Went, Washed, Came Back Seeing
Last year, I read through the entirety of the Bible in 2021 with several other people on the journey. This year, by contrast, I am reading very slowly through the Gospel of St John by myself. The dash through Scripture and the meditative sauntering are both good but bring different opportunities.
As I look back in my journal – which I keep sporadically – it has an entry for August 24 that has stuck with me over the intervening months. “So he went and washed and came back seeing.”
This is from John chapter 9, and it sticks with me because it begins to answer a question that has truly plagued me for years: what is the role of God, and what is my role, in being transformed, healed from my many disabilities?
I don’t want to be lazy and presumptuous – “God will have to change me if I am to be changed.” And I do not wish to be active and presumptuous – “I can do this through willpower; no one can do it for me.”
You would do well to read the whole encounter in John 9: it is a complex story. But, to my point, Jesus sees a man blind from birth. His disciples want to discuss if the cause of his blindness is this man’s sin or the sin of his parents.
Jesus replies that neither is true but that the works of God might be displayed through him. (The disciples thought they had exhausted the alternatives with their either/or question.)
Then Jesus spat on the ground. (Yes, the Son of Man had salivary glands!) He made mud and anointed the man’s eyes with it. Jesus told him to go wash in the pool of Siloam. “So he went and washed and came back seeing.”
We are not left wondering who healed the man: he had no power by which to correct his lifelong blindness. It was God’s Son who healed him. And yet … I think it is just as clear, if the man had not gone and washed at the pool, he would not have experienced that healing. Likewise, as I experience healing in its many forms (Jesus didn’t always make mud and anoint eyes when dealing with blindness), I am never left thinking that perhaps I healed myself through effort and willpower. And yet, many times I have a choice of faith and obedience to make. Plenty of mystery remains but as with the disciples’ question, I see that my questioning who has the role also doesn’t cover all the possibilities.
— Wade Bradshaw, Prior.
