John 9 begins with the healing of a man born blind. The story, like so many others in John, is unique to that gospel. The chapter is not even primarily about the healing itself, which takes up a mere seven verses. Strange as it may seem to a first-time reader to find Jesus making mud with his own saliva and anointing a man’s eyes, it’s no stranger than some of his other healings. John’s account is concerned primarily with the repercussions of the event, which take him almost five times as long to tell as the actual healing.
John gives us 41 verses devoted to a man’s story, but no record of his name. That’s actually fairly common in all the gospels, since their subject is Christ, not us. In a way, the man himself is incidental. In another way, he’s anything but.
