Biblical stories can speak to our everyday lives, including when we approach them from different religious backgrounds or none. I also read Jesus’ encounter with the man born blind as an inward journey: receiving guidance, living what has been received, and discovering a different way of seeing.
This symbolic approach does not require me to settle the historical status of every person in the narrative. It simply makes room to ask what the story can illuminate within us, without replacing its place in Christian faith.
Below, I keep the Gospel’s account and my interpretation separate. Whenever I use sight as an image of spiritual recognition, I am not suggesting that a person’s physical eyesight tells us anything about their spiritual life or worth.
The encounter
A person is seen
Jesus notices a man who has been blind from birth. (John 9:1) Before the questions and explanations, there is an encounter.
In my inward reading, this becomes the meeting with a person who has not yet recognised something essential about themselves. The beginning is not their failure, but the possibility of being met where they are.
The search for someone to blame
The disciples ask whether the man or his parents sinned, causing him to be born blind. (John 9:2) Their question reaches backwards in search of a cause.
For me, it also brings to mind questions people ask about other lives and family connections. But an association arising in my reading is not evidence that this verse teaches reincarnation, and it certainly does not establish disability as punishment.
In my own metaphysical view, other lives are not simply earlier lives arranged in a sequence of offences and repayments. I understand them as simultaneous; that is the framework I bring to the question, not a doctrine I claim to have found in John’s wording.
There is another question we can responsibly ask about our own lives: have I done something for which I need to take responsibility or make amends? That is a question about my actions, not a diagnosis of why another person was born with a disability.
The question changes direction
Jesus rejects the proposed connection between this man’s blindness and his or his parents’ sin, then speaks of God’s works being revealed in him. (John 9:3) The movement of the answer takes us away from assigning blame.
I read it as an invitation to turn towards what can now become possible. In my faith, guidance received through our connection with God is the ground of spiritual awakening.
This is the connection I seek when I encounter a teaching. I am not grading other people’s faith by its similarity to mine; I am asking whether what I receive helps me live more truthfully from the Source.
Nor do I read this man’s story as permission to tell someone else that their suffering exists in order to deliver a lesson. The dignity of the person before us comes before our explanation.
Receiving and following guidance
Working while it is day
Jesus speaks of doing the works of the one who sent him while it is day, before night comes. (John 9:4) In the Gospel, this concerns his mission.
In my own application, it asks whether I am willing to respond to the guidance available to me now. A conversation, a recognition or an opportunity for change need not be postponed indefinitely simply because I would prefer a more convenient beginning.
I do not hear this as a countdown designed to frighten us into awakening. I hear an invitation to be present to the life and possibilities we have.
The light of the world
Jesus describes himself as the light of the world while he is in the world. (John 9:5) That statement has its own place in John’s portrayal of Jesus.
For me, light here also becomes an image of guidance: not something that makes me superior to another person, but something through which I can recognise my direction. Remembering Jesus and the teaching can change how I meet what is in front of me.
Mud on the eyes
Jesus makes mud with saliva and places it on the man’s eyes. (John 9:6) The action is striking because it does not fit an expectation that spiritual change must arrive in an abstract or purely verbal form.
In my symbolic reading, I associate what comes from Jesus’ mouth with the word he brings, and the mud with teaching that takes form within earthly life. These are my associations, not translations of the Greek words or explanations supplied by the verse.
John elsewhere uses the image of living water: Jesus invites the thirsty to come to him, and speaks of water becoming a spring within a person. (John 7:37–38; John 4:14) I hear a resonance between those passages and the life-giving quality of teaching received inwardly.
Holy water also evokes that relationship for me. This is a personal devotional association, not a claim that its meaning in every Christian tradition is identical to my reading.
Another thread comes through my reading of Purisaca Golenya Ágnes’s A Kék Vér Gyermekei, whose first volume is Imhotep, a Kékség Papja. (The author’s book information) In that reading, I have connected the Hungarian word sár, meaning mud, with the image of gold and a teaching of enduring quality.
I use that connection as a Hungarian-language association. I do not offer it as an established account of ancient Hungarian tribal history, or as the meaning of the word for mud in John’s Gospel.
What matters to my interpretation is the image it leaves: something that looks ordinary can carry a teaching of great value. The outward material need not announce what will open within us.
Going to the pool
Jesus sends the man to wash in the pool of Siloam, which the Gospel explains as meaning “Sent”; the man goes, washes and returns able to see. (John 9:7) Receiving the instruction is followed by an action.
For me, this is where teaching becomes lived knowledge. We do not simply admire the possibility of change; we begin to participate in it.
The opened eyes become my image of recognition. Something that had been hidden is now part of the person’s direct experience.
The same person, a changed relationship with life
Recognition and uncertainty
The neighbours debate whether this is the man they knew as a beggar, while he insists that he is the same person. (John 9:8–9) The Gospel does not say he has become someone else.
In my inward reading, that matters. Transformation need not erase our personhood; we may remain recognisably ourselves while no longer relating to life in the same way.
I imagine how such a change might become audible in a person’s speech or visible in their presence. That is my application to everyday life, rather than an additional detail from the narrative.
How did it happen?
The people ask how his eyes were opened, and he recounts what Jesus did and how he followed the instruction to wash. (John 9:10–11) He describes an encounter and a response.
I hear a practical question here: what have I received, and how have I lived it? Naming a teacher is not the same as describing how a teaching has become part of me.
What he does not know
When asked where Jesus is, the man answers that he does not know. (John 9:12) His changed experience has not made him all-knowing.
For me, this is an important place to end this part of the reading. A genuine recognition does not require us to pretend we have answers to everything.
Another person’s experience may help us find a direction. It cannot replace our own relationship with the teaching, our own discernment or our own path.
Teaching of enduring value
What remains with me is the movement from receiving to living. Guidance is offered, the person responds, and the same person returns with a possibility that was not available to them before.
This is the quality I mean when I speak of a teaching as precious as gold. Not a claim to possess hidden historical knowledge, but the recognition of something that continues to help us awaken to ourselves.
For me, Jesus’ teaching carries that enduring value. The question is how I receive it, and whether I allow it to become more than something I have heard.
With love,
Georgina
Soul4you