The longest account (41 verses) of any of the seven signs that John included in his gospel was the healing of the man born blind at the Pool of Siloam, which takes up the whole of John 9. As John points out, “Siloam” means “sent,“ or more specifically, because of the structure of the Greek, “the sent one.“ Jesus declares that the Father sent Him 32 times in John’s Gospel alone, so the significance of the blind man being healed by washing in the pool of the Sent One will not have been lost on the Pharisees or indeed on His followers.

Just consider what it’s like to have your eyes opened for the first time after a lifetime of blindness, in which you have perceived and navigated the world just through the senses of touch, hearing and smell, and to a lesser extent taste? Anne, my wife, had her first pair of glasses when she was 10 years old: throughout her childhood until then she had suffered from myopia, so when she looked at a tree, for example, she saw a blur of shifting green shapes but did not discern the leaves in the impression of the tree before her. Trees were mottled green blobs of varying shapes and sizes, and that was how she knew them, and how she assumed everyone else saw them as well. When she put on her first pair of glasses, the world changed for her. Now I don’t know anyone who was born blind, but I imagine someone blind from birth would build up, over the years, a detailed world of mental images, diagrams and maps among which they lived. Some would be fairly accurate, maybe like Anne’s trees; some would be functional but nothing like fact, others would be wildly distorted, yet more would not exist at all, and those that did exist would all be lacking colour and the interplay of light and shade. I imagine this would have been something like the life of the man at the Pool of Siloam.

Then one moment Jesus came along, and in an instant truth and beauty were revealed. I have heard people I know say that everything looked different the moment they invited Jesus into their lives: light seemed stronger, colours brighter – and those were people who could already see. But the man who was healed must have gazed around in unbelieving wonder at what his brand new  vision had just brought him. And then maybe he might have just wanted to run around wildly in the joy of not bumping into things – who knows?

The Deep Things of God
But as the healed man himself said (John 9:25): “One thing I know. Though I was blind, now I see.” And one thing we do know is this:

“Eye has not seen, nor ear hear, nor has entered into the heart of man, the things that God has prepared for those who love him.“ (1 Corinthians 2:9).

The Realities of the heavenly dimensions are as invisible to us as the realities of earth were to the man born blind, until his eyes were opened. 1 Corinthians 2:10 continues:

“But God has revealed them to us by His Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God.“

When Paul writes about his revelations in the third heaven (2 Corinthians 12:2) he refers to “unspeakable words which it is not lawful for a man to utter.” What he heard there was too sacred to be released on earth: they were “deep things of God“ which in this instance could only exist beyond the corruption and limitations of the human sphere. By the Spirit, Paul was given the Grace to receive “the abundance of the revelations” (v. 7) by being taken out of the physical realm – “whether in the body or out of the body I do not know” (verse 3)- because there was no place for them in the flesh. The level of revelation we can receive while in the body is generally not of the same order as those given to Paul on his visit to Paradise, but the principle is the same. Whereas the Pharisees had the arrogance to say dismissively of Jesus that they did not know where He was from (John 9:29), so by implication He couldn’t be anyone of importance, the truth is that we can know nothing of the Kingdom Of God unless He reveals it to us by His Spirit. It is only by His Spirit that we can search the deep things of God; it’s only by revelation that we can see His kingdom, and it’s only by the Spirit that we can know the King.

No Condemnation
Everything in the Bible is there for a reason, and I believe this applies to the sequence of the accounts as well as their content. It seems to me that there is a progression, for example, from Christ’s prophesy of the living waters of the Holy Spirit being poured out (John 7:38) to the healing of the man born blind. In between these two comes the picture of His life-giving mercy towards the woman caught in adultery, contrasted with the judgementalism of the Pharisees who sought to bring death. It is only the living water of the Holy Spirit that can open our eyes to the mercy of the eternal God and the reality of Romans 8:1, that “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the spirit.“

By placing the story of the woman caught in adultery and Jesus’s words “Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more” immediately before the healing at the Pool of Siloam, it seems that the Holy Spirit, in “breathing” John’s writing (“all scripture is God-breathed,” 2 Tim 3: 16) specifically wants to heal any blindness we might have to the truth of Romans 8:1. Jesus said, “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing.” (John 6:63) If this truth, along with the mercy that beats at the heart of the Spirit’s life, still hasn’t reached our hearts, we need to follow the path of John’s narrative to today’s pool of the Sent One, the Holy Spirit, and allow the living God to wash the mud out of our eyes. For some of us, it will reveal a whole new world.

(See also the last section of “Seated in Heavenly Places“ for more on staying free of condemnation.)