The Light of the World: What John 9 Teaches About Sight

From the sermon preached on August 23, 2026

Most of us think of blindness as someone else's problem, a physical condition, a diagnosis, a thing that happens to other people. John 9 tells the story of a man born blind whom Jesus healed, and in doing so, John 9 quietly asks whether the reader is blind too. Pastor Jamie Leahey, continuing the church's series through the Gospel of John, preached on this passage as a story less about eyesight and more about who Jesus notices and what it costs him to help us see.

The rest of this post follows three movements in that sermon: the blindness Jesus sees, the blindness the Bible says everyone carries, and what it cost Jesus to open blind eyes.

John 9 opens with Jesus walking past a man who was blind from birth, someone the text says his own disciples treated as a theological puzzle before they treated him as a person. They asked whether his blindness was punishment for his own sin or his parents' sin. Jesus refused that framing entirely, saying instead that the man's condition would become an occasion for God's work to be displayed.

Jesus heals the man not to settle the philosophical question of suffering but because Jesus is the kind of person who turns toward whoever a crowd has learned to look past.
That detail matters more than it first appears. The sermon named a pattern across the Gospels: Jesus consistently turns his attention to people who have been overlooked, discounted, or written off as less valuable because of a disability or a diagnosis. Jesus heals in a way that refuses to reduce a person to their condition; he sees a man before he sees a case study.

Isaiah had described this in advance, saying God's promised servant would be given as a light to the nations, one who would open the eyes of the blind and free prisoners from darkness, and John 9 presents Jesus doing exactly that in front of witnesses.

A small, honest step follows from this point: naming, without rushing to explain, one place in your own life where a hard circumstance still feels unexplained. You don't need a tidy theological answer to bring that place into the light.

If you are still wrestling with questions like this, our beliefs page lays out what this church holds to be true; it's a good place to get to know us; explore it here.

The sermon's harder claim comes next: spiritual blindness is not a condition limited to irreligious people or to any one type of person. The prophet Isaiah described a whole people group who hoped for light but walked in darkness, who groped along walls like those with no eyes at all, long before anyone in the story of John 9 was born. Paul picks up the same idea in Romans, arguing that spiritual blindness has two forms rather than one.

The non-religious person, Paul writes in Romans 1, knew God yet did not honor him as God, and so became darkened in their thinking, worshiping something else, a career, a relationship, an image, at the center of life instead.

The religious person is not exempt from this same spiritual blindness. Paul's language in Romans 2 turns toward the person who judges others while quietly doing the same things, mistaking moral performance or religious pedigree for actual sight. The sermon connected this directly to John 9, where the religious leaders who interrogate the healed man are the ones who cannot see Jesus standing in front of them.

Spiritual blindness, in other words, does not divide neatly along religious lines; it runs through everyone until Jesus intervenes.

A small, honest step here: consider whether something other than God currently sits at the center of what gives your life meaning, and simply notice it without judging yourself for the answer.

John 9 records Jesus making mud from the ground and his own saliva, and anointing the blind man's eyes with it, an act that echoes Genesis 2, where God formed the first man out of the dust of the ground. The sermon pointed out that spit appears again in the Gospels, but in a far more painful context: Jesus is spit on, mocked, and beaten before his crucifixion by the same kind of religious blindness he encounters in John 9. The man who reached into the dust to give another man sight would later be treated with contempt by the people his healing was meant to reach.

That connection reframes the whole passage. The one who opened the eyes of a man born blind was, in the end, condemned by leaders who could see perfectly well and still refused to recognize him. Paul writes in Romans 9 that this is precisely how salvation reaches anyone, as a gift rather than a reward, because if it depended on already seeing clearly, no one, religious or not, would qualify.

Pastor Jamie Leahey described his own version of this, a night sixteen years ago when every attempt at being a good, religious person collapsed. The moment his spiritual blindness lifted, he said, felt less like solving a puzzle and more like finally being found by someone who had not passed him by.

A small, honest step: if a memory or a moment of your own has stayed with you the way this man born blind stayed with the people of John 9, let yourself sit with that memory for a moment instead of pushing it aside.

John 9:5, where Jesus says that he is the light of the world for as long as he is in it, sits at the center of the passage's claim about who Jesus is. The chapter then plays out two very different responses to that light, and the contrast is worth seeing side by side.

John 9 does not let either group off the hook, and it does not resolve neatly for either one. What resolves the chapter is Jesus himself, still turning toward whoever a crowd, religious or not, has learned to overlook.

Spiritual blindness does not stay confined to church buildings or to religious résumés. It can sit quietly underneath a promotion, a relationship, or a life that looks put together while missing the one thing that actually matters. Whether you call East Harlem, Washington Heights, Hamilton Heights, Morningside Heights, or the Upper West Side home, or you gather with us on the Upper East Side on Sundays, there is a community group meeting nearby where this same conversation continues face to face, in ordinary rooms, among ordinary people still learning to see.

John 9 ends with a man who once begged by the road now able to see the face of the one who healed him, and with religious leaders standing in the same daylight, still unable to recognize him. The sermon's claim was simple and unsentimental: every person, religious or not, is born spiritually blind, and the only real hope is that Jesus does not pass anyone by. That is the light of the world John 9 points to, one that reaches people long before they have anything figured out.

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