46. The common view (Meyer, Watkins , Westcott) is, that the expression, 'Give glory to
God' was merely a formula of solemn adjuration, like Josh. vii. 19. But even so, as Canon
Westcott remarks, it implies 'that the cure was due directly to God.'
But he who had been healed of his blindness was not to be so betrayed into a
denunciation of his great Physician. The simplicity and earnestness of his convictions
enabled him to gain even a logical victory. It was his turn now to bring back the question
to the issue which they had originally raised; and we admire it all the more, as we
remember the consequences to this poor man of thus daring the Pharisees. As against
their opinion about Jesus, as to the correctness of which neither he nor others could
have direct knowledge,47 there was the unquestionable fact of his he aling of which he
had personal knowledge. The renewed inquiry now by the Pharisees, as to the manner
in which Jesus had healed him,48 might have had for its object to betray the man into a
positive confession, or to elicit something demoniacal in the mode of the cure. The blind
man had now fully the advantage. He had already told them; why the renewed inquiry?
As he put it half ironically: Was it because they felt the wrongness of their own position,
and that they should become His disciples? It stung them to the quick; they lost all self-
possession, and with this their moral defeat became complete. 'Thou art the disciple of
that man, but we (according to the favourite phrase) are the disciples of Moses.' Of the
Divine Mission of Moses they knew, but of the Mission of Jesus they knew nothing.49
The unlettered man had now the full advantage in the controversy. 'In this, indeed,'
there was 'the marvellous,' that the leaders of Israel should confess themselves ignorant
of the authority of One, Who had power to o pen the eyes of the blind - a marvel which
had never before been witnessed. If He had that power, whence had He obtained it, and
why? It could only have been from God. They said, He was 'a sinner' - and yet there
was no principle more frequently repeated b y the Rabbis,50 than that answers to prayer
depended on a man being 'devout' and doing the Will of God. There could therefore by
only one inference: If Jesus had not Divine Authority, He could not have had Divine
Power.
47. In the original: 'If He is a sinner, I know not. One thing I know, that, being blind, now I
see.'
50. Ber. 6 b; Taan. iii. 8; Sukk. 14 a; Yoma 29 a.
48. St. John ix. 26.
49. ver. 29.
The argument was unanswerable, and in its unanswerableness shows us, not indeed
the purpose, but the evidential force of Christ's Miracles. In one sense they had no
purpose, or rather were purpose to themselves, being the forthbursting of His Power
and the manifestation of His Being and Mission, of which latter, as applied to things
physical, they were part. But the truthful reasoning of that untutored man, which
confounded the acuteness of the sages, shows the effect of these manifestations on all
whose hearts were open to the truth. The Pharisees had nothing to answer, and, as not
unfrequently in analogous cases, could only, in their fury, cast him out with bitter
reproaches. Would he teach them - he, whose very disease showed him to have been a
child conceived and born in sin, and who, ever since his birth, had been among
ignorant, Law-neglecti ng 'sinners'?