One of the scriptures I refer to the most is John 9:39-41: “And Jesus said, “For judgment I have come into this world, that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may be made blind.” Then some of the Pharisees who were with Him heard these words, and said to Him, “Are we blind also?” Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have no sin; but now you say, ‘We see.’ Therefore your sin remains.” In examining this passage, perhaps it will become plain why I refer to it so often, and what it means in the context of our disputes over religion.

In the original context, Jesus made this comment after healing a man who had been born blind on the Sabbath. The man openly and honestly (and correctly) considered Jesus Christ to be a prophet, knowing that no one could work miracles like that without the help of God. The Pharisees, who refused to admit to themselves and others who Jesus Christ was, even though they knew, were threatening to use their power to disfellowship those who confessed Jesus Christ as a prophet, much less their Lord and Savior. In this context, when the blind man spoke sensibly to them about the relationship between someone’s spiritual state and God’s ability to work through that person, the Pharisees, seeing him as born in sins, cast him out. In that state, Jesus made a pointed rebuke about the spiritual state of the Pharisees.

Of course, some of the Pharisees around Jesus Christ understood the point that He was making. Jesus Christ came to heal the blind–repentant sinners–and to blind those who thought that they saw, like the Pharisees. To have spiritual discernment requires repentance and a personal relationship with the God. But when people think that they have nothing to repent of, it is impossible for them to have a relationship with God. And this problem is not merely a problem of the Pharisees in the past, but it can be a problem for any of us. It is too easy to label the Pharisees as self-righteous and spiritually blind without taking heed to our own spiritual state. After all, the Pharisees had a reputation for being particularly pious and religious, but that piety did not extend to showing love and concern for their fellow man, and that is something that any of us can fall prey to, a mistaken belief in our righteousness because our behavior is better than the common herd but without having the love and outgoing concern for others that leads to the development of true godly virtue.

Of course, the real value of scriptural warnings ought not to be merely in the pointing fingers at other people, which is lamentably easy to do, but in our self-examination. It was in their lack of self-examination that the Pharisees proved themselves to be so lamentably blind. They praised God for making them more righteous than tax collectors and sinners even as they hardened their hearts against their brethren, viewing the difference in circumstances between themselves (often from comfortable “middle-class” backgrounds) and the poor struggling masses of Judea as a difference in virtue and not simply circumstance. And yet there is nothing inherently superior about us that we cannot easily lapse into the same lack of self-examination and the same self-satisfied sense of superiority that made the Pharisees such richly appropriate recipients of the judgment of Jesus Christ.

And that is why this passage remains truly relevant here and now. We can easily claim to see and understand follow God’s way, and yet not see in ourselves the need to repent, the need to change our ways to better match the commandments of God, and our lack of love and respect and concern for other people. And so long as we remain ignorant of our true character, the calls for repentance we hear will fall on deaf ears, because there is none so blind as one who will not see. The moral blindness of the Pharisees consisted in their inability to see themselves as sinners needing the mercy of God in their present lives, and that is a blindness that none of us is immune from. Let us therefore heed the warning of Jesus Christ as a potential warning for ourselves, and first ask that we might be made aware of our blindness so that we can repent and be healed of it rather than fall into judgment because of our unbelief.