you everything. Some heroes wield swords. Ours? We wield a simple, stubborn testimony: ‘I was blind, and now I see.’ And that truth is a light no darkness, no synagogue, no council of fear, can ever extinguish.”

He was not called “the man who gained his sight.” To the believers, he was known as “the Witness,” the man who, when pushed to recant his story, instead preached his first sermon with a courage that shook the foundations of Jerusalem itself. He received his eyes from the Messiah and gave his voice back to Him, a trade that defined the rest of his days. Fr. Jijo Kandamkulathy CMF Published in O Clarim Macau Catholic Newspaper