Thomas J Parlette
“Here’s Mud in Your Eye”
John 9: 1-41
3/19/23
“Here’s mud in your eye.” We know it as a toast now-a-days, but where does it come from. I love looking into the origins of well-known words and phrases and seeing how they come about. This particular phrase has a couple of different origin stories, depending on what source you look up. Some say it originated as toast among farmers celebrating a plentiful crop – the mud in your eye was hoping you spent a lot of time in your field gathering in your harvest. Other sources claim it originated from the mud found in the trenches during World War 1. And still others look to the horse racing world where jockeys often wear multiple pairs of goggles to shield themselves from the mud thrown up by the horse’s hooves. So “here mud in your eye” was a toast meaning – I hope you come in second place, behind me, my friend. But most sources agree, this story from the Gospel of John is probably where that idea of mud in your eye comes from. This biblical image of mud in the blind man’s eyes became a toast to healing and good health.
In the passage for today, Jesus is walking down the road with his disciples. They come across a man blind from birth. Seeing him, the disciples ask their master a theological question – “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
So, let’s pause here for a moment and take note of the human factor. This man is more than a theological case study. He’s a human being, with hopes and feelings and dreams. Because he has been blind from birth, his hearing is probably very acute (as is true of most blind people). Very likely, the man heard them talking to Jesus about him.
How do you suppose the disciples’ question makes him feel? No doubt it’s a question he has heard many times before. Most people assumed, in those days, that any serious health problem or disability was a punishment from God. Blaming the victim was all too common. This man has grown up with all the world telling him he is cursed.
For a great many Rabbis of that time, the answer to the disciples’ question is easy. The man has been born blind from birth, so it couldn’t possibly be his own sins that made him blind. It can only be the sins of his ancestors.
But Jesus doesn’t provide the typical response, the one the blind man is expecting to hear and that gives him a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach every time he hears it. Surprisingly, Jesus answers, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned.”
That’s a break from tradition. The man’s all ears. Then, Rabbi Jesus goes on to say, “He was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”
Now, we shouldn’t read too much into that. Jesus isn’t saying that God is some sort of monster, visiting blindness upon babies just to create a teaching moment. It’s more like he’s saying, “Don’t even ask that question: just wait and see what happens next.”
So, now we come to the part of the story you might call “the ick factor”- the particular means Jesus chooses to restore the man’s sight. Jesus spits on the ground and makes a little mud pie, then spreads it on the man’s eyes. A little gross, I know. It’s a little like the medical advice I got when I was playing little league baseball – “just rub some dirt on it, you’ll be fine.”
In the Gospels, Jesus uses a variety of methods to heal people. Sometimes it’s a touch. Other times, it’s just a word. In Mark, Jesus heals a blind man named Bartimaeus simply by saying, “Your faith has made you well.”
So, what’s with the spit and mud? Why does he choose such a primitive medical treatment?
The answer may have something to do with the disciples’ question. Sure, they’re voicing the prevailing wisdom of their age, but they’re also incredibly insensitive to the feelings of the man before them. There he is in the all-encompassing darkness that is his life. He’s never known anything different. He’s acutely aware of the footfalls of everyone coming up to him. The voices he hears may be mocking or – if he’s lucky – kind. But it’s not unusual for passersby to spit on him – cursed as he surely is – on account of his disability.
So, when he hears Jesus drawing up a great wad of spit, he’s expecting the worst. Maybe he cringes, waiting for the insult about to come.
But this teacher does something different. Something unexpected. Jesus uses the spit to make that mudpie and gently spreads it over the man’s eyes. Then he tells him to go wash it off, in the Pool of Siloam.
Let’s pause again to consider the story being told. At this point, the story continues for a while without Jesus in it. That’s unusual for John’s Gospel. The second half of this story is the longest stretch in the entire Gospel when Jesus isn’t at center stage. John tracks Jesus’ story very closely, but the action shifts in this part of the story. It follows the blind man and what happens to him.
John tells us the man does as Jesus instructs, washing his face in the Pool of Siloam. Once he’s done, it’s as though he has new eyes. For the first time in his life, he can see!
Wouldn’t you expect this miraculous news would set off general rejoicing in the land? Not so. Quite the opposite happens.
One feature of most human communities – and not a very positive one – is that they don’t adapt especially well to change. In that community, there’s a well-established protocol or pecking order, and Jesus has turned it on its head. Anchoring the bottom of that pecking order, for all his life, has been this man blind from birth. If you wanted someone to spit on, he was your man!
But suddenly, Jesus’ miracle has changed all that. And those at the top of the religious pecking order – the Pharisees – are not too happy about it.
Again, we should pause here and recognize the language John uses. Throughout this passage – and others like it – he freely names “the Jews” as the bad guys. He says in verse 18, “The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and received his sight.” A little later, in verse 22, he says the blind man’s parents “were afraid of the Jews; for the Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue.”
This makes no sense at all, and here’s why: Jesus and his disciples are Jews. So are the blind man and his parents. What sense does it make for Jews to fear Jews?
John was writing at a troubled time. His audience was an early Christian church striving mightily to distance itself from Judaism. Not long before, the Romans had brutally put down a revolution in Jerusalem. They destroyed the Temple. Those who persisted in the Jewish faith – the second generation following Jesus’ resurrection – are facing all sorts of persecutions. John wants to keep the Romans off the backs of his own Christian people, so, at many points in his narrative, he identifies the Jews as villains who did all sorts of terrible things, including killing Jesus.
The consequences of his choice of words have been tragic ever since. Later generations of Christians – overlooking the fact that Jesus and his disciples were Jews – practiced anti-Semitic persecutions, citing passages like these as justification. Passages like this one were used to justify anti-Semitic demonstrations year after in Czarist Russia, and even the Nazi Holocaust. The Oberammergau Passion Play continues to try and revamp the more anti-semitic passages of their famous play. And, of course, we’ve seen it during the rallies in Charlottesville Virginia, when we heard chants of “Jews will not replace us.” Christians have a moral obligation to own that terrible part of our history and to be careful about our language as we talk about how Jesus died.
What John is really saying is that a certain faction within Judaism – a certain party within the religious leadership – opposed Jesus. For that reason, you may want to try a little experiment. Every time you read the Gospel of John and come across the words “the Jews,” consider doing a little translation in your mind. Replace “the Jews” with “the religious leaders.” That’s what John is really trying to say here.
OK- back to the story. These Pharisees are alarmed at Jesus. They’re suspicious of his religious reform movement. It’s growing bigger by the day. So, they haul the formerly blind man before them for a courtroom – style cross-examination, right out of an episode of Law and Order.
The Pharisees have heard how Jesus performed this miracle on the Sabbath. All they need now is a little evidence to prove it.
Now, if Jesus had simply said to the man, “Your faith has made you well,” there would have been no problem. But there was this little matter of the spit and mud thing. When Jesus made that little mudpie, he was working. On the Sabbath. Gotcha, Jesus!
At least that’s what some of the Pharisees think. How could a man who worked on the Sabbath be God’s instrument? But other Pharisees looked at what he’d just done and said, “How could he not be God’s instrument?”
“There was division among them,” says John. Maybe that’s why Jesus made the mudpie to begin with, rather than just say “Your faith has made you well.” Maybe he did it just to confound and confuse the Pharisees!
But the Religious hardliners won’t let it rest. Maybe the whole miracle was a hoax. Maybe the man wasn’t really blind at all. They pepper the formerly blind man with questions. They ask him who he thinks Jesus is.
“He is a prophet.”
That’s a powerful claim, linking Jesus with the likes of Elijah and Moses. The Pharisees aren’t too happy about that and switch to a new approach. They try to undermine the man’s testimony. They call in his parents.
“Is this your son?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Tell us how it is he’s no longer blind.”
“We have no idea. Why don’t you ask him?”
They call the man in a second time.
“Tell us this man who healed you is a sinner!”
“Is he? How would I know? All I know is I once was blind, but now I see!”
They start to question him again about how, exactly, Jesus healed him. But he says, “I already told you. Why are you asking again? Do you want to become his disciples?”
It’s kind of a snarky answer, but you can’t really blame the guy. He has had enough of this. The greatest thing in his life has just happened, and these people are more concerned with a handful of mud than a pair of blind eyes that can now see! So he tells them – “If this man were not from God, he could do nothing!”
At which point the drive him out of the courtroom, condemning him as a sinner.
And now, Jesus comes back onstage. Having heard what the Pharisees did to the man he healed, Jesus seeks him out. Most of the time in the Bible, people come to Jesus for healing, but this time the doctor goes out searching for his patient. When he finds him, he asks him, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?”
Who is he? Tell me, so I can believe in him.”
Jesus says, “You have seen him, and the one speaking to you is he.”
Under the circumstanced, I wonder, which is more remarkable – the first half of that sentence, “you (the formerly blind man) have seen him, or “the one speaking to you is he”? they’re both miraculous, two sides of the same coin.
The man says: “Lord, I believe,” then falls down and worships Jesus.
New Eyes. That’s what this man gets from his encounter with Jesus. New eyes in the physical sense, and new eyes in the spiritual sense as well.
And what about us? What sort of new eyes do we need?
We’re not talking, of course, about bifocals or cataract surgery. We’re talking about our outlook on life, the ways we see with the eyes of the soul.
When we look at the people around us, those we encounter every day, do we see them as they’ve always been… small-minded, petty or otherwise-flawed? Or do we see them as God sees them… human children with infinite potential?
When we look at people different from ourselves – people who come from another ethnic heritage, or another religion, or a different sort of community – do we assume certain things about them based on old prejudices? Or do we approach each encounter open to whatever God is ready to show us?
When we look at the physical world around us, do we see it only as a scientist or engineer is taught to see it… a place governed by physical laws alone? Or do we see it as the place where God rules, a place where miracles happen? Do we hear in a bird’s song a hymn of praise, and see a benediction in a sunset?
When we call Jesus Christ to mind. Do we see him only as a historical figure, a wise teacher, an ethical example, or a superstar who had a ton of fans in his day? Or do we see him as the risen Lord who walks beside us, who speaks to us of love and compassion, and who guides us in the way we should go?
I think the best news of this passage from John is the very end. When Jesus seeks out the one he has healed. If you only take one part of this story home with you today – make it that. Jesus will seek you out. Jesus will seek out all of us.
So, here’s mud in your eye!
And may you see the world and the people around you with new eyes, given to you by Jesus, the one who seeks us out, and enables us to see all people as children of God.
May God be praised. Amen.
