The story we hear today from John’s Gospel is one of the great set pieces of the New Testament. It’s almost theatrical—you could stage it. There’s a man born blind, sitting where he has always sat. There are disciples asking the question religious people always ask when they encounter suffering: “Whose fault is this?” There are neighbors who can’t believe what they’re seeing, parents who are terrified of getting involved, religious authorities who are so certain they already know how God works that they cannot recognize God working right in front of them. And at the center of it all, there is Jesus—making mud, touching a stranger’s eyes, and doing something so odd, so physical, so deliberate, that we’d be wise to slow down and ask why.

Because what Jesus does here is not just a healing. It is, if we have eyes to see it, an act of creation.

The whole narrative turns on the question of recognition: who can see what God is doing, and who can’t?
The people who miss it in this story are not bad people. They are devout, careful, learned. But they have already decided what God’s work looks like, and so when God’s work shows up in a form they didn’t expect—in mud, in mess, in a man they’d written off—they can’t take it in.

The one who sees it is the one who was given new eyes, clay eyes, God-made eyes. Eyes that hadn’t yet learned what to filter out.

You can see the whole video by using this link.