New Daily Study Bible: The Gospel of John vol. 2. William Barclay
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It is simply two ways of looking at the same thing. At its heart is the supreme truth that the glory of God lies in his compassion, and that he never so fully reveals his glory as when he reveals his pity.
(b) But there is another sense in which the man’s suffering shows what God can do. Affliction, sorrow, pain, disappointment and loss are always opportunities for displaying God’s grace. First, it enables the sufferer to show God in action. When trouble and disaster fall upon someone who does not know God, that person may well collapse; but when they fall on someone who walks with God, they bring out the strength and the beauty, and the endurance and the nobility, which are within a person’s heart when God is there. It is told that when an old saint was dying in an agony of pain, he sent for his family, saying: ‘Come and see how a Christian can die.’ It is when life hits us a terrible blow that we can show the world how a Christian can live, and, if need be, die. Any kind of suffering is an opportunity to demonstrate the glory of God in our own lives. Second, by helping those who are in trouble or in pain, we can demonstrate to others the glory of God. The American missionary Frank Laubach has the great thought that when Christ, who is the Way, enters into us, ‘we become part of the Way. God’s highway runs straight through us.’ When we spend ourselves to help those in trouble, in distress, in pain, in sorrow, in affliction, God is using us as the highway by which he sends his help into the lives of his people. To help another person in need is to manifest the glory of God, for it is to show what God is like.
(2) Jesus goes on to say that he and all his followers must do God’s work while there is time to do it. God gave the day for work and the night for rest; the day comes to an end, and the time for work is also ended. For Jesus, it was true that he had to press on with God’s work in the day, for the night of the cross lay close ahead. But it is true for everyone. We are given only so much time. Whatever we are to do must be done within it. There is in Glasgow a sundial with the motto: ‘Tak’ tent of time ere time be tint.’ ‘Take thought of time before time is ended.’ We should never put things off until another time, for another time may never come. Christians have a duty to fill the time they have – and no one knows how much that will be – with the service of God and of others. There is no more poignant sorrow than the tragic discovery that it is too late to do something which we might have done.
But there is another opportunity we may miss. Jesus said: ‘So long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.’ When Jesus said that, he did not mean that the time of his life and work were limited but that our opportunity of laying hold on him is limited. There comes to each one of us a chance to accept Christ as our Saviour, our Master and our Lord; and if that opportunity is not seized it may well never come back. E. D. Starbuck in The Psychology of Religion has some interesting and warning statistics about the age at which conversion normally occurs. It can occur as early as seven or eight; it increases gradually to the age of ten or eleven; it increases rapidly to the age of sixteen; it declines steeply up to the age of twenty; and after thirty it is very rare. God is always saying to us: ‘Now is the time.’ It is not that the power of Jesus grows less, or that his light grows dim; it is that if we put off the great decision we become increasingly less able to take it as the years go on. Work must be done, decisions must be taken, while it is day, before the night falls.
THE METHOD OF A MIRACLE
John 9:6–12
When he had said this he spat on the ground, and made clay from the spittle, and he smeared the clay on his eyes and said to him: ‘Go, wash in the Pool of Siloam.’ (The word ‘Siloam’ means ‘sent’.) So he went away and washed, and he came able to see. So the neighbours and those who formerly knew him by sight and knew that he was a beggar, said: ‘Is this not the man who sat begging?’ Some said: ‘It is he.’ Others said: ‘It is not he, but it is someone like him.’ The man himself said: ‘I am he.’ ‘How then’, they said to him, ‘have your eyes been opened?’ ‘The man they call Jesus made clay,’ he said, ‘and smeared it on my eyes, and said to me: “Go to the Pool of Siloam and wash.” So I went and washed, and sight came to me.’ They said to him: ‘Where is this man you are talking about?’ He said: ‘I don’t know.’
THIS is one of two miracles in which Jesus is said to have used spittle to effect a cure. The other is the miracle of the deaf stammerer (Mark 7:33). The use of spittle seems to us strange and repulsive and unhygienic; but in the ancient world it was quite common. Spittle, and especially the spittle of some distinguished person, was believed to possess certain curative qualities. Tacitus tells how, when the Roman emperor Vespasian visited Alexandria, there came to him two men, one with diseased eyes and one with a diseased hand, who said that they had been advised by their god to come to him. The man with the diseased eyes wished Vespasian ‘to moisten his eye-balls with spittle’; the man with the diseased hand wished Vespasian ‘to trample on his hand with the sole of his foot’. Vespasian was very unwilling to do so but was finally persuaded to do as the men asked. ‘The hand immediately recovered its power; the blind man saw once more. Both facts are attested to this day, when falsehood can bring no reward, by those who were present on the occasion’ (Tacitus, Histories, 4:81).
Pliny, the famous Roman collector of what was then called scientific information, has a whole chapter on the use of spittle. He says that it is a sovereign preservative against the poison of serpents; that it is a protection against epilepsy; that lichens and leprous spots can be cured by the application of fasting spittle; that ophthalmia can be cured by anointing the eyes every morning with fasting spittle; that carcinomata and crick in the neck can be cured by the use of spittle. Spittle was held to be very effective in averting the evil eye. Persius tells how the aunt or the grandmother, who fears the gods and is skilled in averting the evil eye, will lift the baby from his cradle and ‘with her middle finger apply the lustrous spittle to his forehead and slobbering lips’. The use of spittle was very common in the ancient world. To this day, if we burn a finger, our first instinct is to put it into our mouth; and there are some who believe that warts can be cured by licking them with fasting spittle.
The fact is that Jesus took the methods and customs of his time and used them. He was a wise physician; he had to gain the confidence of his patient. It was not that he believed in these things, but he kindled expectation by doing what the patient would expect a doctor to do. After all, to this day the efficacy of any medicine or treatment depends to a certain extent on the patient’s faith in it as well as in the treatment or the drug itself.
After anointing the man’s eyes with spittle, Jesus sent him to wash in the Pool of Siloam. The Pool of Siloam was one of the landmarks of Jerusalem; and it was the result of one of the great engineering feats of the ancient world. The water supply of Jerusalem had always been precarious in the event of a siege. It came mainly from the Virgin’s Fountain or the Spring Gihon, which was situated in the Kedron Valley. A staircase of thirty-three rock-cut steps led down to it; and there, from a stone basin, people drew the water. But the spring was completely exposed and, in the event of a siege, could be completely cut off, with disastrous consequences.
When Hezekiah realized that Sennacherib was about to invade Palestine, he determined to cut through the solid rock a tunnel or conduit from the spring into the city (2 Chronicles 32:2–8, 30; Isaiah 22:9–11; 2 Kings 20:20). If the engineers had cut straight, it would have been a distance of 366 yards; but because they cut in a zig-zag, either because they were following a fissure in the rock, or to avoid sacred sites, the conduit is actually 583 yards long. The tunnel is in places only about two feet wide, but its average height is about six feet. The engineers began their cutting from both ends and met in the middle – a truly amazing feat for the equipment of the time.
In 1880, a tablet was discovered commemorating the completion of the conduit. It was accidentally discovered by two boys who were wading in the pool. It runs like this: ‘The boring through is completed. Now is the story of the boring through. While the workmen were still lifting pick to pick, each towards his neighbour, and while three cubits remained to be cut through, each heard the voice of the other who called his neighbour, since there was a crevice in the rock on the right side. And on the day of the boring through the stone-cutters struck, each to meet his fellow, pick to pick; and there flowed the waters to the pool for 1,200 cubits, and 100 cubits was