John 9:16-17 (NIV)
Some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath.”
But others asked, “How can a sinner do such miraculous signs?” So they were divided.
Finally they turned again to the blind man, “What have you to say about him? It was your eyes he opened.”
The man replied, “He is a prophet.”
The Pharisees suddenly found themselves in a theological jam. There were two conflicting philosophies that were battling it out in their minds that John gives voice to here.
The first philosophy is that Jesus could not be a holy man because He did not keep the Sabbath the way that they believed it should be kept. Many of them had spent virtually their whole lives studying all the teachings on the Sabbath that had been written by notable rabbis since the exile, memorizing exactly what was defined by them as the “work” that God had forbidden them to do on the Sabbath. And among all those forbidden activities was performing medical treatment on someone. (Performing miraculous healings wasn’t specifically addressed but was assumed to fall under the same prohibition.)
The competing philosophy was that only a holy person could actually do miracles; that God did not answer the prayers of the wicked. They realized quickly that this healing was no illusion, no sleight of hand that Jesus had done, but a genuine miracle, and of a type that had never been seen before, even in the ancient Scriptures. Coloring this part of the dilemma was the understanding that no person, no matter how holy they were, actually had power to do these kinds of miracles in themselves, but that it was God acting through them that enabled the miracle to happen. Which meant, in their way of thinking, that God Himself had broken the Sabbath!
They immediately turned away from that idea in horror. And when they did, they again saw the once-blind man watching them (!), and taking in their argument with his whole attention. One of them snapped testily at the man, “What do you say about Him? After all, it was your eyes that he opened.” The man simply smiled and said softly, “He is a prophet.” To this man who was seeing for the first time in his life, that was the only conclusion that he could reach.
But the Pharisees turned away from him in disgust. Useless!
Father, we will always fall into trouble when we bring our worldly theologies into Your presence and try to apply them definitively to You. You are infinite. There is far more to You than You have ever revealed to us. Far more than You ever can reveal, even if the Scriptures were millions of pages long. We see only in part, and all efforts to shoehorn You into our predeveloped theologies are doomed to failure. Help us instead to simply read Your word at Your feet every day, humbly learning from You what we can grasp at the time, so that we can grow in wisdom and in knowledge of Your ways. And one day, when we see You face-to-face, we will see how the small amount that we have been able to grasp fits into the infinite whole that is You. Amen.